In the 1997-98 school year, I was a junior and Jonathan was a senior at Raymond High School. Even though we were in different grades, we ended up in the same English class and sat next to each other. That was back before the old building had been torn down. The way the room was set up, most of the students were facing the chalkboard and were directly in front of the teacher’s desk, but there were a couple rows off to the side facing the middle of the room with the windows to their backs. Jonathan and I sat in the back corner of the sideways rows. Since we were in the corner and we faced the teacher, it was a little easier to get away with a bit of mischief. Jonathan wasn’t necessarily prone to mischief like I was, but there were a couple times where we stirred up some trouble. There was one time in particular that I will always remember. The teacher that year was new to Raymond, and she was quite new to teaching as well. She must have been only 23 or 24 years old, just a couple years out of university. At a few points during the beginning of the year, Jonathan had made it clear to me that he was interested in her. He wasn’t overly outgoing or arrogant about it. In fact, he seemed a bit shy about it like a little kid with a crush, which seemed odd because he was often quite outgoing. He must have been a bit intimidated because she was four or five years older than him. I’m quite certain that when he told me that he was interested in her, he had assumed that I would keep his confidence under any and all circumstances. That’s exactly what I had planned to do, but about halfway through the year I found an opportunity to expose his secret that was too good to pass up. One day, we began a week of poetry writing in class. The teacher that day had come to class dressed up a bit more than usual. I don’t remember exactly what she wore, but whatever it was, Jonathan had been talking about how cute she looked. She went to the front of the class and told us that she wanted us to write a short love poem. It didn’t have to rhyme and we could write it in any style we wanted. She just wanted to get an idea of our understanding of poetry by having us write a poem which she would later read to get an idea of our skill level. I knew that Jonathan would be too shy to actually write the poem that he wanted to, so I took the liberty to write on his behalf. He wasn’t aware how I was writing a long, detailed, elegant poem about his crush on the teacher. I put in almost every detail he had ever mentioned that he liked about her, and I took the liberty of embellishing a few things here and there. A few exaggerations couldn’t hurt. And of course, I wrote it in the first person and signed Jonathan’s name on the top. This way, the teacher would have no doubt as to Jonathan’s feelings. Just when the teacher told us to stop and asked us to hand in the papers, I looked at Jonathan, tapped him on the arm, and showed him the poem. Clearly he hadn’t expected anything like that to happen on that day, because his smile quickly went blank, his blank star turned to anger, and anger quickly into panic. When I tried to grab the poem back from his hands so I could turn it in, he ripped it back from my hands, crumpled it quickly into a ball, stood up, opened the window, and threw it out to the grass two stories below. All the commotion that he made by tearing the paper from my hands and throwing it out the window had gotten the attention of everyone in class, including the teacher. A look of absolute shock and amusement came over every student while the teacher’s face quickly became angry. She yelled at him and demanded an explanation for why he had taken my paper and thrown it out the window, but he refused to explain. After all, if he explained why he had done it, it would have exposed his secret. At this point, I was amused to the point of bursting, but I somehow managed to keep a semblance of a poker face. The teacher then looked at me and asked me to explain why he had thrown my paper. I looked at her, then over at Jonathan with his eyes both angry and pleading for silence at the same time, then back at the teacher, and said I had no idea why he had done it. I looked back at Jonathan who, at this point, was probably feeling something between nervousness and relief. I could tell he was angry, but he was clearly trying to retain his emotions for a better time. At that point, the teacher ordered him to go downstairs, retrieve my paper, and bring it back to her so she could grade it. At this point, his panic was renewed. I think that he had somehow believed that when he threw the paper outside, he was in the clear and there was no way that she could possibly ever see it. However, he didn’t take into account the fact that my paper was clearly in view on the lawn below the window and could easily be retrieved and turned in. As he walked out of the room, his face went blank again, and the expression on his face was that of a chess player or a mathematician trying to calmly calculate the solution to a difficult problem. He left the room as I was holding my side trying not to erupt into laughter, and he didn’t return for a couple minutes. When he walked back into the room, he had no paper in his hands. It was clear to me, to the teacher, and to the entire class that he had destroyed it on his way back into class. It had probably been ripped into a thousand little pieces, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had put little bits of the paper into separate garbage cans just to ensure that nobody would ever be able to dig out the shards and reassemble them. There he stood, in the front of the class, completely unable to explain how the paper had miraculously disappeared in the last minute since he had come back into the school. When the teacher realized she was defeated and that no amount of scolding would reproduce a paper that no longer existed, she told him to sit down and instructed me to complete the assignment as homework to be turned in as soon as possible. As Jonathan came back to his seat, he was completely silent. He didn’t look angry anymore. In fact, he looked absolutely satisfied by the way that he had diffused the situation and successfully prevented the teacher from ever seeing the poem. He knew that he was still being watched by everybody in the class, so he made a point not to look over at me yet. He waited patiently for a few minutes until the other students had become distracted again by their own work. At that point, he looked over at me, and politely told me that if I wrote that poem, or any poem resembling it whatsoever, and handed it in as the replacement, he would kindly snap my neck like a wishbone. He didn’t say it with a look of anger at all, because I’m sure he sensed that I had already had my fun and needed no further amusement from the situation. Not knowing that my poem would cause such a stir and completely satisfied by the fact that it had, I agreed to write a totally new poem that involved neither him nor the teacher. Even though he was annoyed by the situation at the time, a couple months later I reminded him of it again and we both had a good laugh. He held no grudges whatsoever, and took as the well engineered prank that it was. He had always vowed that he would get me back, but he got over it and never tried to prank me back. Actually, I suspect that the teacher may have caught on to the real reason why Jonathan had reacted the way he did. I think that on some level, Jonathan may have been happy about the event because it allowed the teacher to see that he had a crush on her without him ever having to say it and without either of them ever having to openly acknowledge it. Anyway, that is my clearest and most prominent memory of Jonathan. I’ll never forget it. ---Kurt Plakinger kurtp2@yahoo.com