How I navigate high school as a tiny little guy
Spencer Isaacs
Staff Writer
April 21, 2022
High school could bust anyone’s chops, but when you’re a diminutive little young man standing only six inches in height, your small stature makes it harder than usual. I am shorter than a hot dog. What would be a typical, boring day for a normal-sized person is a perilous adventure for me. My hope is that, by narrating a day in my life, you will understand the challenges of having a comically small body.
My day begins bright and early at 5:00 a.m. I need adequate time before school for my 90-minute journey to the bathroom across popsicle-stick bridges and dental floss rope ladders. You might wonder how I open my bedroom door. I designed a system of counterweights made from Lego bricks. If I’m feeling lazy, which happens often, I grease myself in butter and slide underneath the opening like a slimy catfish.
Breakfast is a single corn pop fed to me by my mother. She is normal-sized - it was her father who was tiny. She drops me out of an open window, and I plummet hundreds of my own body lengths onto the pavement below. Fortunately, I am so light that the terminal velocity I reach isn’t enough to harm me. In the springtime, I play jump rope with an earthworm while I wait for the bus. For safety, the driver puts me in the luggage compartment. On Fridays, I get to tuck myself into her flannel shirt pocket if I ask nicely.
Arriving at school is the stuff of nightmares. To me, a crowd of students is like a living earthquake. Fortunately, I have one helpful friend in this world. His name is Elias. He is a goose. We have a deal where I get to ride on his back into the school in exchange for pizza crusts. The administration disapproves of our little arrangement, but no matter. I launch frozen peas at them with a toy slingshot.
After that, I climb up a piece of dental floss and slip under a ceiling tile. The ceiling is how I normally traverse the school. Most strange noises or electrical problems are because of me scuttling around. I hope you never hear a popping sound - that means I fired my emergency cap gun at a ceiling rat. Sometimes I sabotage Wi-Fi routers above classrooms of people who wronged me. I also have an RC car available which I use to travel between distant classes. Once I had a near-fatal crash into the sprinkler system that set off a fire alarm. Oops.
Being tiny isn’t all bad though. While I do have to avoid being crushed by my own pencil during a test, my small frame allows me to sneak into my fellow students’ bags and steal their items. I keep a pile of money and electronics inside the walls. I’m like the Robin Hood of Westfield High School, but without the sharing part. After all, in addition to being tiny, I’m an undiagnosed kleptomaniac. For some reason nobody expects it. Am I striking back at the world for ignoring my small little voice? No. I just have a brain disorder.
All in all, I’m not so different from you or anyone else. The only difference between me and a normal person is that a normal person can fist bump without sustaining fatal organ damage. But like my mother always said, in life, we can’t have everything that we want. So I’ll stay minuscule for the rest of my days (until someone’s shoe comes along).