Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Write something AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL (10/02/14)
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TITLE: Betrayed | Previous Challenge Entry
By Veronica Winley
10/04/14 -
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To an eight-year-old, elementary school is both wonderful and exciting. Your teacher and your classmates are your “day family” and the confines of your school, filled with familiar places like the library, the gym and the cafeteria, become almost like home, a sanctuary.
That momentous day I had to use the restroom and the rules stated that I needed a bathroom buddy; no one wandered the halls alone. If memory serves me correctly, my buddy’s name was Charlene and she was a good choice because she was also my friend.
We giggled and skipped our way down the long corridor to the restroom but stopped doing both when we got there and found the door propped open. Two men, one on a ladder doing something to the ceiling and the other holding the ladder and looking up, were in THE GIRLS’ BATHROOM! Frightened but unnoticed, we crept away.
We moved a short distance down the hall, uncertain now of what to do. Nature was still calling.
Grabbing my hand, Charlene said, “Come on. We can use the kindergarten bathroom.” Racing down another hallway, we came to the “babies” restroom, which was right outside their classroom door. As we went in, we could hear them chanting their alphabet. We looked at each other and shook our heads, smirking with third grade smugness. The alphabet? Oh please! After washing and drying our hands when we finished, we emerged, talking and laughing.
We did not see the kindergarten teacher until she swooped down on us as we came out and grabbed both of us by an arm.
“What were you doing in there?” she hissed, bending down and giving both of us a hard shake for good measure. When I tried to explain, stuttering in my terror, she slapped me and told us never to use that bathroom again.
Time has stolen the image of my friend Charlene’s face and I cannot recall the name of my third grade teacher or even the subjects I studied then, for memory is a capriciously selective thing. However, the incident and the kindergarten teacher’s face have been with me through the years.
I have asked myself, as time passed, why was she so angry, her pale face red and her eyes slitted in uncontrolled rage? Had she been teaching so long (her hair was all gray) that she had burned out? Was she unhappy with her job, the school, the kids? Was it just a bad day? However the big question was always, how could she strike a small child like that? Many questions but no acceptable answers to soothe the memory.
My teacher, after hearing the almost incoherently told story, shook her head and tried to comfort me as I sobbed. Giving me a cookie, she told me to rest my head on my desk.
The immediacy of the moment is often a child's best friend and ally. That which is too painful to handle, recedes and gives way to the fun and joy of the next innocent pleasure. Recedes - but doesn’t go far.
I don’t remember the repercussions of the incident – if there actually were any repercussions. That was a different time, long, long ago and teachers were too highly esteemed, especially in some communities, for their actions to ever be questioned. I recall, however, that I took bathroom breaks only when there was no longer any way to “hold it.” They were taken quickly, quietly and always with an unconscious trepidation. School was still about reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and(yay)recess. But somehow, in some unfathomable way, it no longer felt like a sanctuary.
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Thank you for sharing your story.
God bless~
Well done.