A blue bike and a thumbtack

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The thumb tack was pushed into her front tire, the tire and bike were both blue, it was a lady’s frame. Her tire was flat. We were in the fourth grade. I never knew who pushed in that thumbtack, only that it had not been me. For reasons I didn’t understand then and have never understood since, one of my classmates, a young woman who had never even spoken word one to me, told the teacher I had done it. That was all that out teacher needed to hear. She leaned in toward me when I said I had nothing to do with it, and said, “Jonathon, she told me you did it!” My words meant nothing in that circumstance. Alyssa, who owned the bike, then yelled at me, in front of the teacher, that I had done it. That she had seen me do it. That I was a liar! I didn’t know what else to say. What else could I say? When asked if I had done it, I truthfully answered that I had not. And it had not mattered at all. I stared hard at the floor wishing it would all just go away and I could be back in the wood behind my parent’s house, where I was free, where I was a king. I don’t’ recall what my exact punishment was, but I think I spend about a week of recesses inside the classroom while my classmates played outside and laughed at me. I never felt a part of that classroom again. It is the first time I can remember hating everything around me in school, overwhelmingly wanting to change the entirety of my surroundings, to leave and never come back.

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