Wayne's British Flag

I was just thinking about my sophomore year of high school when I had an art class with Mr. Lythe. We were supposed to have Mr. Witt for intro to drawing, but he had exchanged places with Lythe, and English teacher, for the year. So this poor Brit was stuck with all these schmuck kids from the Chicago suburbs, and I’m pretty sure he thought we were all retarded.
Lythe had foul breath, bad teeth, and wore the same coffee and soup-stained tan sweater every day. To compound the hilarity of this hygiene-deficient Englishman, on the last day of class he passed out ‘chewing gum’ for our enjoyment. To my knowledge he never chewed the stuff himself.
I sat with Zach Gorski, and Wayne Dubin sat behind us with this squirrelly kid whose name I can’t remember. He was generally just Dubin’s laugh track, and Zach and I were their affable enemies. Dubin was an anomaly – the first name ‘Wayne’ isn’t used much this far north of I-74, to say nothing of I-80. He also drove an Amigo truck, which had terrible commercials with a jingle that I used to sing to Wayne nearly daily. Despite his unfortunate name and car, he was a funny guy.
Lythe was always giving us assignments that reminded us that he was from England, and this day was no different.
‘Alright, I’d asked you yesterday to sketch something that reminds you of England, which is of course where I’m from,’ he announced in his funny priggish way. He came around to check our drawings. I’d hastily sketched a half-assed Big Ben from memory in the class before. He saw it and wrote ‘C-‘ on the sketchpad. Fair enough, I thought. Zach had made a wildly inaccurate pencil version of the Union Jack. Squirrelly kid had done something forgettable. Then Lythe came to Dubin.
‘Wayne, what is that supposed to be?’
‘That’s the British flag, Mr. Lythe,’ Wayne answered confidently. In the middle of his 8X16" or so sketchpad, one and a half inches tall by wide was a swastika. It wasn’t a well-rendered swastika, either – just a tiny penciled swastika in the middle of the page.
‘Wayne, that is not the British flag, I’m afraid you’re mistaken,’ Lythe said.
‘No, no, Mr. Lythe, I’m pretty sure that’s the British flag.’
‘Wayne, that’s the flag of Nazi Germany.’
‘No, no, no, Mr. Lythe, that’s the British flag.’
‘Wayne, we fought them in the war, that’s a swastika!’ He was becoming flustered.
‘Are you sure, Mr. Lythe?’
‘Yes, Wayne.’ Mr. Lythe marked his page with a ‘C’, one half grade higher than mine.