Tales of Andrew Waters

on my name regardless, there at the base of that tree and I wondered if any passers by had seen it there, but I doubted anyone had and that no one would think twice about it really anyway. I managed to get away by telling my Dad that I really, really needed to go to the toilet, which incidentally was kind of the truth, and that I couldn’t hold it a second longer. I ran off towards my tree, which wasn’t too far away, leaving Dad waiting impatiently at the gate.

When I got there, to the tree, that tree where I always was going to read during my lunch breaks and after school and everything, I went around behind it, ducked down and looked at the spot where I’d carved my name into the trunk to see if it had moved up, to see if the tree had grown at all. But it wasn’t there, my name. I looked around a bit in bewilderment, just to check that I hadn’t carved it somewhere else or that the tree hadn’t grown up so much out of the ground in just one night that I might have missed it. Looking back down, I noticed there was a lot of mud up around the tree and figured that that was the one thing in my stupid experiment I hadn’t counted on, the movement of the ground around the tree. I dug down a little and wiped away all the mud from all around that area. I looked and looked, all around the base of the tree where I thought I’d carved it, but found nothing. I was certain that it had to be there somewhere and couldn’t have just disappeared. The memory of me carving it was as vivid as anything, but it just wasn’t there. It was like it had never been there at all.

And then I saw, just around a bit to the right, this little patch of scratches and scribbles. That’s where my name must have been, and after staring at it for a while, I could just barely make out the letters spelling out the name “Andy” under all those scribbles. It was a strange feeling. I felt just about the maddest that I have ever felt in my life for some reason, wondering what kind of sick kid would scribble out someone’s goddam name off a tree at the back of a school oval. At that moment, I hated that goddam school and felt like kicking in the whole fence at the back of the oval and everything. I felt like throwing big rocks through every single window in the building. I even, in a way, felt like catching who ever did it and doing something really terrible to them, like carving my name into their chest or whatever they’re always doing in those movies, just to teach them a lesson or something. I don’t know what I felt really. I could have taken out my red pocket knife and carved my name all over again if I really wanted to and all. I kind of half-heartedly started to imagine hiding over in 123