It was just as I’d bent down with some paper towels to pick up the smushed mess that I heard Carter yell, “Oh, fucking hell. It went through the fabric. I’ve got shit between my toes.”
I didn’t want to risk breathing in a mouthful of shit air, so I didn’t laugh like I wanted to. Again, you only make mistakes like that once.
The sound of something hitting something else followed, and then the unmistakable sounds of someone puking came loudly down the hallway. It lasted for as long as it took for me to pick up, do the first wipe down of the floor, and then start on the next round—all the while dodging Clyde’s excited attempts to lick my face—for the toilet to flush and the shower to turn on.
Throughout it all, I wondered what karma Bond was going to get.
And all because of a whistling booger.
Life continued like that for a couple of months. I had a babysitter every day, but I went about life almost like a normal person. I had a couple of down days where I really wanted to reach out to my parents, mainly Dad’s birthday and then their anniversary, but I kept myself busy with the course I was doing and then starting up the class at the high school.
I’d had my cast taken off the day before I’d started, so I didn’t look like a dick trying to write with my left hand on the dry erase board in the room. The kids were great and seemed to be absorbed in the information I was giving them.
Well, they were like that after the first week. For that first week, I had to keep repeating what the goal of the class was.
I wasn’t there to psychoanalyze them. I wasn’t there to do anything other than help them understand what psychology was all about. There were techniques they could use if things felt too much, which I outlined briefly to begin with, and I also did what I set out to do—help them to separate what they felt was the reality of everything in life with social media from the actual realities of life.
I also had to continually answer a question that drove me nuts.
“Miss Hadid, so you do psychology, right?”
“No, I studied it at college. I’m not a psychologist or therapist.”
“Okay, okay,” one of the kids waved away that answer, not at all interested in what I was saying. “So, tell me what I’m thinking right now.”
It was like they’d initially been dubious of what I was doing for them and thought I was there to read their brains to tell their parents and the principal all of their secrets.
This was where the definition of what psychology was had gone over their heads completely, and I went home after that first week and outlined a new approach. The next Monday, I’d gone in and jumped straight into the new plan, and bang, they dropped all of the walls, and out came kids who were like sponges.
I’d also learned a lot from them, and a lot of it was terrifying. A majority of them genuinely felt connections to the games they were playing and the videos they were watching, and it was shaping how they approached life. I’m not talking about shooting—although the possibility of it was something that ate away at me—I’m talking about how they spoke to their friends and the people they were gaming with online.
What was really right, and what was really wrong? They didn’t have the answer to it, it just depended on the day.
A lengthy discussion with the guy leading the course at the hospital, John Tafferty, proved vital, and having him as a mentor made more sense. I paid close attention to how he approached things when he came in and spoke to them about some of the issues that’d come up and the feedback he gave me after meeting with students.
One thing kept coming up that needed to be dealt with, and that was helping them understand that the words that they were using had power. It might sound simple, but it wasn’t. Why? Well, they figured that other people on the video they’d been watching when the word or term they were saying was used hadn’t reacted badly to them, so why would anyone else?
Something else became clear: the English language was always evolving, and the kids were using slang and new interpretations in everyday life. I was familiar with some of it, like ‘sick’ and ‘fat’ and ‘killer’, but when one of the kids had laughingly told another one to ‘go kill yourself’ I’d almost lost my breakfast, even though they swore it meant ‘shut up’. That’s when John came in and outlined the effect of seemingly innocent words on someone in a way they’d remember.
“You don’t know where your friend’s mind is at when you say something as serious as ‘go kill yourself’, do you? They could be struggling with a lot and even be considering doing just that. Sometimes there’s a new definition for a word that makes total sense, and you can just throw it around without a hard consequence coming from it, but it’s up to you to be sensible about it, too. Saying to someone ‘go kill yourself’ meaning that you want them to shut up isn’t sensible, it’s very dangerous.”
That lesson lit a fire under me and made me even more determined to achieve the qualifications I needed to be a school guidance counselor. I wanted to help pull kids back from the edge, help them when they felt like they couldn’t breathe, and give them the gentle push they needed to maybe even be the person who did it for someone else in the future. So, I was working my ass off at the school, doing a course, and doing a part-time degree at college, too.
And I was exhausted.
That’s why, when Garrett asked me to go for a walk with him and Clyde today—who’d just graduated from his new extended canine protection course—I jumped at the chance. We were near Christmas, it was cooler in Texas, there was a slight frost on the ground, and the whole place looked beautiful.
Just behind Piersville Police Department was a wooded area that led to a small lake if you walked far enough. When I say walked far enough, it was about two miles, and there was no way I was going that far.
We’d driven to park up in front of P.V.P.D . so we could walk around the building, with Clyde being hyper-vigilant beside me as he sniffed the air and looked around us. My boy had grown and reached about four inches below my hip when he was on all fours. When he was on his hind legs, excitedly giving kisses or begging for one of his favorite treats, he was almost the same height as me, but he was still my baby.
“How’s your arm feeling?” Garrett asked as we entered the trees.
I’d discovered that my newly healed arm was like a weather warning system for rain and the cold. Holy shit, did it ache.
Still, holding it out in front of me, I twisted it from side to side, like I was proving there was nothing wrong with it. “Not too bad.”
“Does it still smell like cheese?” he teased, making me blush.
Okay, I had a good reason for that. When I’d had the cast taken off a while back, one of the techs who I’d never liked had been the one wielding the small electric saw to cut through it. He’d dropped the fucking thing twice before he’d pressed it on the cast, so I was slightly out of my mind by the time it came off.
My anxiety also wasn’t helped by the fact that I’d made the mistake of looking up how many cuts and accidental amputations happened while casts were being removed, and the information I’d found had kept me up for two nights. Just to make it even better, the helpful internet people even had photos of it all right there for my viewing pleasure.