Growing Pains

Chapter 31 - I just had no real interest in being alive

C A I T L Y N

We had been told all we had to do was watch the kids during recess. I could do that, but apparently, not this guy. This guy, whoever the fuck he was, had been playing with the kids for hours. He had played catch, then hide and seek, then green light, red light, then everything and anything the kids wanted him to. Right now, he was letting the girls braid his hair, sitting in a swing that was obviously too small for him, and trying to catch his breath. There were grass stains on the knees of his jeans, some more on his old white shoes, and blood on his elbow, where some old scabs had come off.

I had been sitting on the same bench for hours, watching all this through my sunglasses even though the sun was almost gone for the day, while resisting the very real urge to smoke a cigarette, maybe more. I had one more hour left before I could get the fuck out of here. That was exactly one hour too long. I couldn't resist it anymore. I got up and walked up to the guy getting the ugliest looking braids I had ever seen in my life.

"You look beautiful."

He looked up at me, cheeks red from all the running and jumping he had been doing, and smiled like an idiot, "Thank you."

"Sure." I shrugged. "I'm gonna go to the toilet."

"Okay," he said, right before, "I mean, yeah, of course, go ahead, it's fine. I think I can handle them on my own for a few minutes."

He had been doing that for hours, but I didn't tell him. I had, after all, watched a kid fall on his face just minutes ago and done absolutely nothing about it. He had looked up at me, ready to start crying, and I had crossed my arms over my chest and looked away. When I looked back, he was up on his feet again, ready to go back up the slide he had just fallen off of. So no, I wasn't really handling anything.

I left him to it. There was no one in the toilets. I took the last stall, the one with a small window on it, and closed the door behind me before climbing on top of the toilet seat. I took a cigarette from the pack I had forced into the pocket of my jacket this morning and lit it up. It took me only a few minutes to finish it. The window was too small to fit my whole head in it, but big enough that I could lean in and blow all the smoke out.

I threw the butt of the cigarette in the toilet and flushed it. When I opened the door, a girl with cornrows was looking at me. I hadn't heard her come in. I had no idea what she had seen.

"Snitches get stitches," I warned her, just in case.

She nodded, and said, "I know." Then she disappeared inside a stall.

I went back outside, back to my bench, back to waiting for all this to be over. The girl came out of the toilets a few minutes later and walked over to the slide, where she waited for her turn to go. When a kid cut in front of her, she let him. When another one did it too, she did the same thing. She didn't seem upset about it either, or if she was, she didn't let it show. When it was finally her turn, she sat very upright on top of the slide and pushed herself forward, smiling when gravity pulled her down, and stopping as soon as it was over.

I watched her do this a few more times. She kept letting kids cut her in line and she only smiled when she was going down the slide, but even then, she did it like it was something she shouldn't be doing, or that she didn't know if she was doing right. The other kids didn't talk to her, except to yell hurry when she was going up the stairs or get out when she took too long to get up from the slide after she reached the bottom.

I didn't think she was going to tell anyone she had seen me smoking. In fact, she didn't seem like she was going to tell anyone anything ever. I wanted her to. I wanted her to tell each and every one of those kids to fuck off. I kept watching, wanting for her to lose it and at least push one of them off the slide, but she didn't, and in any case, eventually, they all left. She was one of the last ones to get picked up.