It was just one more letter. Just one more. Until I was finished with my homework. Yet I could not finish it. I just couldn’t.

This was because I was using human willpower to stop myself, although it was actually not my willpower.

It was my teachers.

It just so happened you were not allowed to finish your homework in school. Aha! She had said finish. Besides, what I did was perfectly allowed and legal: I finished 99.9999999% of my homework. It wasn’t finished! There was one letter missing!

You see, the teacher had given us some time to finish. About thirty minutes. That was enough time for a worksheet. So I took it, and I finished it until there was one letter left from the word “space”. So that made “spac .” I even put the period there!

So I took that sheet home. The next morning just before the school bell rang (and the school bell “officially” rang), I wrote in the letter e.

“The E.” I said quite dramatically as loud as I could inside the hallway just moments before we went into class.

And I think I heard just someone in our class squeak, “The L.”