Evie Jo

Evie Jo Becker ate glue.  Not paste, which I could almost understand.  My mother bought me some once for preschool.  It came in a little bucket with a smiling cow’s face on it and the lid held a little white paste spatula for spreading.  It smelled fresh and heavenly.  But I didn’t taste it and it eventually dried up into flakes.

No.  Evie Jo ate glue.  Right there at our work tables.  Mrs. Shea would come to each one and dump a blob of Elmer’s on a piece of paper in the center for us all to share.  There were popsicle sticks that we were supposed to use to spread the glue onto our first grade craft project.  Some of us used our fingers.  But Evie Jo  – every single time –  would take a finger full of glue and pop it right into her mouth.  Some at our table would squeal, tattling to the teacher that Evie Jo is eating glue!  She’s eating it!  And Evie Jo would smile and say, “It’s good.” 

The whole thing was almost overwhelmingly undignified to me.  On top of the shared – and now contaminated by Evie Jo – glue blobs there were the shiny square wax crayons that came in boxes.  I hated that we were expected to use these oily, subpar crayons with corners that hurt our fingers and didn’t grip the paper the same way Crayolas did.  I couldn’t wait until second grade when you could bring your own box of crayons from home and store them in your very own desk with a lid, instead of sharing these impotent sticks that some of the boys would brace between their ring and pointer fingers, middle finger over the top and then *snap* down on their knee, breaking them in two.  They got in trouble for that, but the rest of us still had to use the greasy leftover nubs. 

Evie Jo was one of the gross kids.  Not just because she ate glue, but that was part of it.  She also had round, very thick glasses with pinkish brown plastic frames.  Dirty blonde pigtails tied with yarn ribbons.  She smelled like some of the farm kids, some combination of distant manure, wood smoke and vagina.  And she couldn’t speak very well.  She had to be broken of “ain’t” and “gots” and “them colors.”  She would address you loudly, embarrassingly. 

I don’t know what happened to Evie Jo.  She disappeared sometime around third or fourth grade.  What’s most likely is that her family moved.  Some of the gross kids stayed on through high school.  Looking back at them now, I can see that poverty and developmental delays and neglect were their real problems.  But who knows what drove Evie Jo to eat glue?