Paste Warriors

By the time I was in the 4th grade, I had come to realize that grown-ups were not superhuman. Not only didn't they know everything, they couldn't see through walls or read minds. I was probably late to this realization, which reduced, just slightly, their intimidation of me. Each morning the teacher collected lunch money, gave us a reading assignment, then took the money and the attendance roll to the principal's office. That left us unsupervised for at least a quarter of an hour, plenty of time to get into mischief.

One spring morning while the teacher was away, Anthony Pace flicked a dollop of library paste at me. Anthony was only the second biggest kid in class, but easily the strongest. The biggest, Alan Davis, was all fat. Anthony was big-boned and strong. And big-hearted. Never a bully, he seemed to recognize his strength, and though he sometimes teased, he was never mean, and we were friends. He and his younger brother, Greg, lived about a mile down the road from my house.

I tried to get him back, but my dollop went wide and hit the girl in front of him, feisty Nancy Johnsey. She thought Anthony had done it, but instead of whining, "Quit it or I'll tell the teacher!" like most of the girls, Nancy committed the ultimate fourth-grade sin. She stood up, out of her seat, and whacked Anthony! The collective gasp could have been heard in the hallway. Anthony was so surprised at her daring move that she almost got his ear, but he ducked in time, and the slap bounced off his shoulder with a thump we could hear across the room.

Nancy sat back down, but I began to tease him. The embarrassment of being hit by a girl, together with my taunts made him mad and somehow, Nancy's standing up broke the taboo that had kept us all obediently seated every day since the school year began. He made for me with vengeance in his eye and a paste jar in his hand. Two or three other boys joined in the fun, and within seconds, the room was pandemonium. Nancy had paste in her hair, most of the boys and some of the girls were smeared.

The sound of the door opening was like the crack of doom. I stopped in the act of pasting the back of Anthony's head, and my ears pounded from the silence. I had never seen an angrier adult. As the teacher's eyes narrowed, the kids' eyes widened. We slunk to our desks like whipped dogs as she slowly made her way to her desk. She leaned on the desk and stared at us for a few month-long seconds. Then she slowly opened her desk drawer, took out a paddle and laid it like a sword on the desktop. We sank in our seats, trying to disappear as she caught our eye, one by one.

"Line up in the cloakroom door." She didn't ask who started it, and she certainly didn't have to ask who was involved. The ten or so paste-splattered warriors filed obediently to the front of the room, each trying to get behind someone else. Nobody wanted to be at the front of this line. The cloakroom was a walk-through closet at the front of the classroom, with a door at each end. The teacher went in through the door opposite the line. Charles, the smallest kid in class, had gotten pushed to the front, and he was already sniffling. I was third.

"Come in, Charles." The sound of the paddle on Charles seemed loud enough to break windows. She set up an assembly line, each one of us getting three stinging whacks in the privacy of the cloakroom, exiting sobbing at the other end, and going back to sit gingerly at our desks.

When it was all over, the teacher came out, put the paddle away and stood in front of her desk with her hands on her hips. She looked at us like a warden surveying her prisoners. "This will never happen again," she said quietly. And, boy, was she was right.

Gary Gentry 

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