Some Kind of Normal (13 page)

There was a brawl in the locker room. Logan and some
other kid. Technically, no punches were thrown and both students
were deemed to be at fault, so the coach chose to take the matter
in his own hands rather than send it up through the ranks to the
principal. Both students received detentions to be served cleaning
the equipment closet and washing uniforms after school, and both
were indefinitely suspended from the team.

I turn it over, but there's nothing else. There's no
date. I try to remember the last time I saw Logan play ball. Two
weeks before the hospital, maybe. Two weeks of deception.
How's the
practices?
I've asked.
Same ole, same ole,
he says back. He didn't
tell me he was flunking PE the first quarter when he kept
forgetting his gym clothes. He lied about forging my name to the
driver's ed permission form. And this morning he walked out of the
bathroom with a royal blue Mohawk.

Enough is enough
, I think.
This time, I'm gonna wring his neck.

I scrounge through the junk drawer to find the
coach's phone number, when the phone rings. It's the middle
school.

"Mrs. Babcock? We need you to come down to the
school."

Instantly, I forget about Logan. "Is Ashley okay?"
Suddenly my world is dropping out from under me.

"Not really. We need you to come right now."

I already have the keys in my hands, and I'm hunting
for my purse. "Did you call the hospital? Has the ambulance come?
Should I just go there?"

There is silence at the other end of the line for a
minute. "Ashley's fine, Mrs. Babcock."

I stop my flight out the door. "You just said she
wasn't."

"She's not sick or hurt, if that' s what you mean.
She's in trouble. We need you to come pick her up." And in case I
was wondering she adds, "The expulsion kind of trouble."

I'm so relieved Ashley ain't lying dead somewhere
that I'm in the car before the word expulsion registers. I've
feared this call but never expected it to come for Ashley. Logan's
a different matter, of course. He's clashed with school since
eighth grade when he created an explosion in chemistry class that
sent the entire school into evacuation mode. Then there was the
protest he began over the quality of cafeteria food, complete with
a sit-in that resulted in a school-wide ban on recess for a week.
Not to mention this year's adventures. If there was any form of
authority, Logan was there to rebel against it. Trouble always
follows him.

But never Ashley.

I'm between scared and mad by the time I march into
the office and demand an explanation. Ashley sees me from the
corner where she's been banished and lunges at me, throwing her
arms around me and bursting into tears.

The principal's door opens, and she motions for us to
go in. The secretary makes a point of not making eye contact with
us.

"What in the world is this about?"

She motions to a chair. "Have a seat."

"No, I will not have a seat, Laura. What is going
on?" Ashley's leaning on me still, shaking hard and digging her
nails into my arm. I pry them off and notice how sweaty they
are.

"Ashley's brought drug paraphernalia to school." She
lets this sink in and then deals what she thinks is the final blow.
"You know the school has a zero tolerance policy. That is automatic
expulsion."

This is so absurd I laugh.

"I assure you this is not funny, Mrs. Babcock."

"Jiminy, Laura, call me Babs. We've known each other
since grade school."

She opens the desk drawer and pulls out the insulin
pen, the needle still attached. "Did you know she had this in her
backpack?"

I am no longer laughing. "As a matter of fact, I put
it there." Suddenly, I know Ashley isn't shaking because she's
scared.

"Did you take the insulin?" I'm in her face, holding
her damp hair out of her eyes and gripping her head. She nods. "How
much? How much did you take and did you eat anything?"

She shook her head. "One and a half units, I think.
Then they made me leave the lunch room."

"Where is your lunch?" I'm now completely ignoring
Laura, who's telling me to calm down and sit. "Where's your lunch?
Is it in your back pack or still in the cafeteria?" As I'm asking,
I'm hunting through my purse, throwing items on the desk until I
finally just dump the entire contents searching for a tick tack, a
life-saver, something with sugar. "She needs food. Where is her
lunch?" I grab a can of Coke off the desk. I pop the top open and
hand it to Ashley. "Drink it." I don't have any idea how many carbs
are in the can, or how much she is drinking, but I'll worry about
that later.

"Is this a drug reaction?" Laura is suddenly backing
against the wall, eyes wide over Ashley's gulping of her drink.

"Yes. It's called insulin, and she needs it to live.
But she needs to eat when she takes it or she dies. Do you get
that? You'd let her sit here and die while you made your smug
little point about zero tolerance?"

I snatch the insulin pen off the desk and hold it
close to her face. "It's prescription. Does this look like it's
dangerous to you? Does this look like some illegal substance? It's
got a drug company logo on it. Do you people not read the notes I
send in? She's got diabetes. Why do you think she was gone all
week?"

Ashley is wide-eyed, but I can't stop. All this anger
at what is happening to our lives rushes out, and I can't stop. Is
this what her life is going to be now? Shots and tests and
accusations and near-death experiences?

And while I'm ranting more, the door opens and I feel
a hand on my shoulder. When I see it's Travis I burst into tears,
and he wraps his arms around me. Laura, smartly, leaves.

When she returns, the contents of my purse are not
spread around her desk anymore, and the can of coke is empty and in
the trashcan, and Travis has pulled up a chair between me and
Ashley. Laura looks at us coolly as she sits behind the safety of
her desk. "Do I need to call security or can we resolve this
now?"

Travis leans over, resting his hands on the desk. "Do
you have any idea. . ." His voice trails off with a tremble. I
expected him to smooth us out, but instead he stands and opens the
door, nodding for me and Ashley to leave.

"This isn't over," Laura says, raising her voice
enough to follow us into the hall. "Prescription or not, Ashley
brought drugs to school. And a needle. That's serious, and the
school board's going to be on my side."

Travis walks back to her, his face inches from hers,
and lowers his voice. "If you think for one second you, or your
school board, is going to keep us from keeping our daughter alive,
you are in for a long fight."

On the way out I watched him put his arm protectively
around Ashley, and a weight I didn't know I carried fell off my
shoulders.

~~~~

We call Dr. Benton, who's with a patient and whose
nurse tells us we need to get us something called a 504 and refers
us to a lawyer who will help us if we need it. I say we should wait
'til Dr. Benton calls back, especially since we got insurance to
cover the doctor but no lawyer insurance, but Travis calls anyway.
The lawyer seems overly eager to talk to us. I think he smells a
lawsuit, but by now I just want Ashley back in school.

She's gotten over the fear of being in trouble and
now is complaining about the way they hauled her out in front of
her friends and made a scene at the school. She's afraid she can
never show her blush-cheeked, lip-glossed face again.

This drama is new, so I test her blood, hoping it's
the diabetes, but I'm disappointed when the meter shows 132. I
realize it's just being twelve.

"At least twelve goes away," Travis says, tying on a
tie I haven't seen in a month of Sundays. "If the diabetes causes
this kind of moodiness, we'd never get her married off."

I point out a salsa stain on the tie, and he takes it
off. He rummages through his drawers trying to find his only other
tie, a white one with small blue and pink handprints Logan and
Ashley made for him one Christmas back when their handprints fit on
something as small as a tie.

"You sure you don't want to go with me?"

"I wouldn't know what he was saying anyway." I spit
on my finger and rub it across the salsa stain trying to figure if
I'd washed it already and it's set in for good.

Travis stops fiddling with the knot and looks at me.
"You think I do?"

"You know better than I do."

"I don't understand half of what anyone has said the
last week. You were the one who understood what the doctors were
trying to say. Carbohydrates, basals, hyperglycemia. I got no idea
still what any of that means."

"Logan explained it all to me," I say, finally
dumping the tie on the heap of dirty laundry on the bed.

"Maybe we should send Logan to the lawyer." We look
at each other as if we're actually considering this, and then he
pecks me on the cheek, which I can't remember the last time he done
this, and says goodbye.

Ashley is flopped melodramatically across her bed and
moaning that since everyone is at school, she can't even text them.
I toss her book bag at her and tell her to catch up on all her
make-up work or help me fold clothes. She chooses the
schoolwork.

When Travis comes home the house is some semblance of
back to normal, and I'm in the kitchen broiling chicken again
'cause I don't know what else to fix. He lays a folder on the table
and grabs a Dr. Pepper from the fridge before sitting down.

"Is it fixed?" I ask, joining him. "Can she take the
needles to school, and more importantly, can we fire Laura?" This
last comment is joking, but only partly, 'cause I'm still mad.

"Yeah, yeah, and no. At least not yet." He shoves the
folder across the table at me, but I don't open it because I know
it'll be full of legal jargon.

"Just tell me."

"It's called a 504. It's a federal civil rights law,
so it applies to everyone in the country, including us."

"Ashley ain't black," I say, because civil rights
brings flashes of bus protests and diner brawls to mind. I don't
get where this is going.

"Not civil rights like race. It's a disability
law."

"She ain't disabled either."

"According to the law she is. She needs special rules
for her because she's different, the lawyer said."

"She's not different." I get up and pull out pans for
chitlins and then realize I have no idea how many carbs are in
them, so I put them away.

"I don't mean she's different. I mean, she has
different needs. Put that away and come sit down and listen, 'cause
I can't take days off work every time there's a problem at Ashley's
school. You gotta handle this, too."

I sit, but I don't look at the papers.

"It just means she's got rights. It's good stuff,
Babs. Look at this." He pulls out a paper with a list with those
dotty things in front of each item, but I push them back to
him.

"I don't want to read them. Just tell me."

"Okay." He settles for this and glances at the
papers. "A 504 is a law that says Ashley's got the right to feel
safe at school, like she's not going to pass out and die and nobody
will know what to do. The law says there's gotta be people at the
school who know what diabetes is, and know how to give her shots if
she needs it, or test her blood, and they gotta know what all the
numbers mean, too, so they know if she needs to eat or call a
doctor or something." He looks at the list again. "All her teachers
got to know she has diabetes and what it looks like if she goes
high or low, and what to do if it does. They gotta let her go to
the doctor anytime she needs to and it's excused. And she gets to
go to the bathroom or water fountain anytime, too. They can't keep
her from doing that."

I think about how Ashley came home crying the day
right before she passed out, because the teacher wouldn't let her
go to the bathroom, and she thought she was going to pee her pants
in class. She was so embarrassed. And I told her to stop drinking
so much.

"She gets to eat whenever she needs to, and," he
looks at me triumphantly, "she gets to carry her needles and
insulin."

"Really?" All I can think of is,
We got Laura!

Travis puts the papers back in the folder and drains
the Dr. Pepper. "But we got to fill out all the papers first. To
make it legal."

"Well, let's do it." I get up to get a pen when
Travis stops me.

"We can't do it ourselves. We have to do it with the
school, with the principal and the administrative people, and the
teachers."

"I'm not doing this with Laura. I won't sit in a room
with her again and listen to her smug educated talk and her big
words and her talking down to us."

"But we're right." He's quiet when he says this, like
he's calming me down, but what he's really doing is offering me a
weapon to bludgeon Laura. "We were right, and she was wrong, and
now we need to go get her to put that on paper."

I look at the papers in my hands and nod. "I'll call
and make an appointment tomorrow."

But we never make it.

~~~~

I don't notice Ashley's itching right away. By the
time I see her scratching at her stomach with the fervor of a dog
with fleas, she's scratched a good few layers of skin off, and
fingernail size streaks of blood are seeping through her clothes.
She winces giving herself a shot for dinner, and I see the red
blotches across her white shirt.

I pull up the shirt enough to see her abdomen is
dotted with angry welts. I recognize them right away as hives. I'm
no stranger to hives on my kids. Logan got them when he drank milk
as a toddler, and every time he rolled down a hill of Saint
Augustine grass. Ashley got them when the local pool dumped too
much chlorine in the water and when I use bleach that smells like
flowers. But we haven't been to the pool in months, and I stopped
using bleach the day Travis accidentally used it instead of
detergent on a load of his work jeans.