They Just Want Gum
F ourth grade. 1984. Wednesday. Sunshine. The day I got caught cheating. We had these desks with four legs and separate chairs. Not the kind where the books fit under the seat. I’d figured out that you could take the list of spelling words, hide it just inside the front and if you pushed back just enough, you could see the words as the teach called them out. I’d done it a couple times before, but this time I leaned back a little too far or something and she cause me looking. It really upset me when she caught me at it, because I really liked my teacher. I never cheated on a school test again. Oddly enough, the Wednesday test was just a practice test. The real spelling test was on Friday each week. But the people who made spelled all the words right on Wednesday didn’t have to take the test on Friday and they got to chew gum in class on Friday morning. I cheated, just so I could chew gum. It seems like such a little thing now. My mother would’ve bought me gum, if I’d asked, but that w...