Guilt That Never Disappears Completely (or Drawing Mustaches)

Again, this comes from deep-brain salvaging--memories unearthed after following a prompt.  It’s not perfect, but here’s what happened this time.  Written after reading Jack Gantos’s “The Follower” to a group of 7^th graders:

With the exception of the interactions among my brothers, I believe that for most of my childhood I was a follower.  I sneaked out of my house…only when I was a friend's house.  I vandalized tents and sidewalks and other types of property, but only when someone else was the ringleader.  One particularly weak me-as-follower incident came when I was eleven years old.  In church, some of the leaders decided they wanted to spotlight a different child each week.  A poster was placed in a prominent part of the hallway with a large photograph and some frivolous facts about the child:  a favorite color, favorite food, favorite scripture story, and two or three other trivial tidbits.  Each poster would remain hanging for a month and rotated out as additional children were “spotlighted.”

For some time, several of my male peers had been drawing mustaches on everything—cartoons, handouts, whatever.  When I expressed to them that I thought the idea of the spotlight was ridiculous, they dared me to draw a mustache on one.  When the first picture up happened to be G_____, a girl I sort of had a crush on, they razzed me even more—poking, prodding, daring me to draw facial hair on this dimpled, dirty-blonde who set my stomach silly.  I volunteered to deface one of the others, but for the guys, in order for me to accomplish the task, the mustache had to be hers.

A couple weeks passed.  I couldn’t do it.  I knew it was wrong—wrong to betray my twitterpated feelings for her; it would be defacing property…in the church, even!  What made it worse was that my mom was one of the women in charge of this hair-brained public display thingy, and there was no way I wanted to disappoint her.  For days my shoulder angel and shoulder devil had a full-on sumo match without a decisive winner.  However, in the end I wanted to win the approval of my peers, and right before the church building was locked up for the week, with a black licorice-scented marker, I drew a bushy, curly mustache nigh unto Rollie Fingers.  A little crooked, since I was trying to covertly complete the operation, it sat unnoticed for a week.

When we came back the following Sunday, the photo had been removed.  My buddies never saw the picture, but they assumed I had fulfilled my fraternal obligation when we all got chewed out by our leaders that afternoon—something about respecting property.  Afterward, without adult supervision, I hardly noticed the high fives and slaps on the back.  I simply swallowed guiltballs the size of grapefruits each time I looked over at the blank spot on the wall.  From then on I couldn’t even look G_____ in the eyes to muster the gumption to talk to her.  Oh, well, right?  To this day, I still don’t know if anyone found out exactly who did it, but when I think on it, I can feel the burning in my stomach that no amount of Rolaids or Tums could help.  Lesson learned.