My dear little Sophie. When I picked her up at school on Friday, she grabbed my hand and dragged me to a wall in her classroom, where the days of the week poster hangs. She pointed to the poster, apparently to show me where the staples attaching it to the bulletin board had started to pull away.
She seemed a little upset by the whole thing and I reassured her that it was easily fixed. I asked her if she had done it and she told me she hadn’t. OK, no big deal. She was evidently relieved to have shown me what was bothering her and we the left the school. She skipped all the way to the car.
All was seemingly forgotten until last night, when she started crying and whimpering “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.” When I asked her why, she mentioned the poster. And she started crying harder. I asked her if she knew what had happened to it. She started to cry harder and after first responding “no,” she confessed that she did it, but that it was an accident.
No more than 30 seconds after the confession, she realized what she had done and adamantly recanted, claiming that her friend was the guilty party. I told her I was a little confused, and she continued to cry and said that she was confused, too. All she wanted was for me to let one of the teachers know so it could be fixed and I promised that I would tell them when I dropped her off at school.
This morning, she was very eager to go – apparently determined to get the whole sordid mess off her chest. But this is Sophie we’re talking about. She had no intention of doing the talking herself, so when I saw one of her teachers I mentioned that Sophie had noticed the staples were loose. The teacher thanked us for letting her know and wondered aloud why Sophie didn’t tell her herself. But after 5 months with shy little Sophie (shy little Sophie with her teachers, that is), the teacher knew the answer to that question.
I don’t think the teacher suspected Sophie of any criminal wrongdoing. But as for me, the jury’s still out. As I said, the episode was weighing on her. She seemed a little guilty. But until I purchase a lie detector test for family use, I guess we’ll never know for sure.
