Early in my teaching career I received from one of my fourth graders a porcelain piggy bank. It could have been a fifth grader since I often taught a 4/5 combo and much time has passed since I received this gift. The “piggy” wore a white coat embellished with brownish-maroon flowers, spikey dark-brown flowers, and green leaves. Some of the design is faint from handling and from age but one can still see the description in the photo. I named her Maybelline. Yes, after the brand of mascara I used at that time. I was a teacher so the cheaper brands suited my wallet just fine.

Elementary school kids sometimes believe that teachers have eyes all over their head. We see all, hear all, and know all, which is not true, of course. All a classroom teacher needs to do is listen, and observe, and even when a teacher isn’t purposely engaging in these two activities, students talk. They gossip. Loudly! They think the teacher isn’t listening or that they are really being secretive. I would know who liked who for a week because usually that’s the longest amount of time a crush would last in fourth and fifth grades. They were always amazed that I would know “things.” Mrs. Esquerra, teachers really do have eyes in the back of their heads, huh? How did you know about that?

With this in mind, I took Hayley’s present—the 4th grader who gave me Maybelline—and placed it on top of my gray file cabinet and made her “Keeper of the Diary” for our classroom. At night, when the custodian left the building and the glow of the security lights flared on, Maybelline came alive. She wrote in her diary all that had happened in the classroom that day. She even recorded the appearances of such creatures as “Cookie the Cockroach,” a huge roach that came out at night and held parties with other live critters that seemed to choose our classroom to invade. Stuffed animals and plastic figures came alive and joined in the nightly festivities, too. She wrote about suspicious people who stopped by at night to peer into the windows of the school, and the vandals who sometimes broke windows and tagged the building. She wrote about everything that happened in Room 13, as it was then numbered. She wrote about classroom parties: Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day. You name it, Maybelline wrote about it. On Fridays, I often shared some of her entries with the students; entries that did not embarrass them but made them laugh. They loved it, and many wondered who actually wrote the entries. I disguised my cursive.

So why am I writing about this? It’s a fond memory and a great story idea. When Maybelline was actively keeping the diary, it never crossed my mind to write a children’s story using her entries, entries which I still possess. Who knows, maybe one day I will share her journals? Wonderful events, factual and fantasy, that took place in a single classroom, at a school that some of the students swore was haunted. Was the school haunted? I don’t know. Maybelline was mute on that subject.