Melting Ice Cream

The year “Big Girls Don’t Cry'' and “Hey There Delilah '' came out on the radio was the same year that I started learning my multiplication tables. Every week, my teacher would give us timed quizzes, testing to see how well we remembered them. It was a single sheet of paper with fifty equations evenly dispersed like soldiers awaiting their next order. One by one, I would hear pencils go down and my classmates would walk confidently over to the turn-in tray on my teacher’s desk. Panic would set in. “Why am I one of the last to finish?” I thought. My aunt would often help me with my homework and that day, out of frustration, made me sit in our home library and said, “You can’t come out until you remember all the tables.” She had seen the low marks I got on our recent quiz and was not pleased. I don’t blame her, I had gotten nearly every equation incorrect. The entire evening, I clung onto that crinkled sheet of paper, trying to remember every single table. My eyes went up and down, side-toside, trying to shove all the information into my brain. A week later, we took the test again and this time, I was the first one done. When the bell rang, I walked out of the building with my head held high. My grandpa stood by the school exit with a smile as I ran toward him, boasting about my grade and how well I did. This called for a mini celebration! We hopped into his Jeep and drove to the nearby gas station. Without hesitation, I skipped to the ice cream freezer and reached for the familiar Scooby-Doo push-up tubes. On the drive home, I turned the radio knob to 99.5 and let Gwen Stefani sing quietly in the background while I unwrapped my push pop. The weather that day was incredibly hot and I could see the orange wrapping slowly begin to darken and become soggy. And when I tilted it, the ice cream became an orange soup, slowly dripping down the sides and onto my sticky fingers. I didn’t care, “I was the first to finish my multiplication tables,” I thought, “I deserve this!”