Why did you THINK your brother asked you to "hold it"?

Towards the end of my first year teaching, I was in the faculty room during my end-of-the-day planning period, as I often was. (Teaching in an interior room with no windows all day is enough to drive you stir crazy.) As I sat there, grading papers or whatnot, someone from the main office buzzed the room and requested that "a male teacher" report to the office immediately.

All eyes fell on me, as I was the only male teacher in the room. This could only mean one thing, really, if they were summoning people with gender as the only criteria. Someone was going to be searched.

I arrived in the office and was told that someone had stolen an iPod in an art class and one kid -- let's call him J -- was accused. He was willing to have his backpack and person searched by the female Assistant Principal to prove his innocence, but a male faculty member needed to be present. The AP first asked him if he was carrying any item that was against the school rules, giving him a chance to fess up before the search began. He said he was clean, and the AP began to go through his bag. She took out his books, his notebooks, pens, and pencils, along with a sizable Tupperware container I was told he brought in for some sort of food fest in his Spanish class earlier in the day. We searched all these items. So far, so good.

Next, the kid was told to empty out his pockets, which he did, beginning with his jacket. Nothing incriminating. Pants pockets. Nothing. It looked like he was going to walk, until the AP noticed that he was wearing cargo pants. After a quick admonishment (cargo pants are against the school dress code), she told him to empty out the large pocket going down the right leg of the pants. He removed a keychain with a stainless steel pill fob on it, which she handed to me and told me to open.

And I did.

I would like to state, just for the record and not out of any sense of superiority, that I have never done drugs of any kind. I'm not much of a drinker either. I just don't quite understand the allure of ingesting a substance that impairs your judgment and changes your behavior, and after this day, I'm pretty sure J wasn't as keen on it either. I opened the pill fob and was hit by the pungent, sickly-sweet aroma long before I looked into the container and saw a small, mostly-smoked, hand-rolled butt. Apparently kept there for freshness.

I looked at J, expecting to see panic, but he was totally expressionless as I handed the fob to the AP. She looked in, then started shouting at him -- not for having the drugs, not even for not confessing he had drugs, but for stinking up her office. And it was pretty ripe. If I hadn't eased my way out of there, I may well have found up with my first case of chemically-induced munchies.

Here's the thing. J began to swear vehemently that he didn't know the butt was in there, and honestly, I believed him. If he had known about it, he would have been scared when the fob was found, when I screwed it open, when I handed it to the AP... but he had no reaction until she actually showed him what was inside, at which point his face contorted into pure terror. But I also believe that he didn't know what was in there at that time, not because such things were never in his pill fob.

Ironically, he was totally innocent of stealing the iPod, an offense which -- while serious -- would have had a much more lenient sentence than the one-year term in an off-campus facility he wound up getting.

The moral of the story, kids? If you're going to hide your pot in your little brother's pill fob, make sure he doesn't get accused of theft that day, or you're going to be out... I dunno... ten, fifteen bucks? I've got no idea what those things cost.