Hink

This milk is bad.

Bad milk looks exactly the same as good milk and you don’t know if it’s bad until you taste it.

I just poured it on my cereal and took a bite.  Yuck.  The lunch lady gave me a bad milk.  I feel pretty stupid with a bowl of cereal I can’t eat.  I’m not even really that hungry.  I kind of look around to see if anyone is watching.  I get up and go over to the trash and put the cereal in the trash.

“You are wasting food.”

That’s what Carla says to me when she sees me dump my cereal in the trash.  I didn't see her.  She must have been right behind me.  I thought I had looked around good enough but Carla saw me.  And she was the one person I didn’t want to see. 

I think Carla is the cutest girl in the class.

I don't know what to say.  I just look at her.

“You are such a hink,” Carla says to me.

I don’t know what that means, but it can't be good.  And I don’t want her to know that I don’t know what it means.  I don’t say anything.  I just look at her for a second.

She just does that kind of flip thing that she does, like she turns her whole body really fast and her hair and her clothes and probably even her shoe laces flip really fast to catch up with her.  Then she walks away.

So I turn and walk toward my class room wondering what a hink is.

I sit down at my desk.  You probably had someone say a word to you before that you didn’t know.  And you don’t want to tell anyone you don’t know what it means, but you want to know what it means, so you have to be careful who you talk to.

Then comes Pete, the guy who sits next to me.  He’s a pretty grumpy guy but he’s pretty smart so he might know what a hink is.  Also, Pete doesn’t say much, so he probably won’t tell anyone that I didn’t know.

So I say to him in kind of a low voice because I don’t want anyone to hear, “hey Pete, what’s a hink.”

He stops and looks at me.  “You don’t know what a hink is?”

I shake my head no.

He flips his quarter two times over his fingers.  He has this kind of way of flipping it that goes over his fingers and it kind of bumps on each finger.  It sort of looks like water, the way he runs it over his fingers.  I start to wonder why he does that all the time.

But then Pete kind of makes this laugh that he does with his throat.  He sort of rolls his eyes around.  Then he makes a sound that starts “kh . . .” and then you think he’s going to say something but he doesn’t.

And then while I’m waiting for him to say something Carla walks in and starts toward her desk, so I hope Pete won’t say anything now.  And he doesn’t say a word.  He just gets out his book and ignores me.  Carla walks by and ignores me too.

My teacher starts talking about what we are doing today so I forget about hink for a while.

But then I remember when we get up to go to recess.  I like basketball so I go over to the basket.  Then I see my friend Alex.  He’s really good at basketball but I think he might know what hink means so I ask him.

Alex doesn’t even stop shooting the ball.  He says “a hink is . . .” he shoots the ball and waits for it.  It swishes through the net.  “. . . a play where you throw the ball to a guy . . .” he gets the ball back.  “. . . and then the guy throws it back to you after you run to the basket.”  Then he shoots again and it swishes.

“So, it’s a play where a guy passes the ball and then gets it back and shoots it?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Alex.  Then he gets the ball and dribbles to the other side of the court.  I follow him.

“But Carla called me a hink after I threw my cereal away.”

Alex was going to shoot but then he stopped.  “You threw cereal away?  That’s wasting food.”  And then he tried to shoot but that’s when Parker came up and tried to block him.

“But the milk was bad,” I said.  But it was too late.  Alex and Parker were playing a one-on-one.  You know how people sometimes just forget about what you were talking about and you’re kind of glad?  That was what happened.  I just didn’t want Alex to say anything to Parker.  I was glad they were just playing.

So I walked back toward the school with my hands in my pockets.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it now.  I don’t think Carla was calling me a play in basketball. 

Teacher puts me with Samantha for learning the state capitals.  I am asking Samantha a state and then she gives the capital then she does the same for me. 

“Wyoming,” I say.

“Cheyenne,” she says without even thinking about it.  I didn’t know that one.  That was why I asked it.

Samantha sits very straight in her chair.  She always wears the nicest
clothes and has her hair always done perfect.  She doesn’t like when anyone touches her because it might mess up her clothes or hair.  At recess, she usually just walks around and looks at everyone else playing.  She is really crazy about how she looks.

“Nebraska,” she says to me.

“Umm.  Oh.  I know this one.  I think.  Omaha,” I say.

“Nope,” she says.  “Try again.”

“Oh yeah,” I say.  “Lincoln.”

“That’s right,” she says.

Then it’s my turn, and as I’m looking over the map to pick a state I remember about what a hink is.

“What’s a hink?”

Samantha looks at me funny.  “That’s not a state.”

“Yeah, I know.  But I was wondering if you knew what a hink was.”

Samantha looks up.  “Everybody knows that the hink is a hairstyle.” 

“A what?”  I ask.

“It’s a hairstyle for girls where you cut the hair the length of your ears and then kind of curl it under.”

I can’t believe that.  So I say “so then, why would Carla call me a hink after she saw me throw away my cereal?”

“You threw away cereal?  That’s wasting food.”

“I know.  But the lady gave me a bad milk.”

Samantha looked at me like she didn’t understand.  Suddenly I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Florida,” I say.

“Tallahassee,” she says.

So, finally it’s lunch, and I’m glad because I didn’t get my cereal at breakfast and I’m pretty hungry right now.  I go through the lunch line and I get a sloppy joe, some tater tots, some green beans and a cookie.  But I don’t get a milk.  I just get a cup of water.

My best friend is Shea, and I go and sit by him.  He is telling me about a show he saw last night on TV.  And I am really trying to listen to him, but while I’m eating my tater tots I am thinking about asking Shea about what a hink is.

“And then a clown is balancing an umbrella on his nose with a bottle of bubble bath soap in one hand and a voodoo doll in the other hand.  And there’s this kid eating a taco and then the clown . . .”  Shea stops for about a half a second to take a breath and pop a green bean in his mouth.

“Hey Shea, what’s a hink,” I say during the break.

“I don’t know,” says Shea, “but anyway the clown puts down the voodoo doll and pours the bubble bath soap into the umbrella and then he tells the kid that he can make the President of the United States pull Spiderman’s finger . . .”  Shea pops a tater tot into his mouth.

“But really, what’s a hink?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” asks Shea. 

“Because Carla called me a hink at breakfast.” 

“Oh.”  Shea eats a bite of his sloppy joe.  "Carla is cute.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “and I wish I knew what that word meant.”

“Maybe it means that she likes you.”

“Do you think that’s what it means?”  I can’t believe that.

“Yeah, probably.”  Shea says.  “Hink probably means you are a cool guy and I want to be your girlfriend.”

“You don’t know that,” I say.

“Yeah, I think I remember hearing one time on TV.”

“You just said a minute ago that you didn’t know what a hink was,” I reminded him.

“No I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did—when you were telling me about the President pulling Spiderman’s finger,” I said.

“Oh yeah!  You saw that show too?  Wasn’t that great?  And wasn’t that funny when the kid dropped his taco and Spiderman farted?”

Sometimes you just can’t talk to Shea.  He just wants to talk to you.  You probably have a friend like that.  So I let him talk to me about the show.  And it was kind of funny.

But then during art time I was sitting by Lucas.  Lucas is drawing Zooming Sea Horses from Pluto.  It’s a new cartoon and you have probably seen it before.  But in case you haven’t these strong guys come down from Pluto disguised as sea horses to save people from accidents in the ocean.  He is always drawing those guys.  This time he is drawing Neptune, who is the biggest Sea Horse. 

It’s kind of loud because a lot of people are talking while they are drawing.  So I say “hey Lucas, do you know what a hink is?”

Lucas doesn’t look up from his drawing.  “Yeah,” he says, “it’s got six eyes so it can see all around its green, floating head.”

“It’s got a green, floating head?” I ask.

“Oh yeah,” says Lucas. 

“What cartoon is it from?”

Lucas stops and looks at the ceiling for a second.

“Can’t remember,” Lucas says, and goes back to his drawing.

So I look at my paper.  It’s blank.  I can’t think what to draw.  But then I think I might start drawing a green floating head with six eyes.

Instead, I look at Lucas.  “Why would Carla call me a hink?”

Lucas was finishing the green part of Neptune’s tail and he doesn’t look up.

“She called you one?” asks Lucas.  “Why?”

I don’t want a big deal about the cereal and wasting food again, so I don’t tell him.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Carla knows about hinks?  She’s cooler than I thought,” says Lucas.

“Yeah, I guess she does.”

But then I think that I can’t understand why Carla would call me a green head with six eyes.  Oh yeah, that floats.  Can you think why she would say that?  Me either.

I am glad Lucas just drops it because next he says to me “who is the cooler sea horse, Neptune or Ulysses?”

“Neptune,” I say, and start drawing a green head.

“Yeah,” says Lucas.  “Yeah.”

So, finally it’s after school and there’s that time between when everybody leaves the classroom and the bus actually leaves.  It’s the time when people are in the hall getting their stuff, talking to friends, or just sitting on the bus waiting for it to go.

It’s that time that I walk up to my teacher.  She’s a good teacher and I know she will know what a hink is.  So I say “Teacher, what is a hink?”

She smiles at me and says “what?”

I say it again: “what is a hink?”

She kind of puts her lips together in a way that makes me think that hink might be a bad word.  I never thought it might be a word that would get you get in trouble.  And just about the time when I think she’s going to tell me that she’s going to call my parents she smiles.  Then she gets a big book off a shelf from behind her. 

“Look it up,” she says, and gives me the big book.  And of course, it was a dictionary.

Well, I don’t know why I didn’t think about that sooner.  I’ve opened a dictionary before, but not very often.

So, I open it up to the H section.  I look at the top of the page and the word “hokum” is on one side and the word “holism” is on the other.  But that’s too far in the book.  I flip the pages back a few.  Then I see “haughty” on one page and then “haute couture” on the other.  I need the HI part.  So I flip back a few pages.

I see one page with “high-muck-a-muck” on it and “hippie” on the other.  I look for “hink,” and I finally find it.  I read:

hink, n, a person who uses words in conversation without knowing the meanings of the words, hoping that the listener will tell them the meanings of the words.

“Thanks, teacher,” I say.  Then I run to catch the bus.