Storytelling Week 9

The Boy that Nobody Spoke To

The House Fire

There was a quiet kid in class that nobody ever talked to. They all just looked at him and made up stories about him. The girls called him creepy and the boy called him whatever they wanted because to them he was an easy target.
One day there was a house fire and everyone in our class was wondering who started it. That is when Cheryl told everyone that she saw the quiet boy start it.
Soon the police showed up and took him to the police station for questioning. The entire school was a buzz about the quiet boy that nobody ever spoke to. They were making up stories about how he was a serial killer and that he probably had dead cats tied up in his basement.  Still I always wondered about Cheryl’s story because every day we walked to school together and the day of the fire was no different. We were nowhere the house when the fire was set.
This bothered me so I went to the police station to talk to the boy that no one ever spoke to. He was crying and I told him what I knew about the story. He told me that if that was true I had to get her to admit it. I wanted to help the quiet boy, but I didn’t know how, so he told me to be at the house fire tomorrow night and to get her talk about it and that he would take care of the rest. As I left the boy that every adult wanted to talk to I passed his father. He was dressed nice.
The next night Cheryl and I were walking and I asked her about her lie. She confessed that she made it up. She said that the guy that nobody spoke to annoyed her because he seemed creepy and that she wanted to get rid of him. When she heard about the fire she saw her chance to get rid of him and did. Just as she finished telling me the story a bunch of police dressed in black rushed towards us and arrested her for making a false statement to an officer.
Not long after the quiet boy that I talked to returned to school. Everyone that told stories about him hung their heads in shame. They all realized that they never took the opportunity to understand him and because of that he was almost sent to prison. Soon everyone wanted to talk to the quiet boy.
Turns out that his dad was not only well dressed, but the governor of the state. The boy and I became friends and often we talked about the time he went to jail. He told me that because I had done the right thing and made everything right that he would always be in my debt. If ever I was in trouble all I had to do was dial his number and ask him for help and he would help me in any way that he could.

Author’s Notes
I based this story on the Rattlesnake’s revenge from the Cherokee Myth’s Unit. I have changed the characters in the story and updated it. Still I stayed true to one of the morals of the story about not judging things that we know nothing about or that scare us.

Bibliography
Myths of the Cherokee by James Mooney (1900)

Picture Attribution

By LukeBam06 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or FAL], via Wikimedia Commons