A Pokémon that meant a lot to me

Posted by @ValCedar 3 days ago
6 minute read (1,604 words)​

I wrote this for Language Arts class in my second year of high school, when our teacher prompted the class to write about “A Pokémon that meant a lot to you.” I found it again while trying to find some photos on my old laptop, and when I read it over, memories of my childhood that I had seemingly long forgotten hit me again, like they had happened just yesterday. I’m posting it online so I can come back to it, and maybe other people will like it too. ―Valentina

My dad was never quite the same after my mom divorced him. He wiled his days away at home staring blankly at the TV, watching re-runs of The Pokémon Whisperer, with hardly a smile left in him anymore. Conversations with him consisted of vague nods and one-word responses, starting and ending in less time than it takes Billy Mays to sell you on Dusk Balls during the commercial break. Even if you went up to him and told him your best joke, he would only give you that pained half-smile that says, I get it, but I’m not laughing.

Unable to stand the emptiness of my real home, the library became where I spent all my time after school. I read books of all sorts, and soon I became what everyone started calling me: a nerd.

This was a time before geek chic. Nowadays, I see kids start to play Dungeons & Dragonairs out in the open like it’s no big deal, but back then, being a nerd meant you were a weirdo. That’s pretty devastating around middle school when all the girls who were your friends in elementary school start to care. They start to care about their hair, and they start to care about their clothes. They start to care about their social status, and most of all: they start to care about boys.

These topics were the focus of most of the conversations at the lunch table. Boys especially. I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t like boys or anything― quite the opposite. Centerfolds of Wallace in Teen Vogue made my heart skip a beat like any girl with a working pair of eyes. But I wanted to talk about the book I had read at the library yesterday, and middle school girls don’t feign polite interest. They only listen to what they want to talk about.

So I learned to blend in. I learned who the school’s dreamboats were, learned who was crushing on who, and circulated rumors about what Alyssa and Lucas were doing in the bleachers at the assembly.

It’s amazing how deeply we could get into these conversations. If people can say about four words a second on average, and at least one person at that lunch table speaks though the whole forty minute lunch period, that’s at least 9,600 words every lunchtime. If we put as much thought into those 500 word, two-page essays in Language Arts class as we did tweenage drama, every one of us would have had As.

I could only pretend to care for so long, though. Day by day, I started saying less and less, and started zoning out more and more, wishing I could talk about the Collected Mythology of Unown or Science Experiments You Can Try At Home.

Then one day, as I zoned out eating my sandwich, I decided I was tired of having people talk around me. I mean, whether or not I contributed to the conversation, those same 9,600 words are still gonna get said by someone. So, as Melanie on my left craned her neck to talk to Amanda on my right about how Josie might have been flirting with Derek yesterday, my sandwich and I got up from that table and went right out the cafeteria door. The both of them just kept talking.

With every step I took, all those words started to fade away. After a little wandering, I settled down on a concrete stoop behind the gym. Leaves rustled in the wind. Pidgeottos flew past, high in the sky. Now, there were 0 words.

That’s where I met that Psyduck.

I had tucked into my lunch once again, looking vaguely at the tree in front of me, when all of a sudden a Psyduck waddles up to me from behind a bush. As I raised my sandwich up, mouth wide for a bite, he snatches away my sandwich― my sandwich!― and tosses it right into his big fat gob. In one singular gulp, that sandwich was history.

I was furious! As he stared at me with his vacant little Psyduck eyes, I yelled at him for what felt like ten minutes straight, until the bell rang and I had to get back to class. In my parting shot, he turned right around and hopped back into the bush he came from. His tail wiggled amidst the leaves before he disappared from sight.

Even though I could no longer see him, that Psyduck still showed up in back of my mind all day. After school, looking for a new book to read, a subconscious Psyduck led me to the Psyduck section of the Pokémon shelves. When I went to bed that night, I stared at the ceiling counting Psyduck. They weren’t different, unique Psyduck― I just counted that one Psyduck over and over.

The next day, I returned to that spot behind the gym, with the rustling leaves and the Pidgeottos overhead. I returned even though I knew that Psyduck could come back to take my lunch, and even though it had frustrated so much that he appeared in last night’s dream, surfing on a giant sandwich far from my reach.

Looking back, I think that deep down, I wanted to be furious. I wanted to yell and scream away my frustrations until my throat was hoarse, because it gave my heart a break from just feeling lonely.

So I sat down on the concrete stoop and sure enough, several minutes later, I spy that Psyduck peeking at me from behind the tree. I drew in a sharp breath and held my sandwich so tight the mayonnaise leeched from its sides. After considering me for a few moments, he waddled up to me just as he had the day before. My pulse quickened as he stopped right in front of me.

From behind his back he produced a misshapen crabapple, and held it out in front with his stubby little arms. Quite bewildered, I shakily reached out an apprehensive arm and grabbed it. This seemed to satisfy him, and he plopped himself down next to me with his own crabapple.

I guess he felt bad for taking my sandwich, and he’d brought something he thought I could eat as a peace offering.

All of a sudden, I started crying. Maybe I felt bad for having yelled at such a remorseful Psyduck the day before. Or maybe I was just lonely and this Psyduck was the only being that seemed to care about me. But in that moment, my brain couldn’t think and make sense of it all. I could only hug him so tight that he started to flail around after a minute and I had to put him down.

From then on, I started skipping the lunchroom and started having lunch with this Psyduck. Sometimes I’d bring him snacks that he’d gulp down all at once, only for him to clamor for more. I’d watch him pick up leaves that had fallen on the ground, gathering them in his arms until they were overflowing and scattering all across the floor. One time, I brought a playground ball and tried to teach him how to play Wallball. That was not a success.

In all that time playing with him, I wondered vaguely whether he was someone’s Pokémon or if he was wild. I’d never seen him with anyone else, or anywhere else for that matter. I just know he’d show up at lunch, and we’d hang out. I didn’t have a Pokéball to try to capture him, but as long as he came back each day, I was already happy enough.

When it came close to summer in my last year of middle school, I knew our lunches would be coming to an end. I think he knew it too. When the lunch bell rang in those last weeks before graduation, he would tug at my legs with his little arms as if telling me not to go.

I didn’t want my time with that Psyduck to disappear, so on graduation day, I slipped away and stole a Pokéball from the janitor’s supply closet. I met him once again at the concrete stoop behind the gym, right on time, at noon.

I gripped the Pokéball in my hand. I imagined the trajectory in my mind, the curve that it would make in the air. I had always been a lousy pitcher in P.E., but somehow, just this once, I knew exactly what power and angle I would have to throw it at.

I drew my arm back, and then Mr. Davis the Math teacher appeared behind me and took the stolen Pokéball before I could throw.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “But that Psyduck isn’t yours to capture.”

After a stern talking to about theft, he told me that the Psyduck was named Daisy. She had been coming to school every day for six years at noon, when she used to play with her owner, a former student by the name of Adrian Lee, in the area behind the gym. The police have stopped looking for him, but his parents have never given up hope.

And neither, it seems, has that Psyduck.