Fuschia???!!!

One day in fifth grade, after the morning Pledge of Allegiance, the teacher said there was another announcement. A girl stood before the class to say she had lost her new scarf. She went on to describe it in detail: a square, quite large, and the color was gold and fuschia. I remember feeling surprised, because she was a friend of mine, and I didn't know she had a new scarf, much less that she had lost it. I also was a little in awe that she had the nerve to voluntarily go to the front of the room to announce her loss. I'd lost one of my mittens a short time before, and I was too shy to tell anyone, and that was my only pair of mittens. But most of all, I felt guilty for not knowing what color fuschia was, and a little envious because she did. She later found the scarf, neatly folded, on the shelf of the cloakroom. (Purple, I would have called it.) In the back of my mind, I always harbored the thought that she had faked the loss so that she could display her knowledge of the word fuschia. But then again, I never believed that Anne Frank actually wrote her diary either.