Shine - A story of hope for children (2008) (DRAFT)

SHINE by Stuart Crouch

Nathan Barnabus Smedley O’Donnell

Nathan wasn’t popular. Nathan wasn’t cool. In fact, he was kind of a nerd. At least that’s what the other kids said, especially mean little Davy Brewster. The other kids in Nathan’s class saw his broken glasses, his knitted, home-made sweaters and his scuffed, old man’s shoes, and they thought like, totally, whatever... If you weren’t cool, if you were a nerd, then you didn’t matter. That’s how it seemed to Nathan.

Nathan didn’t say much. In fact, he hardly spoke at all. He spent his time avoiding people, as if he wanted to just blend in. His teachers thought that this made him difficult. They overlooked his good grades and his neat handwriting and his always-tidy cubby, and saw only a scruffy boy who had nothing to say.

But Nathan was what you’d call a dark horse. No, I’m not saying that Nathan was a horse! No, I’m saying that you never quite knew what Nathan was thinking at any particular time. You never quite knew what to expect from him. His grandmother was always saying that still waters run deep, and Nathan wondered what this meant. And, you see, that made him deep. Really deep. Helen da Silva could be Queen Bee of the spelling test, and Jamie Huckleson might know all his multiplication tables backwards, but Nathan, well, he knew all that and more.

You see, Nathan was a watcher. He looked, he saw. He observed, he noted. He knew the bus schedule from Monday to Sunday (and national holidays), and he had counted (and remembered) all of the trees on his bus route home. He remembered every word that every teacher had ever told him (useful for tests), and every image from every TV documentary he’d ever seen. If Nathan ever got lost, he’d be able to tell you that his full name was Nathan Barnabus Smedley O’Donnell, his birthday was May 29th at exactly 7.18 a.m., that his mother’s name was Jessie, née Sinkowski. He could reel off not just his own home phone number, but also his mother’s cell, his aunt Flo’s home and cell, the priest’s cell and the number of Mr. Pattinger, who lived at number 37. Yes, Nathan was a watcher and that meant that he knew stuff.

Still, being a watcher didn’t make him cool, and his only friend at school was a little snot-nosed kid, who hung around and sniffed a lot. But company is company and together Nathan and the little snot-nosed kid roamed the school and watched.

Their teacher, Miss Bouvier, wasn’t exactly what you’d call organized. She was a little forgetful. In fact, it was already December and she hadn’t learned everyone’s name yet. OK, maybe she’d learned the names in September, but since then, Jemima, Maria and Shauna and the twins Kate and Kim, had become a cluster of little ‘My Dears’, and Jamie, Juan, Jaime, James and all the other little boys whose names didn’t begin with the letter ‘J’ – including Nathan’s friend the little snot-nosed kid that nobody seemed interested in - were simply referred to as ‘That Boy There’. So Fifth Grade had been interesting for the children in 5B, and Nathan wondered if he was learning anything new at all. Miss Bouvier always seemed to be on the verge of saying something important, but then she backtracked and left Nathan wondering if she was a dark horse, too.

Back to the story. More especially, back to Nathan. This story will tell you how Nathan became a hero, and if you read carefully, you’ll see that being a nerd can sometimes be, well, a wonderful thing.

The Auditions
It was the third week in January and school was in full flow after the winter vacation. The word in the school hallways was that a big, all-singing, all-dancing end-of-year show was being planned. The word in Fifth Grade was that they were going to be the stars of the show.

The twins, Kate and Kim, were certain. “We’re going to lead the dancers!”

Mean little Davy Brewster was confident. “I’m going to be the handsome Prince!” Nathan thought that handsome was stretching the truth just a bit, but kept his mouth shut.

Miss Bouvier was positive. “I want 5B to be stars! I want you to shine for a night, just one night.”

The snot-nosed kid was sure. “I’m going to stand on the back row, behind the big kids,” he thought.

And Nathan? Nathan didn’t say a word, and didn’t think a thing. He wasn’t one to push himself forward, you see. Remember? Nathan watched. Observed. Saw. Noted.

Along came the day of the auditions and everyone was ushered into the hall. Mr. Decker, the music teacher, was looking tense and Miss Bouvier kept pushing the children from 5B to the front of the audition line. “You’re going to be stars, little stars, my 5B stars”, she whispered, as she hooked the arm of a kid from 3A or 4C and pulled them down the line, whilst the children from 5B tiptoed up the line. Nathan wasn’t sure that he wanted to audition at all. He didn’t want to speak in public, he had two left feet, and as for singing… No, Nathan was certain that being a star wasn’t for him.

Kate and Kim, who had been pushed by their mother onto more stages than they’d had hot dinners, looked like they were made to be stars. They had come to school that morning wearing matching red shoes that went clickety-clack wherever they stepped. And they were wearing matching drum majorette uniforms. Yes, these girls were ready. Mr. Decker started the introduction to their song on the piano and the girls seemed to swell before Nathan’s eyes. That’s a clever trick, he thought, and as the girls started to belt out the sun’ll come up, tomorrow! Nathan could have sworn that Kate and Kim were really grown-ups in disguise.

Follow that. Well, that’s exactly what Nathan had to do. He was next. Nervously he walked up the five steps onto the stage. Crack. Bang. Smash. He had forgotten that there were microphone cables everywhere, and he tripped. As his knees and elbow hit the hard, wooden floor, the microphone stand fell over. “Nice entrance, Dumb-boy!” stage-whispered mean little Davy Brewster. Kate and Kim sniggered cruelly. Nathan picked himself up, looked around blindly for his broken-but-taped-together glasses, and cleared his throat nervously.

“Twinkle, twinkle little star…” his voice was the merest suggestion of a whisper. Those people in the hall not within spitting distance of Nathan could not hear a thing.

“Project! Project!”, yelled Mr. Decker, in what was probably supposed to be a supportive voice, but which made Nathan cower, whisper and shuffle all the more.

“… how I wonder what you are”, Nathan’s voice faded into nothing. Mean little Davy Brewster, who had already had his audition, dancing and singing and miming and juggling like a pro, laughed, one of those loud, put-on laughs that are meant to hurt. The twins rolled their eyes theatrically.

“Well”, said Miss Bouvier. “Not all of us can be stars that shine. Some of us just…er… twinkle.” If it had meant to make Nathan feel better, it didn’t work, and at the end of the auditions, he picked up his schoolbag, tidied his cubby, walked through the main entrance of the school and got on his school bus.

Mr. Jack says important stuff
The next day, Nathan got off the school bus once more and trudged into the school building. You’d think that his schoolbag contained all the worries in the world, so weighed down did Nathan look. In fact, his were just the worries of your average11 year-old boy, who’d started life as a nerd. Head down, he wandered down the corridor.

“Ow! Look out there!” a voice cried testily.

Nathan looked up and saw Mr. Jack, the janitor, looking back down at him. What a way to start a day.

“Sorry”, murmured Nathan, “I wasn’t looking where I was going. Did I hurt you?” Nerd or not, Nathan never forgot his manners. Mr. Jack seemed to look at Nathan more closely, taking in the battered glasses, the home-made sweater, and the scuffed old-man shoes. Mr. Jack peered into the eyes of young Nathan, eyes that were already starting to well up with tears, and his own eyes softened. “This boy looks as deflated as an old beach ball”, he thought.

“Well sometimes it can be hard to know where you’re going”, said Mr. Jack encouragingly. “And sometimes you know where you’re going, but things get in your way. But sometimes, you should give yourself a break. Just look behind you, and see how far you’ve come.”

Nathan blinked. Wow. Mr. Jack was deep. Maybe he was a watcher, too. Nathan made a promise to himself to think carefully about what Mr. Jack had just said. He nodded, managed an almost-smile, and went on his way, looking in front to see where he was going, and glancing back to see where he had come from. Mr. Jack was still standing there, with a look on his face that Nathan knew was a grown-up look. He just didn’t know what it meant.

Astronomy. Light. Shining
Science the next day was cool. 5B were learning about the sun. Even Miss Bouvier talked like she knew what she was talking about. After asking the children of 5B what they already knew about the sun (“It’s yellow and hot”… “It’s really far away”… “It gives us heat and light”…), Miss Bouvier explained that the sun was a star and that stars don’t last forever. One day the sun would go BOOM and that would be that. The class fell silent. Mean little Davy Brewster broke the silence. “Yeah, and it’s gonna happen soon, like, next week!” Two girls screamed and Miss Bouvier struggled to make herself heard. The little snot-nosed kid looked around in wonder. He hadn’t been counting on going boom just yet a while.

“No, no, Davy! You know that’s not true. It’s going to be a long time from now. It’s going to be in…”

“Five billion years”, thought Nathan, who’d known this since Kindergarten. If the sun was a person, it would be almost middle-aged. If it looked behind, it could see yesterday and billions of other yesterdays, and if it looked ahead, it could expect another five billion years of, well, shining.

Miss Bouvier explained that the light from the sun that we see on Earth was, in fact, 7 seconds old. That’s how long it took for the light to travel all the way from the sun to earth, and to our little town, she explained.

“The light from a bright star, like our sun” she said in her this-is-important-so-I’m-speaking-slowly voice, “Is worth waiting for. It doesn’t come right away.” She glanced over at Nathan, smiled faintly and continued “But if we’re all patient, it will shine eventually.”

Now Nathan may have been a nerd, but he was also clever. He knew that Miss Bouvier had just aimed her words straight at him. He just didn’t know what she was aiming for. Maybe this was one of those dark horse moments, something that he would understand when he was older.

February turned to March and preparations for the school show continued feverishly. Nathan had been given a backstage job. Silent boys couldn’t be trusted to stand on the stage and speak. Or sing. Or dance. So, it was Nathan’s job to collect all of the props at the end of each practice and hand them back out at the start of the next practice. He wouldn’t have a job on the night of the real performance because an adult would be needed for this important job, but Nathan didn’t mind. From the side of the stage, you see, he could watch.

Life. And all that it brings
Just in case you were wondering, life is all about stuff happening and what you do when it happens. One of those moments was fast approaching in Nathan’s young life. Imagine the scene. It was the week of the show, and in class 5B…

“Now everyone, listen please”, Miss Bouvier wasn’t having much luck. “Davy Brewster, what did I just say? Well then! Please do exactly that!” Davy Brewster had not been having a good day and his life, at least the part of it that was happening right now, was running out of control. All day, Davy had been mean. All day, Miss Bouvier had been patient, but now Davy was holding the snot-nosed kid in a death grip and trying to steal his lunch money. Big mistake. What usually worked in the hallway or the playground, was clearly not going to work right in front of Miss Bouvier. Voices were raised, and soon the Principal, Mrs. du Pont, was in the room looking fierce, like a six foot tall golden eagle whose chicks were being stolen by a mean little boy. To cut a long story short, Mean little Davy Brewster was suspended. Again.

If you’ve been reading this story carefully, then you’ll know that mean little Davy Brewster was supposed to be a star of the end of year show. He was going to be the handsome prince. He’d always been destined to be the handsome prince. Except that now he had been suspended. Next day, Mr. Decker came to 5B looking for a volunteer to step into Davy’s shoes. Step up… no, it wasn’t Nathan. You thought it was going to be him, didn’t you? Thought it was going to be a happy ending? No. Sorry. Not yet, anyway. Wait a while and we’ll see. Who knows what possessed him at that very moment, but the little snot-nosed kid raised his hand, sniffed lustily, and said, “Me. I’ll do it”. And that was that.

A Happy Ending
Now it’s time for your happy ending. You see the little snot-nosed boy had not sniffed his way through life unnoticed. Oh no. Miss Bouvier had noticed the sniffing and Mr. Decker had noticed it, and finally even Mrs. du Pont had noticed that perhaps it was time for the little snot-nosed boy to be just a boy. The school nurse was brought in to look at him, and his mother was called. Finally the little snot-nosed boy was sent off to the hospital for lots of tests. This meant – you’re one step ahead of me aren’t you? – that he would be away from school on the day of the show...

While the snot-nosed kid was in hospital, trying to become just plain Michael Dimitrios, who knew his own name, even if nobody else did, poor Mr. Decker, who was looking increasingly desperate, and doing a good bit of sniffing himself, was looking for a star. Step up… Nathan. Was this an odd thing for a boy like Nathan to do? Not really. You’ll remember that Nathan was a watcher. And Nathan never forgot a thing. Nathan knew that he knew all the words to the show-stopping finale. He knew that he was supposed to enter stage left, go downstage slowly and end up standing on the very edge of the stage, bathed in the spotlight’s yellow glow. He knew that this was his moment to shine.

I don’t need to tell you about the night of the performance. You’ve all been to a school show. You know all about the homemade costumes and the red makeup, the wobbly backdrop, the poor kid who forgets his lines, hears the teacher whispering them and then finds his way again. You can picture all of the proud parents and worried-looking teachers. But maybe you can’t imagine the heroic performance that Nathan gave that night. Gold glows, silver glistens, but Nathan shone brighter than any precious metal that night. It seemed that he borrowed a little breath from everyone in the audience, and used it all to make his voice bigger and stronger than ever before. You couldn’t miss Nathan, up on the stage, and nobody could overlook him. And if you’d been watching closely, you may just have noticed that it took fully 7 seconds for the light in his eyes, and the sound of his voice to reach the very back of the audience. But it was truly worth waiting for.

The Big Moral of the Story
So, Nathan was the hero that night. He had become a star. Next year, he decided, when he was in Sixth Grade, he would speak a little more, and not just be a watcher. He’d push himself forward, just a little, and maybe take a risk or two. He wouldn’t try to be cool or anything like that. Being a nerd meant that he could do what he wanted, not what he thought everyone else wanted him to do. He wanted to look behind and see how far he’d come, and look ahead to all of the excitement that life could offer. But he would also try to shine. He would shine when he was alone, shine with his friends and family, he’d even shine around people who didn’t like him. Because, whatever Miss Bouvier might say, maybe some stars really could shine forever.

(2885 words)


Stuart Crouch was born in the 60’s and was a nerd throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Nothing changed in this respect when the Millennium came around. His theory is that being a nerd can be kind of cool. He has worked as a teacher and teacher-librarian in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and has taught hundreds of children, some of whom were just like Nathan Barnabus Smedley O’Donnell.