American Bad Boy(21)

“Ms. Brickman, how nice to see you again. Too bad it’s never under different circumstances.” She looks over her wire-rimmed glasses and I stare down into my palms. How does she do that? I need to bring her to my house to give Chris that look when he’s acting up. I’d most certainly have a much different son.

“Mr. Vaughn is waiting for you in his office, you can go right in.” he continues.

“Thank you,” I mutter, my ears burning up and the skin on the back of my neck prickling as I watch my feet shuffle to the office door. Put my hair in twists and my feet in Mary Janes because somehow the last eighteen years of my life have disappeared. I’m a butterfly who lost her wings, crawling into the office.

The door is open and Mr. Vaughn doesn’t look up from the file folder he has under his nose when he waves me in. “Come in, come in. Sit down, sit down.” he repeats himself.

I sit across the desk from him and fold my hands in my lap, waiting for him to stop reading whatever the folder holds. It’s thick and tattered around the edges. Chris Brickman is written down the side tab. I swallow hard when I try to imagine how many offenses that folder must hold for it to be so thick.

“Ms. Brickman.” I jump in the worn office chair as the principal jolts me from my thoughts. “As you can see, your son has had another incident here that we need to discuss.” Mr. Vaughn carefully places the file folder on his desk and fans several sheets out across the top.

“What happened?” My mind races with possibilities. What have I already been in here for this year? Disrupting classes, fighting, skipping school, the list swirls through my mind as I wait for the next step in his delinquency to be reached.

“Christopher was found with explosives in the boy’s bathroom today, Ms. Brickman. I’m afraid that between our zero tolerance policy on weapons at school and the damages that he and his friends did in the restroom, he’s facing expulsion this time.” Mr. Vaughn squints his already beady eyes at me, waiting for me to close the gaping hole my dropped jaw has left in my face.

“Explosives? Are you sure? I mean, I know you’re sure, of course,” I raise my hands like I’m trying to clutch my words from the air before they reach his large, flat ears. “I have no idea where he’d get them, I mean. Did they make a pipe bomb? Or maltov cocktail? Or …” I wrack my brain.

“Cherry bombs.” Mr. Vaughn answers me matter-of-factly.

“Cherry bombs?” I parrot his words, but they don’t match the pictures in my head. “That was the explosives?”

“Yes, Ms. Brickman. Christopher and a couple other students decided to drop a handful of lit cherry bombs into a student toilet this morning and blew it up.”

“Blew it up? It exploded?” I try to imagine the scene. Are cherry bombs that powerful?

“Well, it blew the lid off the seat, yes. And it also made a terrible mess. There was water everywhere.” His face flushes a deep maroon as he relives the horror.

“Cherry bombs.” I sit up straighter in my chair, suddenly feeling my butterfly wings return once more as I transform back into the twenty-eight-year-old I am.

“Yes.” Mr. Vaughn nods severely.

“Those were the explosives? So, Chris and his friends threw cherry bombs in a toilet and it blew water all over the floor?” The visions I had of shrapnel and smoldering tile laying in broken piles of the boy’s washroom are replaced with the kind of innocent foolishness that boys do so often, even Bart Simpson has been immortalized doing it on the Cartoon Network.

“That’s correct,” the principal snaps at me. He points down to the many forms he fanned out in front of his folder. “As you can see, I have plenty of witness statements, including one from your son admitting that he was the one who brought the explosives to school today and that he participated in the destruction of school property.” He taps his finger like he’s trying to communicate in Morse code against the sheets.

“Ok, so, Chris and his friends pulled a prank with some cherry bombs and now he’s getting expelled? Isn’t that a bit much? I mean, boys do this kind of thing all the time don’t they?”

“No, Ms. Brickman, boys don’t. In fact, with only three months left of the school year there has been exactly one incident with explosives in the school …”

“With cherry bombs, you mean?”

“Yes, with explosives. And it was Chris who incited it. If you’d like to take a look at his record, Ms. Brickman, you’ll see that Chris is often the ringleader in such cases. As I said, there’s a zero tolerance policy with weapons at this school.”