{m}aganda magazine | issue #30 - TRIAL

Every time I got detention I resolved never to get detention again. I lowered my voice, muted my steps, and cast down my eyes, thinking this was the way to look well behaved. I never told my parents about my visits to the detention room, determined to be the sweet, well-behaved girl they thought I was. One day, my Kindergarten teacher, Miss Cameroon, happened to walk into the detention room, and recognized me with my head face down on the desk.

“Monica, why are you here?” she asked. Then she turned to the teacher who was watching over us that day, and said, “This child is so well-behaved. Why is she here?”

“Well she’s here for a reason,” the teacher supervising us that day snapped from behind her desk.

A few months before I returned to the Philippines with my family, I met a girl who had been my classmate in the first grade. We were in the advanced readers group in first grade and although we talked to each other a lot, we never became regular playmates. All her playmates where white, while most of my playmates were Hispanic or Asian. Gillian had deep red hair, pale freckled skin, and green eyes, and I sometimes had the feeling that her outer prettiness represented a certain inner perfection I would never attain. We were waiting in a line in front of the library and for some reason I asked her how many times she had gotten detention.

“Me? Detention? I’ve never gotten detention,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

Her shock cut a wedge between us, as though her perfection and innocence were qualities I’d never recover.

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