As Eva stepped out of the bathroom inside her fourth-grade classroom, Mrs. Rodriguez, her teacher, immediately asked her, “Eva, how much milk are you taking home?”

Eva winced as she reached the faucet to wash her hands. It took her a few seconds to reply, “Eight.”

Mrs. Rodriguez immediately started screaming at the top of her lungs, calling Eva a thief. “You will walk to the janitor’s office right now, young lady, and tell her you are a thief and that you are there to return the eight boxes of milk you were planning to steal.”

Eva felt her face turning red as all eyes were on her. She went to her desk after drying her hands with the ugly brown paper towels provided by the Laredo Independent School District and gathered her eight small cartons of the lunch milk provided by the district. Every day at lunchtime, Eva gathered the cartons of milk that her friends did not drink with their lunch. It was common knowledge amongst her school companions that she would collect the small cartons to take home to her family. The unopened milk cartons were thrown out every day as trash 

Eva, knowing the precarious situation in her home where her mom was trying to raise two babies, in addition to the rest of the other members of the family, figured since the beginning of the school year that it did not hurt anybody to take the milk home to her baby brothers. Not only did her mom and dad have seven other children to feed, clothe, and provide shelter for, but the oldest, Frank, was mentally challenged.

Her father was a used-car salesperson, and his check did not stretch enough to feed them all appropriately, or so he said. It was years later that Eva discovered that her dad was keeping the commission checks for himself. Their meals consisted mostly of beans, eggs, rice, tortillas, potatoes, and an occasional meal of ground meat tacos. For supper, it was mostly tortillas with butter and slices of cheap bologna fried in a pan with a little bit of lard. Sometimes, when their father collected food from the welfare pantry, they would enjoy spam and real cheese for a week or two.

When Eva knocked on the janitor’s door, the old lady, known only to her as “grandma,” opened the door and was surprised to see Eva trying to carry all those small cartons of milk. She explained to grandma that she was there to return the milk she had collected to take home, and grandma looked at her with disdain. She walked Eva to the nearest water fountain and asked her to open all the cartons of milk and pour them down the drain. When Eva finished, grandma asked her why she was taking the milk home, and Eva told her that it was for her baby brothers.

Grandma just shook her head and asked her to return to the classroom.

Eva walked back to her classroom, and when she opened the door, Mrs. Rodriguez exclaimed, “Oh, look, the thief is back.”

Eva bowed her head in embarrassment and sat down at her desk. She thought the shameful ordeal was over; however, at the end of the class period, Mrs. Rodriguez asked all the students in the classroom to bring back for homework an essay, half a page long, about why one should not steal. She then looked at Eva and told her, “In your case, you will write a two-page essay of why you shouldn’t steal.”