How I was Dubbed Sir Shady

Yesterday was book club.

Ms. Comma was pulling up chairs in front of the room after snacks were passed out, those random plasic blue and orange chairs no one ever really uses, all up in a line- six of them.

The Original Six stood silent, hanging around her like balloons that were almost out of helium, laughing and talking and trying our best to be as obnoxious as we were last year, and failing badly. This was important. This was our moment.

All the sevies sat watching, waiting, crinkling their fruit snack wrappers and talking and murmering about what was going on.

Pen sat seductively on the table at the side of the room.

She looked over at me.

She smiled.

I gave her the you're-sitting-seductively look and she sat up fast and looked over my shoulder again, unused to feeling so excluded. I wished she had been of the Original Six. As fun as that original year of book clubs had been, it would have been funner with her.

Ms. Comma had all six chairs in a row. "Sit down," she told us, in her laughing-serious voice.

We sat.

I was smiling wider than my face was capable of, resulting in what I assume to be a kind of painful and awkward look, trying not to laugh. She went over to the window, took her name off of the yard stick resting there, and handed us little blue slips of paper, titled "*SIRS"

I could feel the idea of an audience watching us, although they were only a rag tag bunch of book-club sevies, talking, spread out around the room. They stopped to listen to me, though. I don't know why, but somehow they love me.

Ms. Comma finished passing the slips of rules and regulations and signatures of Sirs and stood beside me, at the beginning of the line. She started explaining then, and everyone was laughing inside, but not out.

No....no, Pen was laughing out loud then. Funny then, for an actress.

"Shady," the teacher proclaimed. "Stand and say a little about yourself."

I stood.
I was a monster.
Already their eyes were growing wider and their heads were turning up.
I was wearing my brown striped jacket, and hugging my arm.

I liked being a monster.

"Why hello there." Giggles. "My name's Shady. Um. Balsom." Laughter. "I'm of the Original Six, as these guys are. Well, not so much Jake. He's just here for the wings." Yelling from the Six. Jake showing signs of self-defence.

The teacher interrupted.
"Jake, you can defend yourself later. Shady, continue."

It was all very light, everyone trying not to laugh, trying not to be serious, in a pretend-serious ceremony Dustin had invented that everyone had hated. "I would like to be called Sir Dustin," he had said on that first practice Thursday of the year. "Oh, so now you're the Sir? Aw nah. If you're a sir, I'M a sir! What, you think you're better than these guys?" I told him. Oh, it had been fun. But it ended up being actually a good idea. And so there we were.

I finished awkwardly and sat back down. Ms. Comma went up in front of me.

"Shady. Do you hereby agree to the aforementioned statements?"

"I do." I said it like I was getting married.

"I hereby dub you-" the yard stick tapped over my shoulders- "Sir Shady."

And everybody clapped, and Pen laughed. And clapped. And said my name.

I was smiling wider than I had meant to, showing more emotion than I usually allowed myself to show. It was stupid how happy the Sirring Ceremony made us. It was like it was real, you know? Like it was your moment. Like no matter what happened after this, or how low you got, you could always say, "I was a Sir once. I was dubbed Sir Shady."

It was our moment. It was our life. Our chance to be somebody special, to be a Sir, to be more than the sevies we used to be, to even be more than we already are. To sign an unevenly cut blue slip of paper, to promise a title, to become something. To have a yard stick tap gently each of your shoulders, to bow your head, to smile. It was our moment. It was my moment.

And we could carry it around like a plastic trophie, a Burger King crown over our heads, forever.

It was a good feeling, and we like the smell of books fresh out of Narnia.


And so we have book club.

So nice to see you there.

:)