The Write Stuff

The scene: I'm minding my own business, enjoying a bowl of cereal for dinner at 9:00 pm after a pretty lengthy work day. Steffi and Loren are in the hallway talking, followed by Steffi coming into the dining room and reaching across the table for a pencil.

"Fine, I'll erase it," she says. She grabs the pencil, returns to the hallway and starts erasing something from the wall.

I get up from the table, fully satisfied from my breakfast/dinner. "What's on the wall?" I ask in typical I'm-not-really-sure-what's-going-on-but-just-trying-to-be-helpful mode. "It's a heart," says Steffi. "Who drew a heart on the wall?" I asked, more out of curiosity than a aren't-we-past-the-writing-on-the-wall stage mindset. "I don't know," Steffi answered unconvincingly.

"Okay, I drew the heart. I wanted to see if a pencil could write on the wall," she admitted, as I noted in my internal voice only that "if I could write on the wall with pencil" would have been the grammatically correct way to explain it. Of course, if I truly wanted to correct her, I could have also gotten into a much larger discussion over why a wall was better suited for the task than say, a piece of lined paper, colored construction paper, or a notebook. But in the grand scheme of things, this was not a big deal.

"Stef, now you know, you can write on the wall with pencil," I replied.

"Well, I was really trying to get Jesse in trouble. See, I drew the heart just like she does," Stef continued. Apparently she would not hold up well under cross examination. I asked one question and the confessions just started pouring out.

"You don't have to get your sister in trouble, she can do that just fine all by herself," I said. I felt bad for Jess, but glad that Steffi didn't lie to us.