My Soul to Keep - By Sean Hayden Page 0,1

but algebra deserved it for making my life a living, miserable hell. Actually, it deserved worse, much worse. When my sophomore year was over, I planned on sacrificing it to no one in particular. I was thinking ritualistic burning or maybe saying a few words in Latin before chucking it into a wood-chipper. Either idea would make me giggle like a little school girl as I watched its demise.

I sat down and looked over at my Playstation 3. It silently called out to me, pleading with me to not do my homework, but to come caress the buttons of her controllers. She promised to help me defeat the soldiers of the opposing team. I could hear her. “Don’t pick up the pencil…pencil…pencil.” It never ceased to amaze me how electronic devices always spoke with an echo. Stoically, I held my hand up to my shiny source of endless entertainment in a gesture of denial. Keep thyne mother and father happy.

I flipped open the dread book of polynomial torture and choked back the gorge rising into my throat. After trying three times to get into the drawer holding my paper and writing utensils, it finally flung open and jabbed me in the chest. My breath shot out with the force of a sneeze. I needed to remember the drawer trick if I ever found myself choking in my room. Screw the Heimlich, open a drawer.

Battered and weary before the homework even began, I pulled out my pristine sheet of white paper and my famed No. 2 pencil. Okay, it wasn’t famous, but it might be some day. Fine, it was a stubby, overused nub of a pencil without an eraser, but it was still my favorite.

I set the paper on the desk in front of me and then flipped to the page we were working on in class. Of course it had to be my favorite; multiplying polynomials. I’ll admit it. I had no grandiose desires to be a rocket scientist, geneticist, or anything else that ended in "ist". Why on earth did I have to learn this crap? "Firsts, outers, inners, lasts," sounded like a recipe for disaster. It’s why God invented calculators. We weren’t allowed to use them and they would know if we did. “Show Your Work” really meant prove you didn’t cheat. It took me all of three seconds to make my first mistake.

Because my favorite pencil didn't have an eraser, it ended in one of those dangerous metal contraptions that could bore a hole through a wood desk in detention. Trust me on this one, I know. For just such emergencies I kept a fat pink eraser in my desk drawer. Staring at it, I silently prayed to the eraser gods to start making them in different colors. Pink was my least favorite color in the universe. Rubbing it against my paper and watching it disintegrate into tiny dust nodules made me feel a little better. Plus it made my mistake go away, too.

Knowing my mistake-making wasn't over, I slid my arm sideways across the desk to set it aside. Someone, probably myself, had left a half buried staple in the desk. The half that wasn't buried slit me open like a bag of Doritos. Chips didn't pour from the wound, but blood did. Lots of it.

Time slowed for an instant. I've never been a squeamish person, nor have I ever been into the macabre. However, I couldn't help myself. I stared at the wound as the blood flowed toward the desk in thick droplets. My eyes shifted from my arm to the tiny puddle of blood on the desk. Eventually the flow stopped, leaving a red streak on my arm. It wasn’t the wound which captivated me. It was the thick red blood forming the shape of an artist's palette.

Mesmerized, I stared. I couldn’t help but dip the tip of my pencil in it. I brought the tip closer to my face and saw the tiny drop of blood suspended from it. I glanced down at my empty homework sheet and started writing in my own blood. For several minutes, I scribbled a note in blood red ink to nobody in particular. I don’t know if a vague memory of mine inspired the note, or if the fates themselves guided my hand. As I wrote I could feel the importance of it. I knew without a shadow of doubt I'd written a binding contract in my own blood.

I probably should have crumpled it up and