A mother's love

Chapter 12

Brian felt imprisoned. He was bursting with things that he wanted to say to Brenda and do for her that he didn't have the confidence to say or do. In her presence he was overwhelmed by her and could do nothing but surrender himself to her. The imbalance between them remained. Brian had seen the genuine love that she had for him in her eyes when they'd been sitting in her car but he still had a long way to go before he could consider himself on equal footing with her, which is why he said nothing to her about the other students calling him welfare boy. He didn't respond to their insults, he received them all with unwavering equanimity, the years with his mother had taught him how to internalize pain. As the days went by and more students learned about welfare boy the teasing got worse until one day when he was walking down the hallway between classes he was subjected to a chorus of students saying welfare boy that quickly escalated into a chant. They all stood on the sides of the aisle and chanted welfare boy in unison as he walked down the middle, looking to get away from them as quickly as possible. Walking with his head bent toward the ground he couldn't see anything that was happening down the hallway in front of him, and was thus not aware of Brenda charging down the hallway from her classroom.

"STOP IT! ALL OF YOU, STOP IT!" She yelled at the chanting students, her voice resonant with anger and pain.

The students all stopped and turned around to their lockers and carried on with whatever it was they'd been doing before they'd started mocking Brian. Brian also stopped, and without so much as looking at each other they acknowledged the significance of her intervention. She had come to his rescue, at that moment they could not have been farther apart. During her class Brian didn't look up from his book once and after school he didn't go to her classroom; he went straight home after school without going to the library, where Brenda looked for him after waiting half an hour for him in her classroom.

He couldn't bear to face her, not after his inferiority to her had been revealed so starkly. He grew dubious about the nature of her love for him and began to suspect that the fact that she had never had a child of her own had more to do with the interest that she'd taken in him than any attraction to him she had. Despite his doubts, not talking to her for a full day proved to be too long for him. He walked to the convenience store that night with some coins and called her from the pay phone.

"I was hoping you'd call, I've been out of my mind with worry all day. How are you? Are you okay?"

Hearing her voice and the deep concern in it, everything that Brian had been holding in since they'd started calling him welfare boy at school came pouring out of him.

"Brian? Are you crying?"

The tears wouldn't stop falling; inside the tight confines of the phone booth, Brian was falling apart.

"I know where you are, don't go anywhere, I'm coming to get you."