by C. L. Stone
I didn’t have much of a choice but to get up and leave without them, assuming they knew better than I did. Sure enough, no sooner had I closed the door behind me, then Dr. Green came around the corner. “Oh hello there,” he said with a light smile. “Fancy meeting you here.”
I nearly floated on my toes toward him and had to stop myself from appearing too eager or getting too close. I hadn’t seen him in a while.
“Hi,” I said. I wanted to say so much more, but I feared I’d give too much away at school. He wore light tan khaki pants and a green sweater on top of a white shirt and yellow tie. The green matched the warmth in his eyes and his hair seemed longer than usual, slightly curly, especially around the ears. I admired his happy, nonchalant smile.
“I’m heading to the front office,” he said, already positioning himself to walk beside me. “Do you happen to be heading that way?”
“Yup,” I said, unable to help the small smile. I joined him, the soles of my Keds squeaking as I walked. “Are you in trouble?”
“Probably,” he said with a grin. “Actually, I’ve been called in by...I think it’s HR. I don’t know what about.”
“Human resources?” I asked. “Is it a bad thing?”
“It could be anything,” he said. “Ms. Johnson, your English teacher, Kota said she was upset, and it looks like they talked to her, too. Maybe a pay cut. Or they might be going over schedules for next year. Like they want me to cover another class, or they’re going to offer me a full time job, or ask me to do a number of other things.” He shrugged, the sweater shifting on his lean shoulders. “Too bad I’ve got this other thing going on. I’m a little too busy to teach more classes. Did I mention I’m a doctor?”
I giggled. “No kidding?” I said. “I heard a rumor, but I wasn’t sure if that was true.”
“Girls are always impressed. They really like the thought of marrying a doctor. I thought you might like to know.”
I rolled my eyes but kept my grin. “Funny how I’ve yet to see you doctor anyone. I seem to recall a time when a doctor was needed, and I was the one doing the doctoring.” He’d done more, of course, I just wanted to pick on him a little. Teasing him was relieving a lot of the tension I was feeling about having to see Mr. Hendricks again.
Him walking me to the office also reaffirmed they would always be just outside listening, and would pop in if I needed them.
He scoffed, grinning the entire time. “That was one time, pookie, and I’ll have you know, I’ve done plenty of doctoring since that time. Usually on you.”
I tried to hide my smile. He drifted toward me as he walked and his arm brushed mine. I wished I could reach for his hand, but I restrained myself.
We turned the corner into the main hallway. Dr. Green put his hands in his pockets. I walked with my arms folded across my stomach. The closer we got to the front office, the more my nerves started to rattle. I told myself it wasn’t anything to be nervous about. I knew what to say, and for any surprising questions, I could get away with saying I didn’t know, or—as Kota said—telling him I could find out.
I had answers for where I was all week: I was out sick and even had a doctor’s note. If he asked about the look-alike that they’d been following, I was to simply look surprised and say, “What do you mean? I was home all week.”
Dr. Green and I fell into silence. I rehearsed the lines and took deep breaths, preparing myself so I could handle any yelling and threats. I shared quick looks with Dr. Green, but I didn’t feel much like giggling with him now. Time to be serious.
He opened the door for me and held it as I walked in. He waved to me quickly as he headed down the right hallway. The principal’s office was down the left, so I wouldn’t get a chance to swing by. Would he be going to his office before he went on to his meeting? Or was who he needed to talk to behind one of the other doors down that same hallway?
I sighed and went to the counter, holding onto my things this time, as I wasn’t sure if I should leave my book bag or take it with me. It depended on how paranoid Mr. Hendricks was, and if he didn’t want my bag, I hoped Dr. Green would come back for it. “Hi,” I said, checking in with the woman behind the front desk who was familiar. I’d been in here too often.
She looked up at me. “Sang Sorenson?” she asked, although she said Sang more like Song, like she wasn’t sure how to pronounce it.
I nodded.
“Third door on the right,” she said, picking up a pile of papers and straightening them with a smack on her desk.
Out of habit, I turned left but she stopped me.
“Ah, ah,” she said. “To your right, third door on the right.”
I wanted to check in with her again. Had I been mixed up with another student? I was sure this was wrong. I gulped, and turned right, tempted to go past the third door on the right, and on to the unmarked door down the hallway. Instead, I tightened my arms around my stomach and paused right outside the third door. Was Mr. Hendricks throwing me off by meeting me in another room? That could be it. Maybe it was a just a meeting room of some sort. I had no reason to be anxious, I told myself.
I hoped Mr. Blackbourne was paying attention. I checked down the hallway, and the unmarked door was closed. Dr. Green had probably gone into that office. I wished he had stayed a bit longer. I could use some reassurance.
I touched the phone in my bra with my fingertips, feeling the rough scratches on the cover from when I’d dropped it. I considered a quick message, but was sure they were listening and watching by now. Whatever was going to happen, I couldn’t use my phone.
I sucked down some air and held my breath, wishing for courage.
UPHEAVAL
There was a sign on the door: School Counselor. The sign was faded and it made me wonder if it really was the school counselor or if it was now used for another purpose. Like many areas of this school, signs didn’t mean much: an old janitorial closet could be a new teachers’ break room.
The door opened. A pudgy woman who was about my height, with fluffy curls around her head peered out at me through the thick lenses of her purple-framed glasses. “Sang Sorenson?” she asked, her lips tight and cracked around the corners. Her voice was steady, clear.
I nodded. My heart thumped hard in my chest. This was wrong; I was supposed to be meeting Mr. Hendricks. He was going to ask me where I’d been. He was going to ask me about the Academy.
I wasn’t prepared for whatever this was. I wanted to feign sick. I wanted to request to see Mr. Blackbourne.
The door opened further, revealing the rest of her. She wore dark slacks and a dark burgundy sweater, the collar making it appear that she had no neck at all, just shoulders and her head sitting on top. She was shaped like an apple, round in the chest and torso.
She motioned for me to enter the small, windowless office. The room was furnished with file cabinets in each corner, a desk in the middle and three ugly orange chairs sitting facing the desk. “Have a seat,” she said.
I went in, placing my book bag on one of the extra chairs before I sat on the middle one, folding my hands into my lap, lips pressed tightly together. Would Mr. Hendricks come in soon? I hoped Mr. Blackbourne was paying attention, as I had no idea what to expect. I planned to mostly not talk at all unless forced.
The woman sat back in her chair, an old wood and black leather one with some duct tape patched in the corner. Her age was hard to tell; she seemed old with cracked lips and squinty eyes behind her glasses and her outdated hairstyle, but her eyes burned with a sharpness of someone younger. She lifted a folder on her desk to read whatever was inside. “You’re new to this school?” she asked before scowling at me over the folder.
“I started the beginning of the school term,” I said, my voice monotone. I didn’t want her to think I was nervous, although I wasn’t sure how well I was hiding it.
A small brass nameplate sat on her desk: Ms. Wright, School Counselor.
I wondered why I was here. Was she with Mr. Hendricks? How come I hadn’t noti
ced her before?
Ms. Wright dropped the file folder onto the desk, and then folded her arms over her ample breasts, leaning forward to peruse the file some more. “I didn’t approve this schedule,” she said.
I hesitated, unsure of what to say or if she was even looking for an answer. She hadn’t asked me a direct question. She called me in to go over my schedule? “Another administrator approved it,” I said nervously. “I wanted to take some specific classes.”
“And you didn’t come to me? You don’t go above my head to get classes,” she said in a hostile voice. She shook her head, reaching for a red pen on her desk and making marks across the printed paper. “This breaks all the rules of scheduling for new students. You’re not allowed more than three college prep classes in a year. And how are you in Japanese? There’s a course requirement and you don’t have it.”
My heart raced, fear filling in every corner of my brain. “I got special permission.”
“He’s not your school counselor,” she said. She looked up, narrowing her eyes at me. “You may have gotten permission from Dr. Green to take his class, but that doesn’t give you the right to take it early. How was I not notified for this long about this? Every seat you take up means other students are not able to have a spot in those special classes. We don’t have enough to go around for everyone.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. But wasn’t it too late to move people in and out of classes? “I didn’t realize, and he might not have known it, either.” It was on the tip of my tongue to negotiate and say I wouldn’t take any special classes next year. Not that I knew what was going to happen next year, but…
“We’ll have to fix this,” she said. She lifted her eyes to the computer and then started typing into it, her eyes darting to the paper as she entered the information. “Sang... Sorenson...”
My heart raced, feeling positive this shouldn’t be happening. I pushed my hand to my chest, afraid to ask, “You’re...changing my schedule?”
“I’ll have to leave you in the English class, all the other ones are full.” She looked at her screen.
“I can’t keep what I’ve got now?” I asked, unable to stop myself. It was ludicrous. I’d be forced out of the classes I shared with the guys. “Isn’t it too late to change it?”
Ms. Wright snapped her head around, her eyes fired at me. “Are you kidding me? Did you hear what I just said? You can’t have this schedule at this point.”
She was changing it! My brain flew into a panic. It was hard enough scheduling now with the boys following me to escort me to class. But how would we work it if I was in different classes? What about all the work I’d missed in two months of school? “Are you going to move someone into my spots?” I asked. Once I’d started questioning her, the questions kept coming. I tried to sound polite about it, but inside, I was panicking. “Is someone waiting to take my place?”
“That’s not the point, Ms. Sorenson,” she said. She released her mouse and turned her plump body until she was facing me head on. The edge of her mouth twisted up. She’d been waiting for a fight, and she was armed. She pulled a piece of paper from my file and held it up for me. “I might have overlooked your schedule if you bothered to show up for classes.”
My lips stumbled to say I had a doctor’s excuse for this past week. My fingers itched to gather the slip I’d gotten from Dr. Green if anyone asked. “I…was sick…”
“You couldn’t have been sick twenty-five full days of school since we started,” she said. “Not to mention all the times you skipped out on your P. E. class, and in some cases skipped out of...” She glanced down at her file. “You missed third period, attended fourth, skipped fifth and went on to the next class after lunch.”
“There are times when Mr. Hendricks called me into his office,” I said. “And then all those fire alarms. Everyone missed classes that week. And then...”
She shook her head, and then while she was frowning, her eyes lit up in amusement. She seemed to like the drama. “While you might have technically been in school, you weren’t in class, which means you were absent. As it is, the law states you can only have ten unexcused absences for the year. The only reason you haven’t been called down before now is that someone has been going into the school system and marked you as there, but when I was double checking with the individual books from teachers, I found more absent marks. I did what I could to save you from getting turned into truancy officers for this. You’re already looking at summer school.”
My head snapped back, surprised. Why would she go back in and investigate my records? “They were excused absences. And...my grades...”
“Yeah, sure, you turn in your homework and get A’s. That doesn’t matter. The law says you have to be here for so many days, and you’re not. If this went unnoticed, who knows how many additional days of school you might miss. You still have to attend summer school to make up for the lost attendance.”
My mouth fell open. Was this normal for schools? What if a child was sick a lot? I remembered in grade school getting chicken pox and I was out for a week. Teachers asked what happened, I explained, and they said it was fine. There was never a problem before when I’d been off sick.
It was hard for me to believe I’d been absent for so many days. Then again, between missed classes, and the times I was out for a week, perhaps it was adding up.
I swallowed hard, afraid to say anything more and knowing defending myself wouldn’t matter. My silence and lack of a reasonable defense seemed to fuel her irritation. What could I say? Most of why I was out had to do with the Academy, and how could I begin to defend that?
Where was Mr. Blackbourne? Was he going to stand by while this happened?
“I don’t know how you did things back in Yankee-ville,” she said, her disdain clear. “Whatever they taught you up there is not how we do things around here. You don’t get to waltz down here like you’re in charge and do whatever you want and enroll for whatever you want, going around me to do it. I’ve talked to your mother, and she sounded very surprised to hear you were skipping classes. She said she wasn’t informed. She even suggested your notes had to have been forged somehow.”
The stab at where I came from was forgotten the moment she mentioned who I could only assume was my stepmother. “You called her?” I asked, my hands in fists under my folded arms. My eyes watered and my throat thickened in emotion.
This woman didn’t know me at all, but she was lashing out at me for things she didn’t understand. She probably was following the rules, but did she have to be so mean about it?
And she was bringing my step mother into this...how?
“Of course I did,” she said quickly, rolling her eyes. “I had to tell her I was calling you into the office to discuss your truancy, and to warn her that you were going to summer school, not to mention all the in-school suspensions you’ll be required to complete for all those absences.”
I strained to keep still, to not surrender to the bullets she was firing at me. Suspension, too? Why? There was something suspicious about her speaking to my stepmother, though. I couldn’t let it go. “What did she say?” I asked.
“She was surprised and said she had no idea where you were during all of your absences,” she said. “If she wasn’t aware of you being sick, as was the excuse on a few of them, then what else could I think? Maybe you forged them. I had to mark most of those absences as unexcused.”
I stiffened, but then suddenly couldn’t stop myself. “The excuses weren’t signed by her, but by a doctor. And you managed to reach my mother who has cancer and is in the hospital undergoing treatment?” That was the part I couldn’t believe. The boys had my mother at the hospital where Dr. Green works so they could monitor her. Wouldn’t they have told me if someone from the school had called for her and what was said?
Not to mention, my excuses were often signed by Dr. Green, or Mr. Blackbourne, never my mother, so forging her name shouldn’t have come up at all.
Was she lying? She seemed pretty co
nfident.
Ms. Wright snapped her head back and glared at me. “You will not talk back to me, young lady,” she said instead of answering the question. She leaned forward against the desk, the weight of her body making the wood in the old desk creak. “Twenty five absences is enough to give you a withdrawn from all classes you’re attending this year. You’ll have to take all of them over. Some you can make up in summer school since you’ll be there anyway.”
This wasn’t right. Where was Mr. Blackbourne? Was he listening? Was he just as shocked as I was? I had to trust if he wasn’t interrupting, there was a reason.
She sat back, looking again at my schedule on the computer screen. “You’ll keep the English class, but...” She scrolled through, from the odd angle that I was at, I couldn’t read much of what she was looking at, just the shapes of windows and the flicker of a mouse cursor moving around. “Pre-Algebra...”
“But I had algebra last year,” I said. “I had to take Geometry this year, and then the second Algebra I’ll take next year.” Should I work with her on this? I wondered. Could Mr. Blackbourne fix it after she made changes? Would she even notice as long as my attendance records showed I was in class? Maybe that’s why Mr. Blackbourne wasn’t coming in. He would simply change it later. Maybe I should just help her and move things along.
“You have to take some sort of math class, and you can’t be in college prep classes. You’re lucky you get to keep your English class.” She looked again. “Violin? Class of one? That’s ridiculous. Who approved that? I’ll need to move you anyway, as the only available Pre-Algebra is in that time slot.” She clicked some buttons. “US History instead of AP World History. We don’t have another science class open. I might have to put you into one of the health classes.”
I sat back in my chair, fighting a sigh. It wasn’t like what I said mattered, but I said it anyway. “I took Health last year,” I said quietly, more to point out I’d be repeating a class I already taken. Had she even looked at my records from last year?