Yahara Journal 2021

Robin Hood’s Bow: Forging a Weapon of Identity Lia Smith-Redmann Criminal. Deceptive. The ghost of an accident waiting to happen.

Precise, tactile, and taciturn, it’s like a ritual of the mute. Sacred. I follow the tip of my inky Paper Mate pen with my eyes, nose to the table as it swims across the paper next to the daunting words “Sign Here.” After an hour of unyielding focus with my pen, as precise as diamond cutting or searching for constellations in the night sky, my hand now knows this process. I end my mother’s signature with a flick of the tail and sit back to admire my artwork. I just signed an official document with an adult’s signature. At eight years old, I am now officially an adult.

I began forgery early, and I like to think that if I had charged for the services I provided back then, I would be rich now.

Forgery is logical, I realize, as I sit in my third-grade classroom between the columns of soap-smelling necks, clean ears, and pink faces of my peers, looking up at Mrs. Leroy. With 20 other signatures to worry about, she doesn’t care about the authenticity of my mother’s, does she? There’s no reason for me to haul bounties of forms and letters home just to lose them in the shuffle of paperwork on the kitchen counter; no reason to get a bus pass written for me when I can do it myself. Forging my parents’ signatures opens the gateway to an unapologetic secret to give me power.

I distribute “parent-written” bus passes like tickets. With them, students can go where they want after school, even a village 40 minutes away from home. A desperate third-grader comes to me and declares, “Hey, I need to get on Bus #5 to go to my friend’s house tonight. I need a parent note. Can you do that?” My memory parrots to me the formulaic format of a bus pass: “So-and-So has permission to take Bus 5 to So-and-So’s house tonight,” signed and dated. I ask them what their parent’s signature looks like, and oftentimes they scribble it out in a flurry of swirls like Sally Brown’s hair in Peanuts, 27