In a case of life imitating art (and yes, this film is art),* Never Been Kissed* has been paid homage to by a 31-year-old woman who posed as a teenager at a Texan school. Only instead of it ending in her snogging her teacher under the baseball stadium lights, it ended in an arrest.
Charity Johnson had been attending classes at New Life Christian School from October last year until just last week. Charity was rumbled when her adoptive parents – um, did we mention that she'd also posed as an orphaned teenager and was taken in by a family? – started to believe she was using a fake identity. They told the police, who went into the school, investigated, and finally broke the news Charity had been lying.
'Teachers were crying and students were crying, and her best friend just couldn't believe it,' Tamica Lincoln, the woman who had been her guardian, told local television station KLTV. Charity, who went by the name Charity Stevens, even after police confronted her, had told Tamica a whole bunch of lies – including that her parents had passed away and her biological father had abused her. 'I sympathised with her, and invited her into my home. I took her in as a child, did her hair, got her clothes and shoes,' added Tamica.
She even helped Charity enrol in the school – which is the institution's excuse for failing to spot that Charity was a 31-year-old imposter. But that's the end of the line for Charity's deceptions, as she's in jail on charges of failing to identify/giving false, fictitious information, with bail set at $500 (£297.78).
According to The Times, no one but Charity knows why she lied, and Tamica is dumbfounded, saying, 'I just don't know why she did it. Why put yourself and others at risk to do something like this?'
Well, yeah, the mind does boggle. When you're 31, the idea of going back to school, with its intense social conformity and those dreaded exams, should be nothing more than that recurring nightmare you get when you're stressed.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.