Cutting Class

She was on to me.  She was watching.  In the halls, day after day, as I came and went.  Waiting, ever so patiently, for me to act carelessly and blow it.  It took the better part of a year, but she gained the upper hand.

She had caught me.  The jig was up.

The funny thing about that day of my senior year of high school — when I was summoned to the principal’s office — was that I wasn’t sure what it was for. Which offense, I mean.  I thought I was getting in trouble for parking in the gym teacher’s parking spot again.

Nope.  It was worse.  Way worse.  Kind of like that moment in Goodfellas when Henry Hill thought he was busted by local cops for  “normal” crimes, but it was really the Feds getting him for drug trafficking.

OK, it  wasn’t that bad.  Especially since I was in high school and all.  And no narcotics or broken laws were involved.  I guess that was a dramatic example.

Anyway.

I remember I was wearing this prairie-like dress from the Gap.  Apparently from their 90s Amish Collection.  And penny loafers.  The principal sat me down and asked me very directly, “Is there a problem you want to discuss with me?”

“Uh, no.”

“A drug problem maybe?”

“No, definitely not.  Why would you say that?”

He pulled out a file. And I knew.

“Because, according to Mrs. Vogel’s records, you have missed 40 days of school this year. 40.  The state maximum is 20.  So you see the problem we have, mere weeks before graduation.”

Mrs. Vogel. The school attendance officer.  That little troll.  She was like my non-Seinfeldian version of Newman.  She knew I was, shall we say, on the truant side.  And I knew she knew.  And she knew I knew she knew.  It was an ongoing dance between us.  But she couldn’t prove it.

Because I had one airtight alibi after another.  I was a good girl.  Student Council officer, Honors student, the whole thing.  But.  I had this older boyfriend who went to the local community college and lived at home, up the street from the high school.  With a mullet.  So I made a habit of skipping classes — not whole days, just one class at a time — to hang out with him.  I used  excuses of National Honor Society meetings, college essay application writing workshops and other upstanding activities.  My teachers all believed me, and my work was always done, so I kept getting away with it.

But Mrs. Vogel was watching.  She would see me leaving school property or sneaking back in.  She was on a mission to make an example out of me.

And she did.

You can imagine my parents’ reaction to the news that I had skipped double the state’s maximum allowable days — under their noses — and that my graduation eligibility was questionable.  At best.  As I was wait-listed to attend my top college choice, pending final transcripts.  It was not a good day.

{For the record, I think 40 days was a gross exaggeration.  I would put it more around 28.  But I wasn’t in a position to be arguing technicalities at that point.}

The standard disciplinary action for such misconduct was suspension.  Which the Mullet Boyfriend and I thought was fabulous — until the administration realized the irony of this punishment.  Perhaps it seemed a bit short-sighted to order the Extreme Truant to miss school.

So they commuted my sentence to something far worse, in my mind.

In-School Suspension.

Seriously?  It was like a juvenile detention hall.  There I was with my perm, my horned-rimmed glasses and my U2 text book covers.  I was blood in the water.  These other students — if you can call them that at age 21, on average — were basically criminals.  Who wanted to eat me for lunch.

But I’m nothing if not resourceful, and I befriended them by offering to help with their English essays, if they promised not to dismember me while the teacher took a bathroom break.

And, three or four times a day, Mrs. Vogel would walk by and just give me the stink eye.  And laugh.  Just like Newman.

I spent my incarceration plotting my road back to graduation.  My first thought, though fleeting, proved just how quickly a desperate person can consider turning to a life of crime.  A good friend of mine had some attendance issues as well and she, as a joke, said we should consider stealing the “M” file (both of our last names started with M) while Mrs. Vogel took a cigarette break.  I was totally and instantly on board.  At least in my head.

Then I reconsidered and figured there must have been a way to put all of that debate practice from history class to use.  After all, I thought, how would it look for the school to have missed such gross misconduct on the part of one of their student body leaders?  Surely, there was a misunderstanding at hand.  Obviously, the records were wrong.

I may have missed my calling in professional debating.  I’ll leave it at that.

Though I had to face the music at home, I did graduate with my class.  I went off to college as planned.  I kept Mullet Boyfriend for a year or so, but it wasn’t meant to be.

As for Mrs. Vogel, she kept her post long after I left.  She was pretty pissed that I slipped through her clutches.  I could have been her swan song.  It had been so close.  She had watched and watched, and plotted, with minimal payoff.  So she set her sights on a new victim in my absence:  My sister.

And, with that, Round Two was on back at home.  While I skipped my fair share of freshman core curriculum classes away at college — where nobody was watching.

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{This post was inspired by Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop.  The prompt was “Write about a time you believed someone was watching you.”}