1/16/10
I felt elated as I rinsed my hands, a post-orgasmic glow radiating from my 15 year old hairless face. Across the hall from the bathroom was my American Studies class, the film had just ended, and so had my handshake with my impatient little-gentleman who had been aching for my attention.
I’ve always thought the cliché of “one moment changing the rest of a person’s life” to be contrived, but whatever deity pulled my puppet strings of karma to the “pay-up time” point, I can attest that the person I had been as I crossed the hall underwent a dramatic metamorphosis as I opened the classroom door. Nightmares sometimes manifest into waking life.
All the commotion stopped, all eyes fell upon me. My body felt the horror of the situation before my mind admitted to it. Although I wished to disappear or appear nonchalant as I struggled to hold onto my naïve notion that it was going to be alright, the butterflies in my stomach were trying to escape as they lumped in my throat under my Adam’s Apple—probably spooked by my heart which started beating as if I had just sprinted a quarter mile.
“Hey, what’s that on your shirt?” Tom McClure asked, pointing to a small smear on my green T-shirt. He sat in the third row of the class. I was at the door which was located next to the marker board that the whole class was facing. The giggling of a few girls suggested that everyone already knew the answer to Tom’s question.
I looked down to the shiny place on my green shirt. How had I missed it? The small iridescent smudge was now the focal point of the room.
“Yogurt,” I stammered, desperately trying to defend my honor. I wished I hadn’t said anything as the soft unconvincing tone of my yogurt plea seemed to amuse the peer-jury who laughed out their universal sentence of “Death by Humiliation”. The room began to swirl as a surreal sensation carried my mind away—my body felt light and my whole being started to succumb to a numb feeling of shock. This had to be a dream! My mind reeled, frantically trying to snap out of the sadistic nightmare.
Ms. Smith ordered the class to be quiet and asked me to step out into the hall with her.
“Jasper, were you, well… Carissa said that she saw you masturbating, and I just want to…I mean, well were you?” She asked the question as if it was a secret military code that could launch a missile, but the word “masturbating” was more powerful to my freshman ears. She began fidgeting, brushing aside her bangs and shifting from one foot to the other. Her fretful eyes would not meet mine and kept glancing from me to the floor as she talked. Nothing I said to her mattered. She was not my lawyer. The verdict had already been given to me in the form of laughter. Yet, it felt good to look her in the eye and deny it. I hoped that if I could somehow convince her that I was innocent, I would be convincing everyone in the class. It was deluded optimism, but perhaps she could persuade the class into believing this was all just a big joke. She would tell them that Tom was the real culprit who deserved ridicule.
“No—of course not… it’s just yogurt from lunch,” I answered with a shrug. “Is that what Carissa said? Or did Tom say it?” I asked the question with conviction, hoping that somehow Tom had started a rumor. I had fifteen years of practice in lying when I had been caught in the middle of all sorts of crimes, and had been able to talk my way out of punishment more than once.
Ms. Smith looked me in the eye, knitting her worried eyebrows together.
“Okay,” she answered nodding as I stared intently back at her. It appeared that she hadn’t even heard a word I had said past “no”, but trying to set up Tom as a false-rumor spreader wasn’t sure footing for any argument of my own, so I didn’t bother asking who said what to whom. It was over and I was doomed; her anxious eyes reflected the hellish position I was in.
In the classroom, gossip bubbled and gained enough momentum to erupt into a storm of animated conversation in the minute that Ms. Smith and I had spent in the hall. As I entered the room behind Ms. Smith a new horror sent the butterflies in my stomach into a frenzied panic—I was sitting next to Carissa. Chills ran up my spine as I realized that as she had been rocking back in her desk and leaning against the wall while the film was on. She had not been watching the film—oh God no! I had a long shirt, how could she have seen? As I passed her to get to my seat at the back of the room she leaned as far away from me as possible, giggling, but with a disgusted look as if I would contaminate her with my cooties. A couple of her girlfriends giggled as well.
“So you just couldn’t wait, huh?” jeered Tom McClure, turning around to face me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat.
“That’s enough Tom!” Ms. Smith said, asserting her teacher/adult authority. I thanked her with my eyes. She looked back at me with pity before she decisively changed the subject to the film we had been watching.
My attention drifted into planning an escape. Every excruciating moment that went by was a moment closer to the end of the day. This was a two edged sword that I could not escape. Although this was in 1995 before the cell-phone boom, the information would spread from ear to ear faster than I could escape the building. I had to take the bus home, which, unfortunately for me, was the same bus that a couple of my classmates took. I contemplated walking the seven mile trek home, but even then, I knew that some students would pass me as they drove or caught rides home with other students who were old enough to drive. American Studies was the last period, so I was fortunate to have an evening to beg God for an earthquake or some catastrophic event that would postpone the date of my public humiliation. Perhaps God would be kind enough to kill me in my sleep, but I knew the odds of benevolent mercy from God were stacked high against me
As class ended and people began to get up and pack their things, I sat in my desk, hoping to avoid harassment. Unfortunately, as the class filed out, Tom turned around with a jack-ass grin smeared across his face and a sadistic gleam in his eye. I glanced over to Ms. Smith who was arranging papers on her desk, but I could tell her authority would no longer be respected even if she did see Tom who was preparing to toy with me as a cat would with a wounded bird.
“So, you’re really going to deny the whole thing?” his interrogation began. I started putting my books in my backpack ignoring him as best I could. I hoped that if I ignored, refusing to enter a debate I knew I would lose, he would drop the subject.
“Why don’t you just admit it?—Carissa saw the whole thing! Do you really think that anyone believes that’s yogurt on your shirt?” Tom’s books were still on his desk and he hadn’t even begun to pack up. I took the opportunity to get up and swiftly exit the classroom.
The halls were bustling with activity and packed with students busy getting in and out of their lockers. I walked in a trance with my eyes to the ground and boarded the bus taking a seat near the front. The group of rowdy students in the back yelled my name and I pretended not to hear. There was an epidemic of laughter and loud conversations that infected everyone with poisonous gossip that would swiftly lead to my social estrangement.
For the next two years I was an outcast avoiding the cafeteria during lunch, choosing the solitude of the halls where I ate, exiled from the rest of the student body. Perhaps things would have been easier for me if I would have admitted to the crime I had been convicted of committing, yet the shame of it all was far too great of a burden for me to shoulder.
I look back on the incident with a sense of humor, and am glad for the captivating story it has left me with. Indeed, I can thank my folly for many of the choices I would make later in life. One moment is truly powerful enough have effects that ripple out into the rest of a life time, however, as the years pass, the waves become less rigid and eventually wash onto the shores with a gentle sigh of relief.
