Allison Rudolf

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,

then say, “But nicer,” or, “But longer,” or simply, “But better than that.”

It begins with an inspection in the way an appraiser studies a Monet. I stare at the signature, a looming reminder of them, whoever they are. I bring it closer to my eyes, playing trombone with the paper. Then I take my pen—no pencils allowed, for the permanency of a signature in ink cannot be redone with the help of an apologetic pink eraser—and trace the air above the signature, then replicate it once below, twice below, three times; then above and on all sides, filling the paper with mockeries of the penned identity. Then, I flip the paper over and do it again in columns down the page, each a better reflection of the last. I rotate the paper and fill in the white areas. Some signs are so poor I don’t even get to the end of “Andersen” or “Young” or “Jauregui,” and I jumpstart on the next. I practice day-of signatures for a few minutes, mastering the shape, the swing of the pen, and the speed of the draw, like a cowboy practicing his quickdraw with a new pistol. It doesn’t take me this many repetitions to pick up the choreography of a signature—it only takes about two. However, a signature habitually dances through the hand. The forgery should feel as comfortable as a step-ball-change.

I’d witnessed the carnage of a bad forgery, standing behind the kid who just handed the bus driver a fake note with bated breath, knowing it isn’t mine. Kindergarteners in the front two rows of seats peer over the leatherette to witness the prisoner exchange. Then, I see the tell-tale wrinkling of the brow and the gut-wrenching sneer on the driver’s face. The driver turns the note around and shows the student the certificate of their failure.

“Really?” the driver says. They guffaw, hand it back to them, and send them off the bus. The kid goes down the three steep steps back to the pavement—the true walk of shame—and the friend who was supposed to receive them is unable to do anything about it. They’re forced to sit down in solitude as far back on the bus as they can without getting pushed out by the older kids. Such a circus makes good forgeries a necessity. I can mimic the words of an adult, and I have the best penmanship in the entire class, employing the grace and maturity of cursive and calligraphy. Naturally, my forgeries get better.

In fourth grade, I begin to sign my teachers’ initials on my classmates’ planners, which they need in order to leave at the end of the day. I patch up their travel release forms in fifth grade, so they can go home from basketball practice with anyone they want. I sign the

forgetful student’s field trip form. Higher stakes ensue. By sixth grade, I have a group of boys surrounding me, saying they all need to go to another’s house.

These are big jobs. I need to be smart: five different kinds of paper, four different pen brands of at least two different colors, and one pencil—for variety—and preferably a sample of their parent’s handwriting. I’m picky about the paper. For example, popular moms always use Office Max seasonal-themed notecards or sticky notes. If I’m writing for one of their sons or daughters, I might use strawberry-pattern notes with tiny frogs across the top. I make sure to include variation in the message—in the format and alignment of the text and in the slant of the scrawl. It would be suspicious if five kids showed up on the same bus with notes written on the exact same paper clearly torn from the same sheet, written with the exact same ink, in the exact same penmanship. Most parents don’t have wideruled notebook paper or matching note cards sitting around on their kitchen counters.

If it’s a note written by a dad, I whip out a slanted, brisk, mutant chicken scratch, the kind that indicates this farming father has restless cows waiting for him. Or maybe he’s an inn owner, so all of the lines that make up the 5 in Bus #5 touch at the vertices instead of scattering like pieces of a broken wristwatch. If I know I’m writing for an artistic mom—a potter maybe, or a jeweler—swooping cursive, like the curls of a 1980s perm, will do. Other moms, the ones who get to read books and shuffle mail all day, are personified by demure, blocky typography. It’s a study in character. The bus driver will only look at this note for about eight seconds, but at that moment, I want them to see the patient dad working at ACE Hardware, or the bewildered mom running late for work at the Shoreline Restaurant, or the jolly grandmother in the middle of baking a pie for her church.

White-knuckled loneliness comes when I forge group bus passes, revealing the parties and homes I’m not invited to. I arrange rendezvous for friends that never want me to write a note for myself. Pride and thrill, rejection and invisibility: confliction wears on me as though I am justice standing under a perfectly balanced scale. On the one hand, I love having a skill other people need to hire. On the other, I know my invisibility is a shield, an advantage for my survival. Teachers would think it preposterous that I, a soft-spoken top student, do what I do.

Yet in middle school, my repertoire grows: hall passes, bathroom

passes, class passes—forgeries of teacher signatures. A student with too many tardy marks on their record needs a signature from the secretary to give them more time to get to class; a bully victim has a panic attack that morning and wants an out from math class to go to the art room; a girl on her period wants a signed excuse as to why she doesn’t show up for gym class. The hearts of Robin Hood, Zorro, and Green Arrow stir within me. Rare sample signatures, the threat of immediate punishment, complex cover stories: greater risk comes with teacher forgeries. I pore over the scale of justice, gauging the value of my reputation. For this reason, I select my clientele carefully. I won’t sign for classmates I don’t trust, such as Andrea, a born turncoat, or Eva, who I can’t trust not to lose her nerve when interrogated by a teacher.

In high school, driver’s licenses, carpooling, and mobile phones strip the thrill of the craft. At 14, I wonder if I’ve been thrown into the technological unemployment market. Robin Hood hangs up her bow. I take on more mundane tasks like signing annual family Christmas cards with all four of my family’s signatures as if my aunts care whether or not the belly of the s in Lucas is round enough. The junior prom committee pays me $200 to write names on place cards for dinner. Instead of forging my mother’s signature to go on a class trip to the Adventure Center, I use it to buy groceries with her credit card. Still, the power this skill gives me does not dissipate, for the power is not in the practice but in the identity that it forges: even a secret one.