Classroom Guilt

I woke up to the familiar background noise of students roaming a hallway. I was on my way to class, but now found myself wondering around and completely lost. Holding onto my sister's hand and while looking around, I made the observation that we might be in the high school side of the building. The students were older and just chatting amongst themselves. I couldn't help but to notice the walls were an odd dark grey color, far too dark to be acceptable. Several students kept looking at us with strange stares, but we ignored them. I quickly realized that I was around my current age (20s), while my sister was much younger between 8-10. I made the assumption that I must have been taking her to class first, but somehow got lost. We made my way to the stairs just behind a group of students.

We finally found her classroom. It was the typical elementary school classroom. Chairs and table neatly organized in the sections. Artwork sprawled like Christmas lights. As she walked in, my sister made her way to the other side of the room and quickly found her seat. As I was about to leave, the teacher exclaimed, "Where are you going? You have to turn in your homework." I instinctively placed my backpack onto a table and started going through my things. My bag was pretty sparse, I only noticed a small black binder and several loose sheets of paper hugging onto the it. I grabbed the bundles of paper and pull it out gently. I realized they're stapled together and were only partially completed.



As the students began walking up to hand in the assignment. I quickly asked the girl besides me if I could get a few answers off of her before turning it in. She quickly replied, "Sure, just don't forget to turn it in." After she hands it to me, she started walking towards her seat at the back of the room. Suddenly my teacher demanded we quickly turn in our assignments. In a panic, I quickly erased our names at the top and switched them. I walked up and placed them on top of the other assignments on the teacher's desk, when suddenly he got up to grab the assignments. He takes a look at the two I handed in and for some reason began analyzing them. He began walking to where I had placed my backpack and slammed the assignments onto the table. He then called me and the girl I had copied from over to the table.



He starts asking her if this was her homework, and hands her the papers with her name on it. She went through it quickly and argued, " No, it's not! Where's my homework?" They looked over at me, and the teacher quickly hands her my paper. He then asks, " Is this yours?" With just a glance at the front of the page she nodded. Realizing I just got called out for cheating, I immediately interjected. I explained that it was my assignment all along and that she's lying. She replied, "If this was yours, can you answer some of this part?", pointing at the section I was missing from my own assignment. She said, "If you can read just one of these words, I'll believe you." I grabbed the paper calmly and tried to make out the words. But the words were blurred and just before she finished "I told you so", I realized some of the words were in Vietnamese. I pointed some out and confidently answered, "This means shrimp stir fry."

The teacher began walking back to his desk, and under his breath explained, "Sorry, it was just that the handwriting looked different" I felt a huge sigh of relief, but knew what I did was totally wrong. As I sat down at my table, I can feel my other classmates staring and the worse sense of guilt washes over me. I began asking myself, "What am I suppose to do once we get them back and her grade is lower because of me."








Crystal Tran