Chapter 24 – Straight Outta Tampons

In some of my classes, I knew a girl named Katrina. She was a head shorter than even me with long, flowing blond hair and a beautifully frail, elfin body. She seemed nice all the times I shared a class with her. But I wondered about her in the years after high school. Her name. Did having that name bother her? Or was it not a big deal? As my own name grew in prominence, it was the sort of thing I thought about from time to time. But, right then, all I thought about was the security office ahead of me.

It was our school’s form of detention. The door was always open. If you went here, as far as I’d pieced together as a student up to that point, then you were probably up for writing long, pointless sentences and being assigned Saturday work cleaning up the campus.

I took my steps slowly, casually. I wasn’t here because I’d done something bad…sorta. At the same time, my heart raced and my limbs felt clammy. The less said of the kind of twitching my bladder was doing the better.

But, as I pressed on through the doorway, I kept all the good thoughts from my teacher and from Cody and from Rebecca and Ben. I even made up a few hypothetical ones. People I hadn’t even met yet who might be nice to me. It could happen.

At first glance, the security office looked a lot like any of the older classrooms. The chairs were set further apart than normal and there were different ‘stations’ with school security. I approached the one near the front. There sat a big guy, well over six feet tall. The veins on his neck looked like mountain ridges in miniature.

Stumbling, I braced myself against the desk and passed my paper to him. He accepted it carefully, looked it over for a long spell, then looked back at me and said, “He called about you just a minute ago. So…you’re not in trouble but he wants you to stay here for a bit. Drama?”

I raised my eyebrows and he leaned his head forward in expectation. It took a moment to realize what he meant. Blame the thundering in my chest over my head. I swallowed and answered, “Well…there’s this guy. And we were together before and his current girlfriend caught up with me…and then there was…an outburst in class and I got upset, especially at my teacher…”

He smiled and stopped me by raising his hands. “That’s drama. Now your teacher…Mister Chilton…didn’t elaborate much. But he said to keep you till after halfway through the period. And he said to keep you separated from others…I guess…So, is he sending up someone else later?”

I didn’t want to volunteer details. I just said, “I’m not sure. I just…I feel…really frazzled and freaked out and worried…and all that…”

He leaned back in his chair and gave a sigh as he asked me, “You got your textbook?” I nodded but mentioned that, “I got sent to the health office a few days ago, then had to get checked out…so I missed stuff in classes and I’m not sure where we are…”

He stayed patient with me and let me speak. They were all fibs and omissions to cover my fears. I knew he wouldn’t guess what my deal was, but every long look of his deep, brown eyes felt like he could see right through me. I stood my ground though. A couple other security officers came and went.

After looking over my paper, he sifted through some stuff on his table and declared, “Well… you can read quietly. Get your mind off things….”

I clenched the straps on my backpack and asked him, “Umm…this. All this…it won’t go on my permanent record or anything…will it?”

He rubbed his scruffy cheek and I was glad, with the respectful distance I gave him, that it had remained as scruffy as when I’d first walked in. With another smile, he told me, “I wouldn’t worry about it. I suppose you don’t get sent here much. Probably don’t even have a file. Just find a seat. Be glad it isn’t a busy time…”

I smiled back as a courtesy and found a seat a little way in the back next to some walkie-talkies and other equipment. I opened up my bag and spread out my textbook. I generally remembered where we’d been working before, but Chilton tended to skip all over the text on a whim. I hadn’t paid attention to what was on the board aside from the grammar stuff. There might’ve been some notes about upcoming work, but I couldn’t remember.

So, I just went to the contents and tried to find ways to occupy myself until another student entered. This one was accompanied by a security officer right behind him. He looked disgusted to be here. He had a swagger to him, stretching back and forth on his legs. They talked to him quietly but with stern words. His response amounted to, “But I didn’t...that’s not what happened….he’s just out for me. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t do anything.” They seemed unconvinced.

He slipped into a chair on the other side of the room and towards the back. We exchanged only a quick glance before he had some paperwork put in front of him which he got started on not doing as quickly as possible.

It was quiet. For a little while. Then he tried to chat with me.

“Yo…got a pen?” He didn’t really seem to need it. It was just an opening to talk. I flashed him a look, and he flashed me a coy smile. The guy up front cut in with, “You have everything you need. Get to work or I can add work.”

He retreated a little but kept his leaned-back swagger. I looked him over. Rigid, pale hair saturated with gel. His nose at an awkward, upward bend like he’d run into a wall as a kid and it had never gone back to normal. He had a distressed, drawn skull on his shirt which looked like it was some band or album cover I’d never heard of. His body shape reminded me a little of Wes. I swallowed and looked away.

A few others came and went but it was mostly me and that guy for the period. During a lull, he made another attempt to communicate as he said, “Hey…”

I looked up from my half-hearted reading and over at him. I’d tried to raise my interest in classical literature with the random hope that something might mystically connect with my situation. It didn’t.

He gave a quick smirk and a little snort followed by a nod of his head as he lightly said, with a thumb gesturing to himself, “Ryan. You?”

I sighed and offered up my name. He arched an eyebrow and shrugged as he pretended to write a little of what he’d been given to do. As we both sat there, I wondered.

It was the kind of wondering I shouldn’t have been doing. But I still did it. I thought about what Cody had said to me about people who might like or seek out…what was happening to me. He seemed to imply he was one of them. That was a weird notion, because I’d had more than one conversation with Cody to the effect that he liked being a guy.

I’d had an idle idea for a female character based on him. It was an odd, very random conversation. I never wrote it, but I shared the idea with Cody. He wrote the funniest, most screwball things. I wanted to do stuff like that. But, when my fingers met keyboard, I felt like all the jokes escaped me. Maybe if I used Cody, then that would help inspire me. I could even borrow things he usually said. But I wanted to do a female character.

I tried to think back on that conversation. Was he actually joking with me at the time and I’d missed it? Was he joking with me this time? I had a hard time telling and it gave me one of my still-repressed embarrassments when I misread the mood of one of his comments as funny when he was actually asking me for advice about his mom separating from his step-dad. I could be pretty dumb sometimes…

Ryan drummed on his desk and asked quietly, “In for?”

With a cloaking cough, I said, “Former boy…friend’s girlfriend stuff…”

I felt the pause between ‘boy’ and ‘friend’ and resisted an internal cringe. He leaned back in his seat with a nod and said some half-syllable which sounded like an “eagheh”. Basically, like someone suffocated a note of agreement crossed with a scoff.

And that seemed to be all I needed to say. I didn’t hope for some sort of Breakfast Club drama out of the two of us. In fact, that was the furthest from my desires.

I wanted a pattern of normalcy. I sit in class, I do things, and the world doesn’t seemingly blow up every time I’m there. Next class would’ve been a nice time for that pattern to return.

Math, my possible salvation. But if Aceves had talked with Chilton then surely he would’ve talked with my other teachers. After that, I had lunch and I could chat with Cody and others.

Gym, Biology, English 11, Trigonometry, Lunch, Spanish 3, and World History. The layout of my day and the minefield set before me. Gym and Biology had been figured out, but English had stopped my day in its tracks again. It felt like a worse version of the first week of class all over again but with even more stuff beyond my control.

Ryan gave a sputter of boredom. I was too worried to be bored but at least he was seated far enough away that I didn’t need to worry about him shouting that he’d suddenly sprouted a pair of breasts.

I wished I had different powers. Like…the power to remotely see and influence the classroom I wasn’t in for ‘proof’ that the weird stuff wasn’t due to me. At least make them think that they had the wrong person. Really though, control of this damned thing would’ve been best.

If I could just turn it on and off. Or, if it was a diet-dependent thing, then I could limit my intake of wheat. Or, if I had to expel it from time to time (like a gas), then maybe find people who enjoyed it, as Cody suggested.

So many thoughts and none of them left me feeling like I’d accomplished anything. Fortunately, it didn’t take long before Chilton came in. He spoke a little to the guy at the front, who seemed to give a whispered update that I’d done nothing and nothing had happened.

I sat up a little straighter as Chilton found the seat in front of me and sighed. He apologized and said, “I have someone watching the class for a few minutes, but I wanted to pass along the work for this unit.”

I made sure my homework was squared away and accepted. I tried to absorb all he wanted me to do. A lot of it was annoying bookwork which I could’ve done on my own at home in half the time, but it was forced into a group-work hole. Again and again with that. There would be a speech presentation from famous speeches and ‘rhetorical methods’. I just nodded.

At that age, I perfectly knew what he was talking about with clarity and cleverness. In a few years after that, I would realize the me back then didn’t know shit about rhetoric. Add on a few more years after that and that me would realize neither of those versions of me knew a damn thing. At this point, I’ve kinda given up knowing whether I will actually ever know anything.

Maybe even that will be wrong someday too.

Art by Alexis Rillera/Anirhapsodist