Spring 2015
BRING FORTH THE GUILTY
by Allen Long
On the first day of class in fifth grade when I was eleven, a Swedish girl named Anna with long
golden hair entered the classroom, instantly captivating my heart and the heart of my best friend Randy.
She was as beautiful as a fairy tale princess and so unobtainable that we didn’t see anything wrong with
both of us loving her. Many of our classmates mispronounced her name, making it sound like banana,
but Randy and I always pronounced it correctly so Anna rhymed with sauna. We even looked her name
up in the school library and learned it meant “grace” in Swedish. That’s how we knew we’d feel—graced—if
she ever smiled at us or spoke a friendly word.
Alas, despite love notes slipped through the air vents of her locker, a multitude of Valentine’s Day
cards stuffed into the crimson and pink box on her desk, and pilgrimages by bicycle to her house, she
never smiled or spoke to us.
Our teacher Mrs. Scarsdale wrote that my behavior was unacceptable on every six-week report card
and I was harshly spanked by my father. She disliked my crush on Anna, and she disapproved of my
friendship with Randy—his parents were divorced, he lived with his mother, he rarely saw his father,
and Mrs. Scarsdale believed he was wild because he needed a man in his life to set some limits. Even
when I didn’t bother Anna at all for six weeks and didn’t speak in class unless called upon, Mrs.
Scarsdale still reported that my conduct was out of line.
Shortly after Valentine’s Day, Mrs. Scarsdale, announced in class that two boys among us were
paying unsuitable attention to one of the girls. She said she knew who these boys were and vowed to
halt this “sick” behavior.
Randy and I shrugged off this pronouncement—from our perspective, we simply were telling the
girl we loved that we loved her. We never considered that from Anna’s point of view we might have
been harassing and stalking her when she had not expressed a reciprocal interest.
So we were on Mrs. Scarsdale’s shit list, a dangerous place to reside. The year before, she shoved
a boy from my neighborhood named Chuck so hard that he fell backward and cracked his head open
on the floor. There were still a few spidery lines of dried blood on the linoleum the janitor had been
unable to remove.
In our case, Mrs. Scarsdale brooded but took no immediate action.
However, during the spring, when we were studying the U.S. Judicial System, I made a mistake in
the lunchroom. I absent-mindedly sat on one of my heels at the lunch table, an egregious offense,
given that both feet were to remain firmly planted on the floor at all times. I was apprehended by Mrs.
Claudette, our lunchroom monitor known as “The Claw.” She dug her talons into my shoulder until
both feet snapped back into place; then she ratted me out to Mrs. Scarsdale, who decided to conduct
The Linnet's Wings