Two years had passed since he had been christened Turtle Boy. He had hoped that he would be able to go unnoticed. What had he really done to deserve so much attention? Truth be told, he couldn’t even remember the incident that had twisted his life so badly, leaving him tied up in a knot even Alexander the Great couldn’t get through. He was afraid to go outside. If he had had his way, he would have opted for homeschooling, but his parents were firm.
“It’s something you’ll just have to get used to!” His mother would tell him. Sometimes when Turtle Boy was recognized in the middle of a street, he felt his parents were simply being unreasonable by demanding that he still had to go to school. He just wanted to stay away from it all, away from his fame. The kids in his class generally got used to the fact that he was the famous Turtle Boy after a few months, but whenever there was a school trip or a new kid in school, he would have to hear the dreaded question: “Hey, aren’t you Turtle Boy?”
Thus it was no surprise to his parents when Turtle Boy asked for his parents to sign a letter telling his teacher that he would not be able to attend the school trip to the aquarium. Their answer, of course, was NO.
“You can’t just avoid people for the rest of your life, you know.” They would say, to the dismay of Turtle Boy. Like he did before every school trip, he cried himself to sleep, dreading the next day when all would point and laugh.
All the other kids were excited, bouncing around and laughing on the bus. Turtle Boy sat alone. He had never been good at making friends at school. He just didn’t like anyone that recognized him and called him Turtle Boy, not even once. He had yet to meet anyone who didn’t know about his past. When the bus finally arrived at the aquarium, he left the bus alone.
It wasn’t until they reached the turtle section that he finally realized what the aquarium would mean. Turtles. The single subject that had changed his life forever. After that fateful interview, he had grown to avoid having anything to do with them, for he knew that anyone who recognized him would point out the fact. Thus it was the first time in 2 years that he actually saw a real live turtle.
The turtle was certainly a magnificent creature. Its shell was the largest anyone had ever seen. It was twice as big as Turtle Boy’s desk. Its skin was scaly and green, and seen through the tank it gave the eerie sensation of actually being underwater with the turtle. Its legs were huge, and to Turtle Boy they seemed as thick as tree trunks. But the most impressive part of the turtle was its eyes. Those eyes were what sparked in Turtle Boy his old love of turtles. They were eyes that seemed to have seen so much, to have lived through so many years that the children that were crowding around him seemed to be mere passing flecks of time. He distantly heard their guide telling the kids that this turtle was almost a hundred years old and their proudest specimen. He was so captivated by the turtle that he did not even notice the video cameras until they were upon him.
All of a sudden, there was a microphone in his face. He recoiled slightly. “Am I suffering from déjà vu?” He heard a voice asking him what he thought of the aquarium and how he enjoyed it. He replied with the sentence that had changed his life, the sentence that he now uttered with confidence and vigor.
“I like turtles.”
Turtle Boy had found his place in the world.
