# i’ve never seen a water sprinkler in action
the most morally strained i’ve ever been was probably around the diabolic red fire alarms sprinkled around the grade school, where the ‘sound the alarm’ handle assumedly is pulled outwards and down but the sign just says ‘pull down’, and where my unseasoned brain managed to calculate there was about a credit card widths length between the ‘down’ position - at least, if it could go ‘down’ any farther, which i somehow imagined it could - and the current position, meaning only the slightest movement would bring out the deafeaning, wailing foghorn of the fire drill siren echoing across all the rubber skirted, grey carpeted halls, before all hell’s brimstone rained forth from an attending bureaucratic babysitter
sometimes it seemed like all you had to do was lightly brush up against it with your cotton t-shirt sleeve and you’d spend the next week in destitute suspension as the chief of elementary school police scornfully stared and timed all your multiplication tests and where failure meant being sent to military school for lifer cadets
really it's not too similar from looking down over a cliff and thinking "well... i COULD jump..." but at the same time getting that stomach dropping feeling. like there's nothing really stopping you, and you realize that; it's just those twitching nerves making you feel like a choked dog tugging at the end of it's leash. where's that come from?
the cheating i did on my multiplication homework, however, had no such internal condemnation and miasmic observance. the buck toothed fellow i copied from, and who lived down the street and liked to do wheelies, i cannot tell you whether he went to harvard or princeton, but i can tell you he was a pious boy who multiplied Good and Fast and in the last few minutes of class had no issue with me preserving his beautiful work like a faithful scribe preparing for the next day’s ritual offering
in contrast, actually getting in trouble never felt "wrong." i just felt embarrassed/social anxiety because i got caught and scared that something bad would happen as a result. meanwhile, the girl who caught me copying my multiplication answers looked like she just saw a ghost. a deer in headlights. being from a small town i'd like to think it was her first taste of adulthood, like something clicked in her mind and she was never the same
