A snapshot of a day in a young boy’s life when he is suspended from school. Short story.
I wrote this story for my Creative Writing class. I wanted it to be set in a laundromat, and I wanted to incorporate spaghetti Bolognese. Throughout all the revisions over the past few months, those two elements have stayed the same.
The day after I got suspended from school, I started coming with Carla to the dry cleaners. Carla told me that I could be her business associate for the next week, and she even let me write the labels for each customer’s order. I made sure to write real neatly because I wanted to do a perfect job, except I forgot to attach the labels to the clothes the first time. We didn’t realize it until Jeffrey Hubner came in to pick up his suit two days later. My chest burned iron-hot when I found his tag underneath a pile of papers on the front counter, and I had to go into the back room because I didn’t want to get in trouble.
The fourth day was a hot day. It was September and the sun went straight through me. I was sweating a lot in my armpits, which Mom said would start to happen more and more. This made me feel uncomfortable, so I sat in my chair next to the register and the AC vent and tried hard not to move.
Carla was loading solvent into the machines in the back. I was thinking hard about what it might feel like to go into a washing machine, to be spun around and around and come out clean at the end.
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