Here I am again, trying my hand at blogging and getting a lovely nudge from MamaKat in her weekly Writer's Workshop series over at MamaKatsLosinIt Thanks, Kat!
When I saw that one of the prompts was to write about a fist fight, I smiled and laughed to myself.
I've been in one fist fight in my entire life. And, truth be told, I was victorious.
I was in the sixth grade, all geeked out in classes thicker than any Coke bottle could ever be. 'Good girl' and 'model student' were labels that I wore proudly like a uniform. But there was one boy, Larry, who for reasons that escape me now, would cause my nerves to frazzle in a million directions. This boy, who lived around the block, was an expert at pushing my buttons long before I knew what that term meant.
And so it was one afternoon on the school bus on the ride home, Larry was taunting me about something and I decided I had enough. He was standing in the center aisle of the bus, too close to me for comfort sitting in the back row. I took a swing at him and to my utter surprise, and sheer delight, I hit him square in the nose, knocked HIS glasses off and caused him to lose his balance and stumble backward onto the school bus floor. As all of this happened in a matter of seconds, I remember noticing at the time how the entire bus was cheering for me and giving me high fives for what I had just done.
The next morning, I sat in in the principal's office as he placed the call to my mother. "There's been an incident that is unacceptable," he told her. My mother ran through the names of each of my three brothers thinking surely it must be one of THEM that Mr. Hoffman had sitting before him.
He went on to explain that it in fact was her daughter, and she had knocked a boy to the ground and broke his glasses. Then under his breath, but loud enough for me to hear, he says to my mom "To be honest with you, he probably had it coming with him, but still...."
I don't recall the specific punishment at home, but I have no doubt there was one. And my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Kelly had me stay after school to smack the erasers clean (do they even do that anymore?) and to clean the blackboards and tidy the classroom. She saw that after-school cleaning session as the perfect time to talk to me about "what it means to be a lady," and how "fighting is not what little ladies do."
I wanted to tell her that the principal said Larry had it coming to him, but I kept that to myself as the erasers continued to smack against each other and chalk clouds puffed into the air.
To see what others had to say about this prompt or the others up for grabs this week, head on over to Mama's Losin' It
