I was once again bodily towed from the classroom down the hall this
time with two halves of a chair and a very, very angry teacher. She
had been pushed to far this time and she was not going to stop until
I was gone for good. She didn't even worry about picking up the other
kid or cleaning up or calming the class she was just marching me
strait to the principals office swearing forth oaths of eternal
vengeance. She said I was getting suspend which scared me but then
she said I would have to pay for the chair I had broken and she
estimated that they cost about eighty dollars. Eighty dollars sounded
to me like a life sentence of indentured servitude. I was terrified
of what was about to go down. We got back to the principal's office
in what was now my fifth trip in three months. I was sat down in the
principals office while she told him what had gone on and then went
to get her stack of disciplinary write-up papers. While she was gone
the principal sat down and sighed and rubbed his face and asked me
if I knew how many of his last ten discipline problems were kids from
Santaquin. I thought I guessed high with five. The correct answer was
all ten. He asked me what I thought made us all so crazy. I declined
to offer a suggestion owing to the sudden and intense dryness of my
mouth and the rapid beating of my heart. My parents were called and a
meeting was arranged and I stayed at school for an hour after it let
out to have our pow-wow. My mom was really upset about having to come
back a third time and she seemed to be more sympathetic to the plight
of the teacher and principal then my story of having to defend my
hair from molestation. They told me I would be suspended for three
days which was the rest of the week and I could come back on Monday.
When I got home I avoided my dad and was faking asleep when he got
back from a late meeting. The next morning when I would avoid him no
longer he told me to come to his room and he asked me what this was
all about and I tried to make it sound like I was a blameless victim
and he knew I wasn't. He told me I would be pulled out of school for
a month and I could come to work with him. I loved school, I loved my
new friends, I loved going to class and to lunch and in the hall in
between. I was devastated and I decided that because I had a little
bit of a congestion in my throat already I would really played up a
little hyperventilation fit to hopefully sway him into seeing how
badly I would cope with this news, like it may cause me death or
something. With the threat of my immanent demise hanging over his
head like the sword of Damocles he told me to calm down and shut up;
he was not impressed. I cried and flailed and wallowed in my misery
and then was resigned to my fate. I got sympathy calls from all of my
friends who agreed that what I was dealing with was total bull crap
and that every adult in the authoritative chain of command was rude
and very rude, and stupid and rude. I kind of liked my martyrdom and
started playing that up. The chair ended up being $12.80 which I
could cover so that was not the worst of it as I had originally
feared.
