completely ignores all your well thought out introspective musing on the nature of the history of espionage because I hella need to know: Tell me about the time someone stole your retainer in 4th grade.
Okay so I’m gonna publish this because frankly it’s a wild story and I wanna share it with the world
So I never really had more than one or two friends at a timefrom about kindergarten through ninth grade, and when I say that I mean I barelyeven interacted with other kids aside from, like, being bullied.
And in third grade, the one friend I had, Grace, was reallynasty and manipulative and basically when I did try to interact with orbefriend other kids she would try to sabotage it so I would be dependent onher, and she got me to be involved in all kinds of stuff I wasn’t comfortable with, likebreaking school rules and stealing petty objects from other kids. One time she got me to stand guard while she stuffedsnow in the backpack of a girl I’d tried to hang out with instead of her. Shealways set things up so I was complicit in them and would encourage me to feelguilty about it so she’d be the only one who understood and I would be evenmore dependent on her.
In fourth grade I met my current best friend Lucy and westarted growing closer and Grace tried to pull her usual shit and basically Ifinally grew a spine and told her to leave me alone and that I picked Lucy andI didn’t want to be friends with her anymore, and I avoided her at school.
But we were still in the same Girl Scout troop, and one daywe were at another Girl Scout’s house for a meeting and she had a Slip ‘nSlide. So we all put on our swimsuits. The host mom had cupcakes for us so Itook out my retainer and I put it in the pocket of my shorts and I put the pileof my clothes on a table with all the other girls’ clothes. And then I went togo play.
When we came back inside, my clothes (and therefore myretainer) were all gone and nothing else was touched. Me being prone to losingthings, people assumed I’d misplaced them. We looked but couldn’t find themanywhere logical.
The other moms came to pick us up, and I immediately told mymom that I was absolutely positive Grace had stolen my retainer. Grace deniedit, of course. Her mom denied it as well. My mom, while skeptical of my claim,said that it couldn’t hurt if we checked the other girls’ bags to make surethey hadn’t taken my stuff by accident. Nothing was found.
Time passed. My parents began thinking about shelling out topay for a new retainer. People asked me questions at school about if my parentswere mad at me for losing it, and I told everyone that I thought someone hadstolen it.
Of course, everyone thought this was a super paranoid idea…butI was right!
About a week after the Incident, Grace tearfully confessedto her mother that she had, indeed, taken my clothing and my retainer (she didn’tknow about the retainer) and had hidden it in a closet at the other Girl Scout’shouse. It was recovered, I was vindicated, I turned down Grace’s mom’s offer offorcing Grace to apologize to me publicly because I thought it would just makeher hate me more. And I decided that “too weird to be true” wasn’t a validconcept.
Side note: I know Grace probably sounds pretty horrible, andfrankly that period really did a number on me psychologically, but I haveforgiven her. I knew at the time and have discovered more recently that herhome situation was really terrible. We avoided each other for ages, but I stillknow her and she’s matured a lot and become a very decent person. In the lastcouple years of high school we stopped awkwardly avoiding each other andmatured into being friendly acquaintances, although we don’t have much incommon anymore.
