This is a creative nonfiction or true story that I wrote at the time I was attending the Jean Dark writing workshop. It marks the first time I realised that a secret gives a story a special sort of power.
This story starts with a brilliant light coming from a prism, a big chunky diamondlike prism, held up high by my teacher, that bathed the classroom in the spectrum that separates from white light, one sunny day.
It was the teacher's prism from home. She thought we would like it and it would improve the classroom. She placed it on a display table laid with a long white cloth.
All the children of the class had a go with the heavy glass prism: holding it close to their eyes to see its insides, pressing it to their face to soak up some of its magic and some raced with it like it gave them super powers and some just marvelled at it from a distance.
So it was shocking the next day when the prism was gone!
The teacher did a double take of the display table. She couldn't work it out. She thought she knew us, but one of us had taken her treasured item. She said no one would get in trouble if her property was returned immediately. The next day the table was still empty. The teacher pleaded again, using stronger words like stolen. The prism was not returned. The next day the teacher used words like theft and phrases like a matter for the police. We were all frightened and wishing the prism would appear so we didn't have to be interrogated and possibly imprisoned aged eight. On day four of what was now becoming An Investigation, and right before the local Police Constable was informed, a ray of sun came through the classroom window and caused a rainbow of light to be seen on the floor beneath the display table. The prism had fallen behind the white cloth, maybe someone nudged the table on their way home and hadn't noticed. The teacher was puzzled, she thought she had checked the area, but more than anything she was relieved, as we all were.
Cut to several years later and now I'm at secondary school on prefect duty, a role of responsibility bestowed on older students which involves making sure the younger children aren't hanging around inside at break time, and I'm sharing the duty with a very thoughtful guy who I went to primary school with. In the silence of the corridor he says I took the prism and I knew exactly what he was referring to and how it was hilarious. What happened was: he was mesmerised by prism so much that he uncharacteristically sneaked it into his bag as he brushed past the display table at the end of the day. At home he kept it secretly in his room, admiring it, but each day that passed, as the stakes were raised, he became more and more anxious about what to do, until eventually he came up with the brilliant idea to fake it falling behind the table. Somehow he pulled this heist off perfectly. He wasn't proud of that though, he was still shaken and had kept that burning secret until it was safe to share.