All Good Children - Catherine Austen [40]
Werewolf raises his bushy brows. “Too bad for you.”
I start to sweat. I consider running for it, but the doorway is suddenly blocked by Mr. Graham in all his bald white enormity.
The principal shakes a paw with Werewolf and takes the floor. “You all know how it’s done. You’ll get two shots, one in each arm. They won’t interfere with your ability to do your homework while you’re here. Please be polite to our nurses.”
He peeks into the hallway and beckons Linda, the fat white woman from the middle school football game. She walks in wearing a pink polyester shirt the size and shape of a barbecue cover. A stainless-steel serving cart rolls in behind her. The top shelf is cluttered with tiny brown bottles, syringes, a heap of sterile needles, stacks of gauze, huge square bandages. One of the cart wheels sticks so it drags across the floor tiles, shhhh, shhh, shh.
I shudder as I look up at the black woman pushing the cart. It’s my mother. She stares at the floor like there’s no one here she knows.
“Hey, Max—,” Xavier says.
“No talking!” Mr. Graham snaps. “Let’s get this done quickly and quietly. If anyone speaks out of turn, Mr. Warton is instructed to put them on tomorrow’s detention list.” He smiles at Linda. “I’ll leave you to it. Make sure you submit the attendance records at the office. We wouldn’t want to shoot them twice.” He chuckles. Werewolf snorts. Linda smiles like a clown. Mom looks down at the tray, humble as a slave.
Werewolf walks the principal to the door, then closes it and leans against it like a security guard.
At the click of the latch, Mom lifts her head and stares at me. Hard. I have no idea what she’s trying to communicate. Run? Stay? Goodbye? I don’t know. Her mouth is tight with worry, her skin tugs on her cheekbones.
“All right, children,” Linda says. “Take off your jackets and roll up your sleeves, please. These will go in the upper arms, one on each side.” She smiles at Mom. “Can you do the right arms?”
Mom chooses a brown bottle and a syringe. She fits on a needle, rips off the security plastic, fills the syringe with god knows what. She holds it in the air the way my stylist holds scissors and looks down on the boy in the first seat—Michael or Martin something; he’s on the cross-country team with me and Xavier. He offers his arm, flexes his muscle, winks at my mom.
“You’re eager,” Linda says with a big smile. “What have you got there, Karenna? The inhibitor? I’ll do the Hep then.”
Mom nods without the slightest bit of feeling in her face. I wonder if she dosed herself in the hallway.
She sticks a thermometer in the kid’s ear and nods after she reads it.
“This won’t hurt much,” Linda yaps. “Needles are so thin these days. You should have seen them back in my mother’s time. Almost as thick as a pencil! Do you kids use pencils anymore?” She pinches the kid’s skin and rams in the needle. She does not have a delicate touch. No wonder she was fired from the old folks’ home. They’re so skinny there, she must have hit bone every time.
Mom places two gloved fingers on the boy’s gangly right arm and aims her needle between them. She leans into him a little and whispers something just before she sticks him.
I watch the syringe push the fluid into his muscle, and I know that he’s being zombified. I wonder who he was and who he’ll never be again.
Mom pulls the needle out and presses a tiny gauze square over the entry point. “Hold this in place, please.” She reaches for a large square bandage, removes the packaging, peels the backing, checks the gauze for blood and delicately positions the bandage on the kid’s arm.
“These patches we’re putting on have to stay in place for a week,” Linda announces. “They’re not Band-Aids. They’re part of your treatment, and if you pick at them, you’ll make yourself sick. Don’t worry, you can shower in them. Your parents will be sent more instructions over the next few days.”
I sit like a stone and watch my mother move down the row of students, shhhh,