General Fiction posted January 23, 2025 | Chapters: |
...26 27 -28- 29 ![]() |
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Beware the one who plays the victim
A chapter in the book A Fly on the Wall
On...Tattling
by Rachelle Allen
Background Vignettes, observations and assessments about everyday life. |
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Tattling - A 5-7-5
Mom, Suzy hit me!
Did you do anything first?
Bye, Mom; gotta go!
I was just having lunch this afternoon with my friend and mentor, Ann, who was the Master Teacher when I was the student teacher in a private school we loved.
Did you do anything first?
Bye, Mom; gotta go!
I was just having lunch this afternoon with my friend and mentor, Ann, who was the Master Teacher when I was the student teacher in a private school we loved.
Our class was comprised of Kindergarteners - eight boys and two girls - and oh! the life lessons I learned from them, compliments of Ann, who had everyone's number.
"Remember the incident with Teddy?" I asked her. Ann is ninety now, but her mind is still diamond-sharp. She gave me an omniscient smile and said, "That's the day you learned that those who tattle are often the ones responsible for having wreaked the havoc."
Indeed.
Teddy was a high-octane, super-verbal, very mischievous redhead (I know, I know; like there is any other kind?) One day, he raced back into the classroom after having just been in the bathroom with a couple of the other boys.
"Mrs. Blauvelt!" he shouted. "SOMEONE has been throwing wet paper towels onto the ceiling in the boys' bathroom, and now they're stuck up there!"
Ann dashed in to assess the damage and, sure enough, the ceiling was pocked with the equivalent of palm-sized spitwads.
Back in our room, as she was sharing with me what she'd seen, another boy, Zachary - smart, tender-hearted, very verbal but also a little mischievous - approached us and said, "Mrs. Blauvelt, Teddy was the 'someone' who threw those towels up to the ceiling."
"You saw him?" Ann asked.
He nodded.
"Zachary," she said with the No Nonsense Teacher Voice every educator masters early on in the career, "did you have anything to do with it, too?"
"Well," said Zachary quietly, lowering his eyes to the floor. "I did laugh."
My husband has a similar story about tattlers-as-catalysts when it comes to creating a dicey situation.
He was ten and enrolled at our town's summer day program, where one of the free-play activities was horseshoes. We're old, Bobby and I, so this was the era of REAL horseshoes - i.e., IRON! No wussy little plastic ones for the Boomer generation!
Several times in a row, Bobby would get into position to toss his horseshoe toward the stake at the other end of the pit, and an annoying camper named Danny Lanuti would deliberately run across Bobby's line of sight. Bobby would stop, mid-backswing, and Danny would laugh and laugh and laugh.
Finally, exasperated, Bobby said, "Danny, you do that one more time, and I'm going to finish my pitch anyway."
Bobby began his backswing, Danny ran across the area between the two stakes, Bobby pitched the horseshoe, and Danny got clunked in the head. He fell to the ground and immediately began screaming bloody - literally - murder. He kept pointing at Bobby and sobbing, "He hit me with his horseshoe! He hit me with his horseshoe!"
Well, certainly true. But like with Teddy, it wasn't the whole story. It was a version that had been cherry-picked to feature the tattler in his best possible light.
My brother experienced this when he was eight and our sister was five. They were co-presidents of the Mutual Adoration Society, those two - connected at the hip 24/7, with Linda as the boss.
One day, they shot through our front door, slammed it closed, threw their backs against it and stretched out their arms. Between little screamy-gasps, Linda said to our parents, who stood there gaping, "DON'T ANSWER THE DOOR NO MATTER WHO COMES...AND NO MATTER WHAT THEY TELL YOU, DON'T BELIEVE THEM!"
Within moments, two policemen were on our porch, rapping loudly. It turns out, my siblings had set off a fire alarm, which, in those days, were on five-foot posts at various intervals along the streets. Each post was topped with a glassed-in alarm that required a person to punch through the glass and then pull on the alarm handle.
"Larry did it!" shouted Linda.
He was tall for his age, but he wasn't tall enough to do that, the police and my parents knew at once.
"The neighbors said they saw her do it," one of the policemen said, pointing at Linda. "She was on his shoulders."
"He told me to!" said Linda.
But my parents knew better. Larry, the responsible, rule-following first-born, would never do such a thing. They knew, too, that if Linda had wanted to be lifted up for a closer look, her big brother would have obliged immediately. She ran the Larry-and-Linda Show.
Our parents looked at Larry. "What really happened?" they asked.
Almost inaudibly, he said, "She wanted to see it, and she promised she'd only look."
"He told me how to do it!" Linda shouted in protest.
"Because she asked," said Larry, near tears at the betrayal. "But she said she'd only look."
The police gave them both a severe talking-to, and Linda got sent to bed without dinner. Years later, we learned that Larry had sneaked food up to her from his own dinner. He hadn't been punished because our parents knew that it was the tattler who'd been responsible for what had occurred. She was just cagey enough to try to present it in a way that seemed as if she were blameless. Tattlers have their PhD in that, I've learned.
But, thankfully, I've also learned that most people are smart enough to see such situations for exactly what they are.
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