Authorized Personnel Only: You must know the endings to Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men to read beyond this sentence.

As a teacher I am fairly patient with students’ misbehavior. A mentor of mine once suggested that we view students’ actions with detachment—they’re making choices, and our job is to apply the consequences of their choices, not to take offense.

Anyway, I mention my patience not to boast but to observe that few stories about my “losing it” with a student exist.

But few means there are some.

I can think of four in particular, and in those instances “losing it” meant I refused to discuss the situation and instead banished the student to the hallway until I was willing to face them.

One incident involved a pair of students who were openly mocking a classmate’s speech. One was a student who kept resisting my efforts to derail his misbehavior, so I tossed him out. And a pair of others—the only recurring theme—had shouted out the endings of books the class was reading.

My banishment of those last two was not a show. I was furious at both boys, at a complete loss for words but sure that when words did materialize, I’d regret them. Who thinks it’s okay to declare prematurely that George shoots Lennie? To shout out, “Piggy dies!” when his classmates don’t know that Simon is going to be murdered?

It is hard enough to keep an ending hidden when you’re approaching it privately. When reading A Tale of Two Cities I saw a VHS of the old film version at someone’s house and flipped the cassette case over to see the pictures on the back. The description of the film stated the end like it was a lead in a news story. So much for the climactic twist.

Then there is the difficulty of stories that permeate our culture. I just finished reading The Lord of the Rings to my children. While three kids were experiencing the story for the first time, the emotional high point was new for only one of them. Two of them had been robbed of that moment between Gollum and Frodo that caps the three-book quest—one by an over-eager speech instructor who cited the end in a discussion about climax, and one in a LARP get-together, where they apparently can’t just beat each other with PVC-pipe swords, they have to pillage books for ideas about how to do it.

In Exodus 22, two chapters after “Thou shalt not steal” makes the top-10 list of commandments, the penalty for theft of an animal that is recovered is a two-fold recompense. But these books’ endings are not living-recoveries. They have not only been stolen, they have been slaughtered. None of my students were taken aback by Piggy’s death, because they’d been looking for it from the moment their classmate prophesied its approach. And unlike the prophets of old, they believed this one with perfect trust, if not respect.

The penalty for theft and destruction of an animal—a four or five-fold retribution—feels better than the other but still insufficient. If you steal and destroy my ox, it strikes me as just when you give me five oxen to replace it. But how can you replace my ending?

You can’t. So, then, is stealing the correct description of the crime? It might not be. The boy who declared to his class that George was going to shoot Lennie was not stealing. He was assaulting his classmates, asserting his power over their experience of the world. This is closer to breaking the sixth commandment than the eighth, closer to murder than theft.

And the penalty for murder in Exodus is well known: death.

Am I suggesting we administer the death cocktail to the people who told my children about Gollum and Frodo? That I send my students to the principal not for detention but the electric chair?

Maybe not. But I think in my heart of hearts I understand why in Antarctica a Russian scientist stabbed a colleague after that colleague was “repeatedly spoiling the endings of the books” he was reading. In my world of poetic justice, this scientist was acting in self-defense.