Plunder
“Let’s tell secrets,” our fourth-grade teacher suggested, ten minutes before dismissal. Instead of starting a round of Heads Up, 7-Up or Simon Says, our teacher lit an imaginary match and dropped it in the circle before turning away.
Cupping hands around our mouths that still smelled of peanut butter and apples, my classmates turned toward each other. Emilio, on my right, looked to Henry on his right, and furtively began to mumble something. My friend Michelle surprised me by turning toward Jenna, a girl known for eating her cherry Chapstick, and not so secretly.
An accordion curtain separated our room from the fifth-grade class, and I wished I could barge through it now, carrying my plastic tote drawer with my belongings. Asal, my neighbor, was in class next door, and she told secrets about worlds I had never imagined. For instance, her twin brother and father couldn’t visit Persia anymore because “the army might make them fight.” I would nod gravely and pretend to know where Persia was.
Around me, my classmates’ faces and hands twitched while telling and hearing confidences as if their expressions were connected, like Dixie Cup walkie-talkies on a taut string. Finally, Michelle tapped my arm. Flipping her fountain ponytail out of her eyes, she whispered that she’d spied on Henry, her crush, playing basketball with his brother in front of their family’s colonial. “I think his sister might’ve seen me,” she said.
“That’s not a secret,” I said. Sara, Henry’s sister, was in the class next door with Asal.
“So what’s yours?” Michelle snapped.
I hesitated, wondering if I should mention mooning my younger sister once, or helping my brother to steal one of our dad’s blank checks.
“Come on,” Michelle whined, but I saw her watching Emilio and Henry, who were wrestling with some of the other boys on the carpet.
“Just a second,” I said. Getting up, I went over to our teacher who was threading the projector’s dark slippery film to begin rewinding. “Miss Thorpe?” I said.
“Hmm?” She didn’t turn around to face me, so I spoke to her orange knit dress.
“Can I tell people that Henry’s sister is adopted?”
“What?” My teacher whipped around. “No, not that kind of secret.” Her voice was tight, like when she spoke to us about a spate of thefts from our totes.
My face felt warm. I wanted to apologize for repeating Asal’s gossip. Miss Thorpe was looking over at the rug where Henry, Sara’s brother, was pretending to ride Emilio like a horse. It was true that Henry had blond hair and Sara was a brunette. “Boys!” Miss Thorpe called out, but not too angrily.
“Maybe Sara already knows,” I whispered to my teacher, but I doubted it. Back then, decades before open adoptions, it was not uncommon for parents to guard the secret from their children for years.
I felt a small pinch on my elbow and saw Miss Thorpe’s manicured nails on my arm. “Melanie, please,” she hissed. “That’s none of our business.”
The bell rang a few minutes later, and from the classroom, I imagined its rusty red vibrations floating out the brick outer wall of our ranch-style elementary.
Miss Thorpe’s motivation that day still mystifies me, decades later, especially since I’m a teacher: Toxic impulse? Inexperience? Or maybe she was just exhausted from her part-time job as a banquet hall hostess.
My own students and children are older — high school — but they still have trouble sometimes gauging which gossip or secrets can be revealed. Social media, of course, magnifies any of their missteps.
The vaporizer in my childhood bedroom purred softly that night, near my asthmatic sister’s bed. The sound used to relax me, but now something darker shadowed my mind. I had once stolen a Persian coin from Asal’s house. Grabbing it from her dresser, I noticed the unfamiliar flowing script, the ridges along its edge. Everyday currency or something rarer? I had no way to distinguish.
The coin never made it back to Asal’s bedroom — I flung it into her family’s shrubs out front as I left that day. Sometimes I still imagine the coin buried there, lost for good the next year after Asal’s family moved away to California. Shame clustered in sharp little beads along my lower ribs as I tried to sleep that night, a sensation that would become familiar to me, like the glint of plunder.