I turned around and sped up to a light jog, toward the school entrance to get Bell.
My face was still light from the smile. Sawyer had a strong effect on me, but at least it was a good one. My jeans were chafing, so I adjusted them, noting that my parts felt a little swollen within my panties. Was I already turned on again, just thinking about him, or was that the lingering effect of this afternoon?
The smile crept back up as I remembered, and I had to hold my hand up over my mouth before everyone saw and knew I'd had insanely hot, toe-curling sex not an hour earlier.
I looked around at the other mothers. There were white moms and Asian moms and plenty of Indian moms, with their lustrous black hair and broods of kids. Many of these dark-haired women were pregnant with the next one. So many kids for one mother, but I knew they managed because they had their mothers and maybe their grandmothers at home, living in multi-family houses with several generations.
As I stared at one raven-haired lady with twins in a double stroller, an elderly woman with silver hair trailing behind her, I realized she and I weren't so different after all. I didn't live with my grandmother, but she had been helping out with Bell so much over the last few months—so much that now I could breathe. I had a new life, thanks to my family.
And to think, my mother told me they were dead. Why would she do that? They were such good people, undeserving of being shut out that way. I noticed the tension creeping up in my body as I felt the anger at my mother, so I shook my head and tried to think of better things.
Like Sawyer.
I pulled my phone out to see if he'd texted me. He hadn't, but I stood there and typed a quick message to him.
Me: Thank you for the nice day in the sun. I had a lot of fun. ;-D
I thought he would enjoy the smiley face.
He didn't text back, but that was a good thing, as he was probably on his bike. I got a tremor of fear in my belly, worrying he might feel his phone vibrate and try to answer while he was riding, and end up getting hurt. It was an awful, sick feeling, and I hated my imagination for being so good at picturing his crumpled body bleeding on the pavement.
“Hi.”
I looked up from my phone at a little face—Bell, with her blue eyes rimmed in red from tears.
Dropping to a squat to be eye-level, I said, “What's wrong? Were you crying?”
“No.” Her little lips puffed out stubbornly.
“Just in a bad mood? What made you sad?” I looked around for a sign, but nobody was looking our way, and I couldn't spot her friend Taylor.
She grabbed the zipper of my hoodie and zipped it up and down like a toy.
“Not talking?”
Her mouth moved from side to side, like the truth was trying to come out, but she was fighting it the way she fought sleep when she wanted to stay up late instead of going to bed.
I took her hand and started us toward home, hoping the rhythm of walking would draw her story from her.
Like her, I'd also been a sensitive little kid, but not to the extreme that she was sensitive. My mother hadn't put up with much of what she called my “fussing,” so I learned to keep quiet while she washed my hair with the shampoo that burned my scalp and stung my eyes. That was when I learned that everything ended—every moment was temporary, and pain was like the train passing by on the railroad tracks. If you waited long enough, soon you'd be back to looking at the trees.
We got all the way home, and Bell still hadn't said anything, despite my attempts to coax a few words from her. Feeling defeated, I let us in the front door of the building. If she wasn't going to talk to me, maybe it was about time she found that cold comfort within herself.
She turned and looked up at me, her big, blue eyes brighter and more blue from the recent tears. “Taylor is mean,” she said. There was a trace of something blue at the corner of her mouth. I hadn't sent her to school with candy, so I figured she must have gotten a sucker or gum from another kid.
“Your friend, Taylor?” I fought the urge to argue with her, to say that Taylor wasn't mean, that she was nice.
It was my and everyone else's instinct to argue with the truth—to insist that some person we didn't even know had to be nice, because how could we keep going in a world where even our friends were mean to us?
Bell looked longingly at the elevator doors, but came with me when I opened the door to the stairwell. I'd lied and told her it was my exercise to take the stairs, rather than tell her the elevator stunk of vomit and disinfectant and gave me claustrophobia.
Up the stairs we went, and out came the truth about her day. In her meandering way, she explained what happened. Her new friend Taylor had invited another little girl to play with them at lunch time, to draw on the sidewalk with chalk. The other girl didn't like Bell, though, and said she smelled like beans. She changed the rules for the hopscotch game when Bell tried to play, and then she'd pointed and laughed.
“She pointed?” I repeated, the image vivid in my mind.
“Like this.” Bell pointed her small finger at me, her eyes scrunched up with derision—an expression of hate I'd never seen on her sweet face.
I might have laughed if the heartbreak didn't make me feel like crying for her.
We got up to the apartment and she decided to have Quiet Time in her room.
I debated for a good hour whether or not to intervene. My mother wouldn't have done anything. She would have told me to slap the other girl on the face, to “slap the mean right off of her.”
Great parenting advice for a seven-year-old. Really.
I rolled my eyes and shook my head at my “colorful” mother. No wonder she was always angry and feeling like the other mothers were judging her. How could they not be?
Finally, I decided to phone Natalie. I was going to be the kind of parent who stuck her nose in.
Natalie sounded happy to hear from me. I explained what Bell had told me, and asked what she knew about this other girl, the mean one. Natalie then told me the other side of the story, which was quite a bit different from what Bell had said.
According to Natalie, who heard about the incident from Taylor, some other girls had been playing with the chalk, and Bell went over and dumped out half the chalk on the concrete and took the bucket away. That wouldn't have been so bad, but she took all the blue chalk with her, and wouldn't share. The other girls had the second-grade equivalent of an intervention, and tried to get some blue chalk. Bell then started putting the chalk in her mouth, chewing it and spitting it out at them.
As I talked on the phone, I lowered my voice. Inside her bedroom, Princess Land, Bell wasn't making a peep, and I could feel her listening to my side of the conversation.