The Power of Testimony

The Crime
new job as a principal. Things didn’t go well for me in elementary
school, with my Midwestern accent and outdated clothes. In contrast,
Marty was one of the cool kids. She and her best friend had
blonde hair that hung so straight it might as well have been ironed.
They spent their summers in vacation cottages, waterskiing. After
Christmas break they laughingly pushed aside those blonde curtains
to display midwinter sunburns in the shape of ski goggles. I tried
hard to be invisible—​ to them and to everyone else.
In seventh grade my class entered Eastern Christian Junior High,
where my father was the principal. I suppose I could have made this
work to my advantage, except that I was hopelessly unsophisticated.
During our eighth-​grade year, my father disciplined Marty’s best
friend for a minor infraction. Furious, the girl’s parents pulled her
from the school. The loss made Marty hate my father and, by proxy,
me. I might have sympathized with her if I’d known what was going
on, but my father never said a word about such things at home.
All I knew was that Marty bellowed “Ruuuth Mooose” at me during
recess, the taunt blowing across the school yard as the winter
wind wrapped my skirt around my legs. The nickname stuck. I was
already the new kid, the principal’s daughter, a goody-​goody. Now
I became a pariah.
In high school, Marty and I were both tracked as college bound
and placed in all the same classes. We spent hour after hour together:
algebra, history, English, Bible. But it was the easy class, typing, that
brought us to a truce. We were assigned to the same double desk,
each with our own manual typewriter.
The typewriters had silver handles that we struck at the end of
each line to return the carriage and begin a new line. The carriage
made a thwack as it slammed across the page, and a bell dinged. It
was obvious who was typing faster by the frequency of those dings,
so the two of us had breathless races. But if we typed in a spurt, out
of rhythm, the levers would sometimes cross paths and get hung up
on each other. Then we’d have to pry the little hammers apart with
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