age of thumb sucking

chapter 3

Nov 17, 2024

One of the sanctified traditions of middle school friendship is the sleepover, a fantastic playdate that never ends, late nights of movies and candy and popcorn, tent-forts and sleeping bags and flashlights.

Neither Tommy nor I had ever partaken in one, and since his parents didn’t mind me spending so much time over there and their house was so big and empty anyway since Tommy was an only child, one day Tommy’s phone invitation included a provision for staying the night.

There was a problem though, one which precluded me from ever sleeping over anywhere before:

I was a thumb sucker.

I don’t know how the sucking of my thumb had been allowed to advance to such an age. Apparently, my parents didn’t see it as a problem, or if they did, they weren’t militant about enforcing any change in the habit. Eventually, I reached an age where I was aware enough to know that sucking one’s thumb was an embarrassing taboo, but I didn’t have the fortitude to abandon the comfort, especially when it came to sleeping.

Naturally, I wanted to avoid Tommy noticing my habit when I spent the night.
His mother took us to Blockbuster, the ultimate one-stop sleepover shop, where we rented a movie and got some microwave popcorn and Sour Patch Kids (his favorite) and Swedish Fish (mine). The movie we decided on was School of Rock, a Richard Linklater movie starring Jack Black that has since become appreciated as a classic.

My stomach whirred, though, as I saw the rating: PG-13.

As may be apparent, my parents had a hard time seeing me grow up, and just as they were slow to acknowledge my thumb-sucking problem, they equally had difficulty understanding that most PG-13 movies were now harmless for me to consume. They took pains to only allow me to watch ones they had already vetted or were watching with me.

Sleepovers were in Tommy’s basement, which didn’t seem like much of a basement to me since it had walls and carpet and a pool table and a movie projector screen, compared to my parents’ basement, which had cement floors and fiberglass walls. I learned Tommy’s was what was called a ‘finished’ basement.

We watched the movie on the projector screen, and once it was over, I couldn’t understand why such a movie would contain a warning for kids our age, as if we needed parents to shield us from its messaging.

Tommy looked at the cover. “For some rude humor and mild drug use,” he read aloud from the box. “What, do they think this will make us start drinking and doing drugs?”

I laughed. School of Rock would not be the origin of such behavior.

We slept in sleeping bags on the big L-shaped couch in front of the projector screen. It was the comfiest couch I’d ever slept on in my life, somehow relegated from being the living room couch upstairs, where it had been replaced with a leather one. I always occupied the smaller part of the ‘L’ because I was shorter than Tommy.

My tactic was to zip my sleeping bag all the way up over my head so that I could suck my thumb inside it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise, but I couldn’t let Tommy see.

“Why do you zip up your sleeping bag like that?” Tommy asked.

“This is how I sleep,” I said.

“You always sleep in a sleeping bag?”

“No, not a sleeping bag. I always pull the covers up and wrap myself in them. I gotta, like, be in a cocoon,” I explained.

He took this as an interesting quirk. Sometime in the middle of the night, my cocoon became way too stuffy, and I unzipped it for some air, no doubt falling back to sleep with thumb in mouth. Tommy let me know it the next morning.

“I saw you like a little biological binky,” Tommy said when we woke up, mimicking my thumb in mouth. Biological binky. It was something only Tommy could say. Funny, but hurtful.

“Don’t tell anyone,” I said. “I want to stop but I can’t. I stopped doing it during the day and stuff, but at night I just can’t, or I can’t get to sleep. Please don’t tell anyone.”

“You want to stop though, right? But you can’t?”

“Yes, of course,” I implored.

I thought this secret shame of mine would maybe signal the end between us, but Tommy nodded with closed eyes to relay deep understanding in the way he’d seen people do in movies. “I have that problem a lot too. My dad says I have ‘impulse control’ issues. Like sometimes I do things even though I don’t really want to do them.”

“Why is it so hard?” I wondered out loud for both of us.

He shrugged. “You’ll figure it out. How many high schoolers do you know that suck their thumb? None, because everyone stops eventually, and you will too.”

“So you’ll still be my friend?” I asked in a vulnerable voice, the most exposed I’d ever been.

“I don’t care. You’re a thumb sucker. You’ll stop eventually. It’s whatever.”

Relief flooded in as we went upstairs to feast on sugary cereals. My parents didn’t let me have Corn Pops.

It started with a girl in gym the following Monday who mimicked thumb-sucking to her friend and pointed at me. Then there were whispers, then a few of the bolder kids who asked if it was true, then by the end of the day I was thumb-sucking Jude Harris, the baby boy.

I was furious, hurt, lost, and lonely. Once again, on my own against the world, because Tommy and I were done. I saw him next in our final class of the day.

“What the hell, dude,” I said, my voice cracking.

“It wasn’t me,” Tommy said, eyes big and eyebrows raised in innocence.

“How do you even know what I’m talking about?”

“Because I heard. But I swear, Jude-dude, it wasn’t me!”

“Who else could it be!” I seethed so only he could hear.

“I swear, it wasn’t me,” he said, sitting down at his desk without breaking eye contact with me.

“What do you mean?! You’re the only person who could possibly know!”

I stood there, fists clenched. It was the first and only time I ever considered violence against someone.

“Tommy, Jude? Is there a problem? Take your seat, please, Jude,” the teacher said.
I asked to be excused and, before I was given permission, I went into the hallway, into the bathroom, and cried in the stall until the school day was over.

I didn’t sit next to Tommy on the bus, and I didn’t interact with him for the most difficult and uncertain next six weeks of my short life.

Six weeks feels like practically a lifetime in the lives of sixth graders, or so it seemed to me in the time without Tommy. It felt like he was a thing of the distant past when one day my mother answered our landline and began a conversation with whom I intuited could only be Mrs. Goodspeed, and that distance made it easier to forget my pain and anger as she knocked on my door and came in with maternal authority.

“Jude? Do you know who’s on the phone? It’s Tommy,” she said. “He wants to apologize. I think you should talk to him.”

If over the course of the six weeks I was apart from Tommy it had seemed like I was thriving and making other friends, my mother would have probably told Tommy’s mother to fuck off.

As it was, though, I was worse off, friendless and sworn off friends. No one could be trusted. She knew how devastated and hurt I was, how it had impacted me so. But what ultimately made her mind up about it was the sincerity that Tommy had conveyed to her, which he then turned toward me.

“I’m sorry, Jude-dude,” Tommy told me on the phone.

“Why did you do it?!” I asked.

“It was an accident,” he said. “I was talking to Claire about how I was playing this video game all the time and how I was playing it so much that I knew I should stop but I couldn’t and then I said something about comparing that with you and your thumb, and you know how I am, and how Claire is so of course she went blabbing…”

I was silent. It did seem that no secret would be safe in the maw of Tommy’s mouth.

“Look on the bright side, though,” he continued, “Have you sucked your thumb recently?”

I looked down at my thumb, un-sucked for six weeks, kept dry and unchewed by the deluge of shame.

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I didn’t forgive Tommy that day. Middle school is the great filter of friendships, where they are ripe for failing because those involved are so nebulous and changing. We can hardly figure ourselves out, let alone others. How often do we look at others in high school and beyond and remember “ah, yes, I was friends with them once,” only for there to have been some inciting incident that blew up the fragile bond and left us strangers to them for years afterward?

Yet, I knew that wouldn’t be me and Tommy, that it somehow couldn’t be. I needed to forgive him, and I did.

I went to hang out at Tommy’s for the first time post-thumb-sucker fiasco and was surprised to be greeted at the door by a little puppy with golden, wiry hair and a mutt-like face. This elated me, as any dog was instantly a friend of mine since my household was devoid of pets because of my parent’s allergies.

“My parents wanted to get a pure-breed and I was like what? That’s boring. And they’re raised by breeders. Waldo here, he’s a mutt, a rescue no one wanted, we saved him. My parents thought maybe he’d get me out of the house more,” Tommy explained. “I don’t know if it worked, though.”

It was apparent that Tommy’s mother’s motivation in suggesting that Tommy apologize was not only because he was friendless, but because his loneliness had taken the form of playing an unhealthy amount of video games, one game in particular, called Age of Empires 2.

After arriving, he led me over to the family’s computer cabinet in what they called their ‘den’, which to me was just a superfluous living room. Usually, we would watch TV, swap whatever books we were reading, or—most often—head out into the yard or into the wooded trail behind his house. When we did play video games, it was something we both could play, like Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros.

He already had Age of Empires 2 up and running on the PC. Age of Empires 2 was a ‘real-time strategy’ game. It focused less on reflexes and technical skill and more on tactics like balancing resources, producing armies, and reacting to your opponent. It was a sort of moving chess enacted by little warriors from civilizations past.

It normally wasn’t something I was very interested in, but the way Tommy talked about it intrigued me. He demonstrated his memorization of certain keystrokes, playstyles, and meta (Most Effective Tactics Available), providing narratives for what he was doing while he played that made me enjoy being a spectator in a way that was surely ahead of its time.

“Last weekend, my parents had to go to something at the lake with my uncle and left me with the babysitter, and I played for like 15 hours. I played overnight until I saw the sun come up in the morning,” Tommy said, as though proud of it. “And I was dreaming about it too.”

Tommy devoted himself fully to every undertaking. It was impossible for him not to dedicate himself entirely to things, to get lost in them, to lose himself in whatever it was, as though his mind were impatient in this life and anything that would speed him through it and closer to death would be welcome. It made for incredible results, particularly in the athletic arena, but also pulled him apart in the way obsessions and addiction have a way of doing.

I have no doubt that if Tommy had continued to play that game in the age of the internet and online gaming, he would have been one of the best in the world.
As it were, though, playing games was seen as a vortex into which a life could be lost. His mom walked in on me looking over Tommy’s shoulder at the game as he talked in his chatterbox, animated way about the strengths of choosing the Mayans rather than the Incas, even though they both produced similar units. The puppy, Waldo, sat beside us dutifully, like a toy gone unused. Where Waldo had failed, it seemed I was meant to succeed.

“T,” she said sternly. “What did we talk about? You can’t play the game when Jude is here. Only two-player games are allowed when you have a friend over, please.”

My presence would force him to consider me and would be another chance for his mother to divert him away from the game.

I did notice new, unnatural rings under his eyes and a pallor and weakness I had never associated with him before in the short time we had been friends. Things could not have been right. He must have been playing for twelve, fifteen hours a day, and for whatever reason, his parents, like mine with the thumb-sucking, were unwilling or unable to stop it. The game had filled the void of my absence and had supplanted even the novelty of a puppy.

I don’t know how much Tommy played Age of Empires 2 once we started hanging out again, but he hardly brought it up anymore. I imagine he was too busy trying to read more books than me and running through the woods with Waldo.

It was always full speed ahead on the Tommy train. You just hoped he was pointed in the right direction.

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