The Wool Sweater

You use the word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.

Before Jayce chose what he would wear that day, he had to find out how cold it was outside. Where he lived in Oklahoma, the month of February was either 70 or 15 degrees, occasionally on the same day.

Just his luck, it was supposed to stay around 25 the whole day, which called for a sweater, his favorite wool sweater. His mom bought it for him as a Christmas present in the middle of his fourth grade.

A year older and a bit taller now, Jayce loved the navy blue and white striped sweater, but he remembered it being a tad tight across his chest two weeks ago when he last wore it. As he sized it up in front of him, he noticed it had a slight tear along the back shoulder seam.

“Naa,” Jayce thought. “Nobody’ll ever notice.”

Turns out Greg did.

Jayce made it to his last class, and Greg tapped Jayce on the shoulder and asked, “Jayce, you know you’ve got a hole in your sweater in the back?”

“Yeah, I know,” Jayce said in a whisper with his hands cupped around his mouth. “I put it on like that. It’s probably the last time I wear it.”

“Oh, okay,” said Greg and he dropped the matter.

When Jayce got home, he changed out of his school clothes and into his play clothes, and was stunned when he saw the hole. The one-inch tear along the seam was now six or seven inches and came around to his armpit.

“Oh no!” he thought. “How long has it been like this? Greg was the only one who said anything but who noticed but didn’t say anything? Did I actually go through the day like this?” He closed his eyes and thought of all the people he had been in contact with throughout the day.

He could ask his mom to sew it up, but he had almost grown out of it. Had she known about the hole, she would have certainly scolded him for wearing it that day.

Jayce wasn’t wrong when he told Greg it would be the last time he would wear his favorite sweater, Hopefully, it’d be the last time he’d knowingly wear clothes with a hole in it.

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