I was as bad as the next kid and got punished the same, writing off what I’d done
wrong—150 times, 500 times, depending
on the kind of day the teacher was having. I may as well have been writing off “I
will not think in class” or “I will not believe
social studies is useless.” Sixth-grade study hall had the acoustics of an abandoned
warehouse, but there were times I could hear
the hiss of the pencil lead raking across the standard-ruled paper as I went about
my punishment. It moved more easily the blunter
it became, the lead’s line widening, growing lighter, quieter, and soon I was
noticing the silvery characters, each cursive I different
from the one on the line above, leaning like a crude sketch of a human figure
trying to stand upright in a fierce wind. The punishment for having words
was to write them, as though writing something down was a way to lodge it into
your mind rather than a means of casting it out
forever. I didn’t know how anyone else in the room felt about it, but my own voice
was being rent from my throat
and flattened onto loose leaves of cheap notebook paper, the end product of
immature pine trees machine harvested and pulped,
acid bathed and bleached nearly white. Anything I might say was as ephemeral as
the wind under the door. A football coach sat at the teacher’s desk
diagraming pass plays on a legal pad. This was the last year anyone could be
compelled to write off. From here on out
it was paddlings—they still did that then—and suspension. I had no idea what
came next but I knew it was waiting. We outgrow everything,
even our punishments. Hardened to the harshest penalty, there’s always another
one out there that will put us in our place. That day
I could see the penciled I was changing, bent a little more at the start of each new
line, some trivial sin handwritten and edging down the page.