Bee

I’m reading Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season, and it’s bringing back so much from my own childhood bee seasons. At first, the early days: the random day you go to school and are told the class is holding a spelling bee to see who’ll participate in the school bee that afternoon. And just like that, you’re in. No preparation, no warnings. For the next five years you will spend every spring in chairs on stages, gripping sweaty pencils, Silly Putty, the hem of your new shirt.

But now I’ve started remembering the uglier parts. In junior high, in ritualistic preparation for a regional bee, I stuffed my new turquoise nylon purse full of makeup. My own, my mother’s – at least ten tubes of lipstick, several eyeshadow compacts, mascara, plus breath mints, twenty dollars, and several forms of ID. I took my mom’s favorite Clinique lipstick color, Guava Stain. I won the bee and returned to school in the afternoon, just in time for Mr. Blue’s 7th period science class. He congratulated me, had the class applaud, and I sat down for the last twenty minutes of class. We moved around, working in groups, and a few minutes before the end of class, I noticed my purse missing. I informed Mr. Blue, who announced that nobody would leave the room until the purse was returned. He was angry; it was hot in the room, stuck at the far end of the school with big, low windows, and he waited, glaring at us. He was usually so gentle and impassive, though we suspected he didn’t really read our work, a suspicion I tested once by writing something like ‘Pink elephants sprout wings and take flight over fields of daisies’ as the answer to a question on a test. He didn’t catch it. Still, I wish I hadn’t done it. I hate that I, like most kids, was so cruel.

But Mr. Blue was angry, and he held us there for as long as he could without making us miss the buses. The purse was never returned.

I don’t remember if I was even sure I had the purse when I went in to science class. But seventh graders steal things – I certainly did. And I was the perfect object of resentment that day, glowing from my victory and lucky enough to have missed most of the school day.

I don’t think I ever told my mom – I don’t know whether we had it out over the missing makeup. I stole a new purse, identical to the old one, from JC Penney’s a few weeks later. But shoplifting will be the subject of another entry.