There I was, heart pounding, palms sweating, with a slight headache creeping up underneath my Orlando Magic hat. As I looked back on the events of that morning which led me to this moment of anxiety outside the principal’s office, I couldn’t help but think, “Why am I such a spazz?” I knew it wasn’t my fault, or was it? Was I a victim of circumstance or a guilty man of 8 years trying to justify his moment of insanity? More importantly, what was I going to tell the “big man” when he called me into his office?

I’d never been in this much trouble before, at least not at school. There was that time I climbed atop our vertically tilted couch during carpet cleaning day and swatted our dining room chandelier so hard it crashed to the table in a million pieces, but this was different. Public property had been damaged and I was the main suspect. As Mr. Perry, the towering red haired giant with a mustache for the ages motioned silently for me to enter his chambers, I quickly considered if I was I willing to point the finger and risk my social status to become “a tattle-tale” or bravely take my licks. Ultimately I fell somewhere in between.

“Now tell me, how did the bathroom mirror get broken?”, said the Principal. “Well, there were a bunch of girls chasing boys around the playground and I had to go to the bathroom.” Setting the scene bought me some time. “And when I was about to leave, the door swung open and Sharif ran in to me.” Presenting my role as the innocent bystander was a safe move. “But when he ran into me, I bounced off the trash can and my leg accidentally kicked backwards into the mirror when I tried to stop myself.” It was simple physics, one force acting on another. “But I think one of the girls pushed Sharif through the door, he wasn’t trying to run into me”. It was nobody’s fault and I cleared my accomplice’s name, so there could be no wedgie or noogie related repercussions.

Mr. Perry stared at me with that look of disbelief that most educators have perfected from years of listening to terrible pre-teen liars, “And that’s how it happened?” I thought for a second, to scan my mind for any additional embellished detail that could erase the rapidly approaching red mark on my permanent record, “Yes, that’s what happened.” There, I had sealed my fate. The book was closed and I just had to see how hard it was going to be thrown at me. While the Principal mulled over the facts as he knew them and cross referenced them with my convenient tale of innocence, I relived the more accurate version of the incident in my mind.

The truth is that yes, girls were chasing the popular boys around the playground. I had hoped to become the prey to some pretty blond, but this was not to be. I noticed that the guys being chased were running to the bathroom as a safe spot away from their side-pony-tailed pursuers. I thought that if I was in that area I might be included in the fun. When the next guy came barreling through the door I jumped in his way to create what I thought was a great moment of physical comedy. But it wasn’t the force of the body impact that sent me flying, it was my own hyper-active theatricality. I launched myself backwards on purpose and kicked the full-length wall-mounted mirror as I came to a stop. It was then that I heard the sickening crack of reflective glass.

Within seconds of the incident, I heard the familiar taunts every child fears, "Oooooooo, I'm telllllliiiing!" I was completely helpless with nowhere to hide. There is nothing schoolchildren live for more than seeing other kids in trouble and taking the attention away from their booger picking or persistent lisp. Soon a "Yard Teacher" had arrived to inspect the damage and I was marched off the Principal's office, where I now awaited the verdict from the most powerful man in the universe. Had my story worked? 

"Well, all I can tell you is that you need to be more careful." Wait a minute. That was it? No phone call to my parents? No week of detention? No steam shooting out of his ears? It was actually kind of let down. Movies and TV really made these kinds of scenarios much more intense. As I walked out of the Principal’s office and back to my classroom that day, I realized that authority figures were not out to get me in trouble, as I had always assumed. Mr. Perry wasn’t looking to doom me to a school career as the “bad kid”, he just had to do his due diligence. I’ll always remember that experience as the day he really put the “pal” in principal.

It was also the day I began my super-villain career as “The Smasher”, breaking mirrors nationwide with no fear of reprisal, “Ah-ha, no one can stop me now, fools!” Oh, I mean, I realized how lucky I was to have walked out of that scenario unscathed and just tried a little harder not to “spazz-out” so much. Yeah, that’s it.

So tell me about your brushes with the Principal. Were you the troublemaker? Did you have your own personally engraved chair in his/her office? Let's hear it.