What? No!

Do you have sudden flashbacks in which you remember times when you did stupid things and cringe? And those in which you said something that you shouldn’t have and feel guilty? What about those in which you remember something really funny and actually laugh out loud?

It happens often to me. In fact, there was a time when it was a normal and daily thing for me and I thought I’d share an incident in which I almost got into trouble because of it. Almost! Flashback in a flashback, ready?

So this was when I was in my fourth grade. As a kid, I would easily zone out. Like, during classes, I’d be in my own world. Until much later in my life, I thought that’s how it was with everyone. Sometimes, I’d zone out so bad that even if the entire class was laughing at a joke, I wouldn’t snap back to reality. Sometimes, my teacher would call out my name twice before I was back to Earth.

This time, it was the English period. Our teacher was really strict. I was scared of her because if she got angry, you would be punished and punishment wasn’t just embarrassment. She would either slap you, or pinch you in your stomach. So it was only natural for me to be scared of her, yet, I zoned out in her class. To make matters worse, she wasn’t in her best mood. She came to class and was yelling at a lot of kids for doing something wrong in the paper. She continued to yell for about twenty minutes, which in my head could have been two hours, who knows.

So while she yelled, in my head, I was at home playing some made-up game with my sister. My sister and I always made up a new game and played together and we enjoyed it a lot. I don’t remember ever being bored as a kid when I was with her. She often made me laugh too, like a lot. I don’t remember now but I definitely remembered something when I was sitting in class, only physically, and to my horror, I laughed out loud and then I snapped back to reality. After half a laugh, I had realised what I’d done.

When I was back to the real world, sitting on my bench in the classroom, in the second last seat, I realised EVERYONE was looking at me and they were looking at me with what I can define as a mixture of shock and confusion. It’s possible that a lot of them might have zoned out too and probably didn’t know if our teacher actually made a joke. But the teacher didn’t look happy, in fact, she looked angrier than ever and why wouldn’t she be?

If someone laughed at you while you were yelling at them, you wouldn’t be too happy either, would you? I did just that and I realised I was dead meat. My mind was racing, I didn’t know how to explain the situation. I didn’t know how I could escape the punishment, or if I could. That was when she asked,

“What’s so funny, Ket? Did I say something funny?”, her voice rose as she ended the sentence.

“He tickled me!”,  I blurted something without realising it while looking at no one in particular.

“WHAT? NO!”, four people surrounding me screamed in unison and then they got confused and the entire class started to laugh. Fortuanately, that seemed to make ma’am laugh too and she forgot all about punishing me… or maybe she didn’t. In any case, I’d never know. Nothing happened to me on that day.

I hope you enjoyed reading this! 🙂