One of my favorite stories to tell (that actually happened) was the time when I was a college professor for about a year and one of my students saw me spank someone at a party. There’s a good reason for it, and I decided last week to start a fictional story with that real-life account. I’m not sure how far I’m going to go with the story, but I do know that I have to revise what I’ve already written because, instead of setting the first part in the present day, I want to set it fifteen years ago. That means changing some of the details I put in.

Here’s the first section of the story:

It was two weeks into the fall term when someone recognized me.

I was teaching English Composition 1 at a community college and, on that Thursday, I let my second-to-last class leave a little early because we’d had a presentation from the tutoring center. A group of four students asked if they could stay in the room for a little while, until their next class, and I said it would be fine. It was two young men and two young women, and while I sat at my desk in the front, working on my laptop, I saw one of the men shooting me suspicious glances.

Then he snapped. Not, like, went nuts or anything — he snapped his fingers. “Professor Montgomery! I just figured out where I remember you from!”

“Oh?”

“Yeah!” He broke out into a huge grin. “You were at that party! You spanked that girl!”

It took everything I had to force down a blush. I don’t embarrass easily, but I had not been expecting that.

The other three students stared at me for a long while, until I said: “I suppose I must have been.”

They all left shortly after that.

Just to make things clear, I was 23 when that happened, and the person I spanked was (I believe) 20 — though she may have been 19 or 21. She wasn’t drinking, though, and it’s rare that a 21-year-old throws a birthday party without some sort of drink in their hand.

Anyway, the first part of the story was fun to write, as was the second. I think I’m going to mix it with some things that happened in the Sare Ree story, including naming one of the main characters Sierra. I’ve been feeling like including that name in a story for a little while; might as well do it now.