Beouf had just started wiping my cheeks when the door opened again. Mrs. Brollish came in. “I just heard,” she said. “How are we doing?” She definitely wasn’t talking to me.
“Just cleaning him up.” My old mentor didn’t take her eyes off me. “Done in a couple minutes.”
I saw Brollish sniff and make a face. Most of my leavings were still on the table. Good. At least it was making that old hag’s life a little less pleasant. “I’ll make sure to have the custodians clean this place as soon as you’re done.”
“Yes ma’am,” Beouf dragged yet another wipe over me. “Thank you.”
Brollish looked down at me. “Clark,” she said. “Mr. Gibson.” She at least had the decency to talk to me like an adult one last time. “Due to the evidence I see here before me and witness testimony from multiple members of our staff as well as a parent, I am invoking the maturity clause in your contract.” She turned toward the door and walked out.
I shuddered, and not just because that was the exact moment when Beouf chose to scrub between my cheeks. Bitch didn’t even wait for me to have all the shit off of me before she fired me. I might’ve cried, just then, but I was too shellshocked to react much more strongly.
Life wasn’t fair. What did I expect?
The nurse was coming in just as Brollish was leaving, wheeling in something heavy on a dolley. It was something like a big glass tube that was almost as big as a Tweener and framed with steel. Near the top end was a latch and a panel with different knobs. The inside of the glass had wired bulbs, like heat lamps at a fast food joint all up and down it. All told, it looked like something of a cross between a bug zapper, a tanning bed, and a cheap air conditioner. And it looked vaguely, hauntingly familiar.
“Still have it from last year,” the nurse said to no one in particular. “Lucky thing the high school hasn’t asked for it back.”
My voice came surging back. “NOOOOOOO!” I started thrashing, even as Mrs. Beouf had my ankles in her hand. “NOOOOOOO! NO! NO! NO! NO!
I was twisting and clawing at the wood, my teeth gnashing and my mouth foaming as I tried to shake loose. I bent my knees and I kicked out. I would kick Melony Beouf’s teeth in and get away. I would run naked through the streets all the way back home and ride buck naked all the way to Misty Brook if it meant staying out of THAT hell hole contraption.
What I got instead was another pair of Amazonian hands pinning me back down on my back.
“Was it something I said?” the nurse asked.
Neither of us answered her. Beouf finished wiping me down like I was a rowdy two-year-old, and I shouted with unfathomable rage? Beouf was hard to be angry at, deep down. Too much experiences, too much surprise, and shock. But I’d just been fired from a decade long career and this idiot was talking about me like I couldn’t understand basic speech.
The school nurse kept holding me down, while Beouf went and retrieved the shiny silver shower cap and goggles dangling from the tube. My screaming somehow found a way to intensify.
“Clark,” she said when I was finally out of breath. “Mrs. B. is going to put these on your head and over your eyes. You need to do your best to keep them on. Don’t struggle with them and don’t fidget. If you try and take them off, you could end up bald and with no eyebrows.” She shoved the cap over my hair, satisfied with her own explanation.
My beautiful red hair, flecked with bits of gray and white. Soon it would be the only hair I had left. “Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this to me?
“Because this will make it easier to keep you clean and take care of you.” Instead of answering my question, Beouf just sidestepped and purposefully misunderstood my question. I didn’t care much about the reasoning behind zapping every hair I’d gotten post puberty, saving that it made it easier to pretend that I’d ever gone through it.
Typical Amazon.