the tinyblog

7th Grade. 7th Period. PE Football. The tough little kid blocks me hard and I fly backwards. My hand goes out behind me to catch myself. I land on my wrist and I feel it break. I sit there looking at it, thinking so clearly, so logically, "How can it be that something can just continue to hurt this badly without wavering?"

I went to the nurse�s office and she saw how badly it had swollen. She went into the little nurse�s cabinet and got out something called an "air-splint". It was a little water-wing lookin� thing that went over the arm, and then was inflated to immobilize it. It was clear plastic, and it was kind of cool.

The nurse tried my mom at work, and left a message. She tried her at home. Then I remembered my mom was in Chicago on business and wasn�t going to be home for hours. With a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I realized I was going to have to call my step dad. I will say that he is greatly reformed, but at the time, he could really be counted on to be an asshole in such a situation and I knew it intuitively. I had never called him at work from school before and I just had this feeling it wouldn�t go well�but there I was at school with a broken arm and a parent really had to be called.

He was called. He came to the school and got me, and I could tell he wasn�t happy about it. I guess he got the idea that I had faked it to get out of school. (Never mind that 1st period might have been better timing. It�s unlikely I would pretend I broke my arm to get out of one hour of school!) He didn�t really say anything and was nice enough to the nurse, but his demeanor was confirmed when we got home.

I started to go in my room to lay down and he said to me, "You�re home, you can take that thing off now."

Eventually my mom got home. "I think I broke my arm," I told her, calmly. At her strong recommendation we went to the hospital and I was never so glad as when the x-rays showed that the arm was indeed broken. Shit, he didn�t even apologize.