S’well Spirits

The day was Monday, September 24, 2018. My feet dragged on the floor as I walked toward the exit, heavy with the mental burden that accompanies Early Action applications. Suddenly, I was distracted by a clamorous school of students crowded around tables near the scanners, swallowing them up like piranhas to a capsized ship. Not giving a damn about the safety of my peers, I squeezed into an empty space at one end of the table and clambered onto it, taking a mysterious cardboard box that some students were seizing dozens of. Mr. Tillman screamed at me to get off the table. Being wildly rebellious in spirit but a good Stuyvesant student at heart, I did something contradictory and told him to shut the heck up as I did as I was told.

Unboxing revealed a simple, odorless, and cylindrical metal bottle. How swell! Gently turning it in my hands and lightly tapping it with my fingernails like some ASMR wannabe, a certain realization struck me:

“You could sneak something potent in this,” I mused. A student overheard my musing and shot me a dirty look. A small grin crept onto my lips as my eyes closed wistfully, but the sound of these bottles already hitting the ground and ringing like Nôtre-Dame bells popped my tranquil bubble, killing my peaceful vibe.

Throughout the semester, I noticed that students never took anything more druggish than espresso in their S’wells. Knowing that the DOE was about as corrupt as the academic dishonesty policy of Stuy, I wondered if they infused the bottles with something that would discourage students from packing ounces of pure black coffee every day. Was it something reactive in the metal?

Oh, there was something reactive in the metal, all right. But it was nothing my milligram of STEM could ever explain. Not even psychology knows how to touch on the intangibility of all things spiritual. Maybe calling the DOE “shady” is too kind since they resorted to the realms of black magic for their personal agenda.

“I saw a spirit in my S’well,” I overheard a student whisper to their friend.

“Yeah, and its name was Fireball,” the friend retorted.

“I swear, though! It was like a little ghost. It would’ve been cute except that it told me that the S’well detected more than a ‘trace of ethanol’ and that the nearest police officer was gonna be notified.”

“I told you that mixing weed, Xans, and drinks to manage your inferiority complex and teen midlife crisis was only going to lead you down the wrong path, but noooo, you told me to stop treating you like a ‘textbook case’ when really I’m just concerned about you and your fallen spirits.”

“Well that took a serious turn!” A voice piped up from the friend’s opened S’well bottle. “Shame that you’re,” the spirit hiccuped, “a hypocrite!” The adorable little transparent blob giggled with the giddiness of having had too much bubbly. “The ‘fallen spirits’ found themselves held in your own troubled bottle.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” I mumbled. The three of them looked my way and laughed dryly.

“You should have nothing to say. Your S’well is beyond empty, because even stagnant water eventually becomes a marsh of mould, a thriving ecosystem of nasty. No, it is a gaping void staring right back at you. You’re more unfortunate than all of us,” the spirit said, drinking between sentences and nodding slowly as it said these words in an intoxicated chant.

Genuinely concerned but too cynical to have savior-like impulses, I considered that enough irony to start my second semester and bade the school day adieu to keep myself in good spirits so that I wouldn’t drown myself in the bad ones.