WHAT IS THE COST OF INTEGRITY?
As I sit here, my post of the third seat from the left, I remember how much of high school has been the same. Going somewhere as small as St. Mary’s, I’ve never had to wrest myself from Ms. Klein’s impassioned history lectures or Madame Rousseau’s bird-song in the form of French. However, you, Mr. Martelli, are most important among my unvaried set of teachers. It was your class that provided me with the answer that your whiteboard implores of me to know. As surely as your angry capitalized print reads like a litigator in the courtroom of my head, I will tell you that your class has implanted in me the only change from the girl I was freshman year. Because of your class, I have learned the exorbitant cost of integrity.
On a December day all too similar to this one, I sat in my aforementioned post, a stockinged foot rocking from heel to ball, just as it indubitably is now. Despite feeling reptilian glares boring into my neck and the side of my face, I continued filling the lines of my journal with thoughts on my favorite movies or other nonsense typical of the freshman journal prompts.
This rhythm remained uninterrupted until your wall phone chimed with its tired brr-brr, a sound that had been exhausted at some point after its installation in 1987. Mr. Martelli, you graciously did not glance at me as you lumbered to the phone. After pleasantries were exchanged with the school secretary, you could no longer prevent yourself from indicating that I, Vera Lane, had been requested in Mrs. Lawrence’s office.
Mr. Martelli, I wonder if you recall how I refused to glance back at those eyes that had stung holes along my skin. Instead, I embarked on my trek to Judgement Day— two, four, six, eight steps at a time.
I reached Mrs. Lawrence’s office after I had counted to thirty-eight. When my breath caught at my trachea, stifled by the sight of certificates and portraits, I knew that for the sole purpose of delaying this meeting, a larger number would have been preferable. Aside from artifacts evidencing a living woman, the office looked like an estate sale. Its furniture was of a grandmother’s chintz that failed to enliven the bitter surfaces. It was a too neat room that felt like it had already been drenched in formaldehyde.
Just as I felt deadly stiffness to be overtaking my limbs, in stepped Mrs. Lawrence. Her tweed pant suit complemented the office’s dreary atmosphere in its vibrant hue of beige. Her countenance was characterized by a lipstick smile that more closely resembled that of a character of Madame Tussaud’s than one belonging to a breathing being.
Reality was not received by my senses until her chirping voice ruined the illusion of a statue. “Vera,” she greeted. “It is important that we discuss some things before you return to Mr. Martelli’s.”
My outward reply was a nod. My inward one was a series of questions about how I was at all a guilty party, complicit in some nameless deed. I followed rules so ritualistically that I even flossed nightly. People who floss cannot be sent to the principal’s office.
“I appreciate the fact that you stepped forth with this information on your classmates’ cheating. It is important that people uphold the standards of this school.”
“But?” I challenged, impatience swelling with the beat of my heart.
“But it appears that your classmates find themselves belittled as a result of your arrogance about your success in this subject.”
“Maybe if they didn’t cheat, their abilities could at least parallel mine,” I retorted, attempting to tame the impudence in my voice.
“Miss Lane, surely you know that attitude is precisely why you are not in your class right now.”
Mrs. Lawrence was right. I, like everyone else in third period English, recognized that I had taken a nice morning stroll into the principal’s office so that my short remarks towards classmates may be discussed, as well as the allegations I had made against those very people about the dishonesty of their work.
Yet I still know, Mr. Martelli, that you of all people would understand that it felt incumbent upon me to defend both the esteem of all classrooms and the sense of my own actions. The pressure was such that I abandoned all semblances of politeness.
“So, it is my own fault that students cannot use the six or seven brain cells that they have? Honestly, if I say anything to them in class, I do so in hopes of helping them.”
Pushing her glasses farther up on her hooked nose, Mrs. Lawrence at least conducted a guise of pondering my words. “I believe that, Vera. However, it is critical that you maintain friendships with your classmates.”
Mrs. Lawrence may not have been privy to this fact as she spent her days in this morgue rather than the classrooms, but everyone knows that my position on that day was rooted in the fact that I was the best of friends with Sadie and Luxe. You, Mr. Martelli, know that they essentially betrayed me by dissimulating their roles as dissolute cheaters.
“In my own eyes, I was protecting my friends from becoming worse people. They were at the center of this nebula of cheating, and they weren’t just any friends. Sadie and Luxe were my very best friends.”
“Miss Lane, I think the past tense of ‘were,’ might be the key to why you are here,” Mrs. Lawrence considered aloud.
I studied the mauve shadow of lips on the principal’s white St. Mary’s coffee mug. The stirring of dread as a viscous goo seemed to cease.
“Mrs. Lawrence, what exactly are you suggesting that I do?” My voice hardly constituted a breath when those words were said. They were said with a hope that was curiously found in something other than aspiring to chop length from this meeting.
Mrs. Lawrence began by calling the classroom, a step that forced Mr. Martelli’s wall phone to steel itself for yet another sorry ring. In the interim between the implementation of this action and its consequence, she discussed her newly decided upon method.
“Vera, because I do care for you and your wellbeing, I will not require you to apologize to your whole class. I feel that would be an embarrassment to you. Instead, I’d like to have you begin a more intimate process of penitence,” proposed Mrs. Lawrence with a flash of brilliance in her grey eyes.
There soon was the clatter of a door opening. Two, four, six, eight— so sounded two sets of high heeled boots against linoleum floors. Luxe and Sadie then placed themselves in the low stools sandwiching my own, their long legs drawn nearly up to their chins. Though we often referred to ourselves as being sisters, there was only resentment in the glances we exchanged.
The office that had engendered such thick, overwhelming sensations of demise then seemed elevated, no longer a place of death but a home where friends may be. I had somehow mistaken the distinct aromas of coffee and carefully selected lilies for that of formaldehyde. A forgiveness was born with a pink skin of revived friendship, and it would not exist without Mrs. Lawrence’s methods for exacting discipline.
Mr. Martelli, though this was a narrative that was inserted where a simple sentence might have sufficed, I want you to know that I do have an answer that may placate the imaginary litigator that is your handwriting. Prideful “integrity” is initially paid for by experiencing abandonment. I was cleaved from Sadie and Luxe; I was submerged in a Bay of Pride, face-down as a modern Ophelia. This initial cost was followed by a rather salubrious payment of my pride. I had essentially been dragged from your class, but in doing this, Mrs. Lawrence tossed a rope for me into that Bay. I therefore say that the cost of true, unadulterated integrity is pride.
In my noble pursuit of unblemished honesty, I resembled the proverbial men of whom Jesus was so fond as teaching devices. I had reached complacently for the speck in my classmates’ eyes while ignoring the plank in my own. True integrity was when I was honest enough to realize my error, just as Sadie and Luxe reciprocated with their own awareness.
Mr. Martelli, you may have even forgotten that brief rift in my sisterhood with the two girls who sit in the second and fourth seats from the left, but that is only because forgiveness is so readily born out of integrity. This December day, I sit in the same seat with knowledge that I can resolve whatever conflicts I face as long as I am no longer seeking to isolate others. I still have classmates who could never pretend to care as much as I do, but I subdue my contempt for their apathy. I react to others with a goal to serve and love, or at least I hope that I do. I found a Hall of Beginnings on an earlier December day, and I chose to accept the call it sang for me.
I, Vera Lane, revitalized love and diminished pride by paying for integrity. I thought I was getting into trouble when I was summoned away from class, but that only began my ascent into what I feel to be good. Forgiveness was born through this series of events. Its place of birth? Mr. Martelli, I told you already that it happened in a principal’s office I thought to be an estate sale.
prguitarman
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
izzy806
romaincrisis
stormborns