THE LIE

The second and third graders were at the blackboard working arithmetic problems. Jenny had hers all done and was waiting by the bookcase while Miss Lucy helped some of the others. She had a piece of chalk in her hand and absent mindedly wrote the name Dean and a large figure eight on the side of the bookcase. Dean was the name of a third grade boy. He was also her fourth cousin. She thought about erasing what she had written, but decided she would leave it there and maybe years later she would come back to visit the school and say to her children, “See that. I wrote that there when I was in the second grade.” The idea of wrongdoing hadn’t occurred to Jenny. Nor had the idea that someone else would even notice it in such a spot.

Jenny forgot about the writing until later in the morning when Miss Lucy asked, “Dean, what’s your name doing here on the bookcase?”

Dean looked up in surprise. “I didn’t write that,” he said.

“Will the person who wrote this please come up and erase it?” the teacher asked.

There was complete silence.

“Isn’t the person who wrote this man enough to admit it?” asked Miss Lucy.

Again there was complete silence. Jenny longed for some magic means to make herself disappear. She thought if she admitted it no one would understand and she would be punished. Margaret would tell Mother and Daddy and then she would feel very foolish and ashamed. She wondered if anyone suspected her.

Miss Lucy was talking to Dean. “Since it’s your name, I”ll have you erase it.

“All right,” he answered, “but I didn’t do it.”

This was the worst part. Someone else was being blamed for what she had done. Jenny now wished that she had told that she did it right away and had gotten it over with. Now that she had waited this long, she was even more afraid to tell.

At recess one of the fifth grade boys said to Jenny, “I think you wrote that. It’s where you were standing at the blackboard. Let me see you make a capital D.”

Jenny made a capitol D at the blackboard, trying to make it as different as possible from the
one she had made at the bookcase. Everyone decided Jenny wouldn’t have done this. She never misbehaved in school and besides, all the other children liked her and didn’t want to think she had written it. This didn’t make Jenny feel any better. She realized now that she shouldn’t have written on the bookcase, but it was even more terrible that she had lied about it. All morning and all during the afternoon, Jenny’s misery mounted. The deed and the lie grew to immense proportions. Finally she could stand it no longer. At the last recess Jenny came into the school house and took the teacher aside.

“I want to whisper something to you,” she said.

“What is it?” the teacher inquired and bent her head down.

“I was the one who wrote that on the bookcase, but I didn’t want the other kids to know.”

“That’s what I thought,” Miss Lucy said. She was happy to put it out of her mind.

Jenny’s burden of guilt was somewhat lessened now, and she went out to play. To everyone else in the school, the incident was a triviality, but to Jenny. it was both a millstone and a milestone.