Chapter Thirty-Three
Erin quickly glanced at the sign next to the door and verified that it read “SCHOOL NURSE.” The room certainly looked like a nurse’s office, with some basic medical supplies and a paper-covered examination table. What looked out of place was the nurse.
Instead of the middle-aged motherly figure she normally associated with the profession, she saw an impeccably tidy man, who looked young enough that he couldn’t have left school too long ago. She was mildly surprised, but after a moment of thought, she realized she felt bad for being surprised. Why shouldn’t the nurse be a man? Realizing she’d had the stereotype didn’t sit well with her; she’d thought she was above thinking people couldn’t do things because of their sex.
Luckily, he interrupted her guilty thoughts. “What seems to be the problem…” he said, pausing, apparently waiting for her name.
“Erin,” she offered. She handed him the note, blushing.
He unfolded it and read it. “It says here that you’re not feeling well, Erin. What’s not feeling righ… oh.” His gaze turned to the trash bag she was holding, which wasn’t entirely containing the odor of what it contained. “Did you have a little bit of an accident?”
Erin nodded. “I did.”
He nodded. “Well, I’ll get you all checked out. Go ahead and climb up on the table, okay?
He went to work, taking her temperature and several other measurements. She was honestly surprised he was spending that much time checking her out; although the few school nurses she’d had to deal with in the past were nice enough, they also seemed absolutely convinced that every kid that came to see them was doing so to get out of class until proven otherwise. It was probably a good assumption for many students, but it was a bit annoying to be assumed to be a liar when every time she’d gone to the nurse’s office was legitimate. This man, though, apparently hadn’t been in the profession long; he obviously hadn’t developed this jaded attitude yet, and that slight attitude difference made this visit to the nurse slightly better than it would have otherwise been.
“You don’t seem to be sick,” he eventually said. “Are you feeling okay now?”
She nodded again, but didn’t say anything.
“You look okay to me too, but you should probably take it easy. I could send you back to class, but there’s not very long left in the day, so you may as well stay here. Would you mind if I called your parents and asked if they wanted to pick you up today?”
“I live with my aunt and uncle, but you can call my aunt, she’s probably home now. But I don’t need a ride, my cousin and I walk home.”
“Well, we’ll call and see what she says,” said the nurse. He pointed to a plain wooden door. “If you do need the bathroom again, it’s right over there.”
He got the appropriate information from her and went next door to the main office. Soon enough, the final bell rang, and a few minutes later her aunt and cousin arrived at the office.
Erin climbed off of the exam table and Hailey immediately ran over to give her a hug. They held each other for several seconds as the two adults in the room watched for a moment before turning to each other to discuss what had happened.
The adults’ conversation was lost to the cousins, who finally broke off their embrace, although Hailey took Erin’s hand in her own. “I met my mom in the hall, we both got to the office at just about the same time, and she told me why we were meeting you in the nurse’s office.” She sniffed the air. “Do you still need to get cleaned up?”
“No, I’m clean.” She motioned to the trash bag still sitting on the floor. “My messy gym clothes are in there, and you’re smelling them through the bag.”
Hailey nodded. “How are you holding up?”
Erin allowed the faintest of smiles. “Better, now that you’re here.”
Hailey’s heart melted. In one fell swoop, Erin had managed to commit social suicide and give herself what she considered to be an extremely unpleasant feeling, and yet she was still willing to give out praise to Hailey. She’s got to be the most selfless person I know, Hailey thought.
The two of them remained silent until the adults were finished talking. Mrs. Summers finally approached Erin. “Don’t worry about it, okay? Let’s get you home, and maybe we can go do something special for you when your uncle gets back.”
“You don’t have to do anything for me,” Erin whispered.
“No, I don’t have to, but I want to,” Sue replied, in a tone suggesting that further argument would be futile.
By the time they left the office, most of the students were already gone from the building. They went back out to the visitors’ parking lot, where Sue took Erin’s smelly trash bag and deposited it in one of the outside trash cans. “Erin, I know you don’t like to waste things, but I don’t think these will be worth cleaning. We can always get you new clothes.”
“I don’t deserve new clothes,” Erin mumbled as she climbed into the back seat of the car with Hailey. “It’s my fault those ones are ruined.”
“Nonsense. I know you didn’t get these clothes dirty on purpose.”
“And she went at lunch too,” Hailey offered, “so it’s not like she tried to hold it too long either. Actually… Erin, what happened? Were you not able to go at lunch?”
Erin blushed. “No, I went a little, but I couldn’t get it all out then, no matter how much I tried. And I also tried between classes a few times, and then my body finally decided it was ready when we were out on the field for gym… and I couldn’t ask to go because the teacher was talking.”
Hailey nodded. “And you’re blaming yourself because you didn’t ask earlier?”
“Yeah. I wanted to… but I couldn’t do that. She was talking, and it would be horrible to interrupt her!”
“Erin,” Hailey said, “this wasn’t your fault. You need to stop being so angry at yourself for it.”
“But if it’s not my fault, whose fault is it?”
“Erin,” Hailey said calmly, “it isn’t anybody’s fault.”
Erin sat silently in thought for a moment as Hailey watched her. Even Sue kept stealing glances through the rear view mirror. Erin seemed calm enough, but if Hailey didn’t know better, she would have said that Erin almost looked hurt.
Hailey began to become worried, though, when the expression and silence didn’t go away after a little while. She patted Erin on the leg. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, I just… I was just thinking about how bad this afternoon was, and I really don’t want it to happen again.”
Hailey nodded. “Erin, I’m sure today was just a fluke. After all, how often do you hear of people our age having messy accidents at school? The chances of it happening to anyone else this year are next to nothing, and the chances of it happening to you again are even lower.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” replied Erin. “Why would it be less likely to happen to me? I think I’ve already proven that I’m capable of pooping my pants. Including today, I’ve done this three times since I moved in with you, and that was three months ago.”
“None of those times were your fault either. One of them we were stuck in traffic and one of them you were sick. And as you told me after you were sick, you could have gone on the toilet that time if you hadn’t been worried about throwing up on the floor.”
“But you and your dad were also in the car with me, and neither of you had accidents,” noted Erin.
“And that’s bad luck. I’m sure if I had to go as much as you did when we got stuck in traffic, I would have had messy pants too.”
“Yeah, but you seem to know better than me when it’s time to go to the bathroom. If you’d had to poop, you would have known before we left the park and gone then. I didn’t realize I had to go until we were in the car and it was too late to do anything about it.”
“Maybe, but you realized that you had to go today, right? You knew since at least lunch.”
“But I still…”
“You still didn’t make it, I know. But it sounds like you did everything you could, right?”
“I just…” Erin paused for a moment, apparently gathering her thoughts. “It frustrates me.”
“What, the accident?”
“Not really… more the fact that everyone else seems to have no problem avoiding accidents, whereas I try really hard to avoid them and still have them. I still wet the bed at my age; I’ve had accidents during the day a number of times too.”
“And it’s unfortunate that that happens to you, but at least you learn from them and take steps to manage them. You wet the bed, so you agreed to wear the diapers at night, and that’s certainly made your mornings better, hasn’t it?”
“I guess so…”
“And when you wet your pants in the movie theater, you also learned from it. You wore a diaper on our next few trips out, so if it did happen again, you’d be ready. And you also made sure to go to the bathroom as often as possible while we were at the amusement park, even though you were wearing the diaper, just to make the extra effort to keep it dry. And, as luck would have it, that’s the day you ended up with a mess, which while it was bad that you had an accident at all, it was probably better to be wearing the diaper when that happened than wearing underwear, right?”
Erin nodded. “But it still was horrible.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t. And I’m not saying today wasn’t bad for you either.”
“But I don’t think wearing diapers to school is an option,” said Erin. “I don’t know what I can learn from this one.”
“Erin, if you wanted to wear them to school, we wouldn’t mind, but I don’t think they would have really helped much; there’d pretty much be no way to avoid other people seeing your diapers when you were changing in gym class, and as soon as they smelled a mess or saw you going back to the locker room in the middle of class, it would be pretty obvious what you’d done.”
“I guess. I don’t really want to wear them to school anyway.”
Hailey patted her on the leg again. “But you did nothing wrong today. What happened still sucked, I’m not going to lie about that, but it wasn’t your fault. You did the best you could. And neither I nor my mom wants you to worry about the accident, or the clothes we threw away, or anything. Isn’t that right, mom?”
“That’s right, Erin. You know we all care for you, and some dirty clothes aren’t going to change that. I know what happened couldn’t have been fun for you, but we’ll get through this, and all of us will be here to give you whatever help you need.”
Erin smiled briefly, although it seemed forced; her body language still seemed to indicate that she was having a very bad day. “Thanks,” she said.
Erin’s mood hadn’t particularly improved by the end of the day. She’d certainly appreciated that her family had taken her out for dinner and a round of miniature golf in an attempt to cheer her up, and she’d made an effort to appear that she was having fun so they wouldn’t be offended. Heck, it actually was fun, but she’d just been too distracted to enjoy herself.
Her mind had been swirling with competing thoughts for most of the evening. Now that she’d gotten over the initial shock of what had happened, she’d been able to spend some time thinking rationally about it.
Hailey had been right. Erin knew that there was nothing she could have done to avoid the accident, but she still didn’t feel any better about it. If she’d done something wrong, she could at least learn from her mistake and avoid it next time. That she did nothing she could correct honestly scared her; it meant that if she were ever in the same situation in the future, she wouldn’t be able to prevent it then, either.
She was also worried about school. For the most part, she’d managed to avoid the attention of other students, which suited her just fine. She apparently didn’t stand out as a target for bullying. That was all going to change, though. She’d been fortunate enough to have the accident in her last class of the day; that had at least saved her from having to deal with the other students immediately. But the story of her misfortune was certain to spread rapidly, and she knew that most of her peers were mean. The only student whose opinion she cared about was Hailey, and Hailey obviously wasn’t going to tease her about it, which would help a bit. But she knew that the other students wouldn’t make her life easy any more, not after something like this.
She sighed, finished off her cup of water, and set the empty glass in the sink. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to fall asleep easily with all the things she was thinking about, but it was late enough that she needed to try.
“Goodnight, Erin,” her uncle called out to her as she passed him on her way to the stairs.
“Goodnight, Uncle Martin.”