Once we were in my bedroom, I took a seat on my bed and the lady joined me. If she noticed the crinkle from the plastic mattress protector, she didn’t say a word about it.
“What happened to your cheek?”
I repeated verbatim the answer that mommy had made me rehearse.
“I was wrestling with my sister on her bed. We got too close to the edge and I fell off and hit my face on the floor.”
“I see,” the lady said, in a tone that suggested she was going to ask my sister to check if our stories matched.
She went through a series of rather boring questions. Asking about what I was learning in school. What I liked to do for fun, and so forth. I answered all the questions honestly, though I didn’t understand why she was asking them. It all seemed so unimportant.
“How often are you able to get to the toilet?” the lady asked casually, in the same tone she had used to question me about what my favorite types of food were.