Hope This Helps #3
This man comes home from work every day and throws back a watermelon Four Loko to cope with the misery of being a mean-spirited, compassionless ass, and now he is drunk emailing. It is the only possibility that makes sense.
My stomach growls, so I angrily stuff cold pizza in my face as I glare at his message, mentally running through retaliation methods.
Mr. Gladwin,
We used to be a professional society. I can see that you are beyond reasoning with! I do not know why a person so insistent on not compromising would become a teacher. In my opinion, you are jaded and rude. Have the weekend you deserve.
Audrey Thorn
Dear Miss Audrey Thorn,
I offer extra credit every Monday in my class. Did you know that? It’s an essay. All that students are required to do, for twenty points, is write a five-hundred-word essay about their weekend. Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Joel Gladwin
No!
NOOOOOO!
This cannot be true. I tilt my head back and yell at the ceiling: “KAAAYYYYLEEEEE!”
Above, the dancing racket falters. The music stops. “COMING, MOM.”
She bounds down the stairs in short order, face pink and sweaty from jumping around.
She and her friends have switched pieces of their outfits, so she’s wearing Emma’s Blue Eye Samurai hoodie and Mackenzie’s “vintage” Y2K choker necklace.
“Yeah?” She floats on instinct toward what’s left of my pizza, even though she and her friends devoured a pizza of their own, plus a two-liter of Sprite and a party-sized bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
And (I suspect, based on the flecks of chocolate stuck at the corners of Kaylee’s mouth) a package of Oreos that I tried to hide behind cornflakes so that I wouldn’t have to share them with voracious gremlin teenagers.
“Does Mr. Gladwin offer extra credit every Monday?” I ask her point-blank. “An essay about the weekend?”
She attempts to cover her face with a triangle of pizza. “Uhhh.”
“Kaylee!” I throw up my arms. My voice devolves into a pitiful whine. “You’ve had the solution in front of you all this time!”
“I always forget about it!” She falls to her knees, pressing her hands together. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Are you going to send me away to an evil boarding school? Where someone will die mysteriously and it will be up to me to solve the crime?”
I half-heartedly nudge her away with a socked foot. “I can’t afford any of those schools. But you are doing extra credit from now on. And after Mackenzie and Emma go home tomorrow, you’re reading the rest of The Great Gatsby. I’m going to quiz you.”
Her forehead wrinkles. “Have you read it?”
“Yes.” (I have not. I was supposed to in high school, but I was… shall we say… an undedicated student. I have, however, seen the movie.)
For the remainder of the night, I alternate between pacing the living room and groaning into my hands with my head between my knees.
Mr. Gladwin is still a snarky jerk, no doubt, but I’ve lost some ground here.
I despise feeling embarrassed. And stupid.
No matter what I do to try to prevent it, I keep messing up.
When will this end? When will I reach the summit of Parenting Mountain and be so full of wisdom and experience that I’ll finally stop making mistakes?
I don’t think that perfection is too much to ask of the universe.
Maybe I should be a little more stringent about boundaries and consequences too.
Sometimes I go a bit easy on Kaylee because I’m trying to make up for…
anything else in her life not being easy…
but I should work on striking a better balance.
If she can walk all over me, then how can she be receptive to learning anything from me?
“I will no longer be fighting your battles,” I announce on Monday morning before Kaylee leaves for school and I leave for my job at Elkport Realty.
She licks yogurt off a spoon and slow-blinks. Ponders this. “Okay.”
“Okay? Just like that?”
“I don’t think I ever asked you to fight my battles to begin with?”
I cross my arms. Well! That can’t be right. She must’ve asked at some point along the line, or else I would not have meddled quite so much. Probably.
“It’s a Monday, so don’t forget…” I let the end of my sentence tilt upward in ominous warning.
Kaylee squints. “Uhh. New episode of MasterChef Junior?”
“No! Extra credit. Don’t forget, you’re doing that essay. You can write all about how you spent your weekend reading and being a good little student.”
“I was kidding! I knew that.” She slings her backpack over her shoulders. “I want to buy Christmas gifts for all of my teachers before break. Can we go to Walmart today?”
“All your teachers except for Mr. Gladwin, you mean.” Suck it, Gladwin. You won’t be getting a cheap coffee mug from us!
Her eyebrows pin together. “Why? He’s my favorite teacher.”
I chuckle heartily at this, but she retains a straight face. Kaylee cannot keep a straight face when she’s joking for the life of her. My jaw comes unhinged. “Are you nuts? You’re getting an F in his class!”
She shrugs. “Yeah, because I keep failing the tests. He’s still nice to me, though. And he’s really funny. He’s everybody’s favorite teacher.”
I gape at her. “Nice?” I repeat, voice shrill. “On what planet?”
Kaylee just looks puzzled. “Wow. You got beef with him?”
What on earth is happening in my kitchen right now. Do I have beef? Do I have beef? I have a whole-ass Arby’s franchise.
I am bamboozled for the rest of the day.
For the rest of the week. I do my last-minute Christmas shopping, and I bake cookies to donate to a school raffle raising money for field trips.
I shovel my sidewalk religiously because I am terrified of being sued by the mailman for slipping on ice, and finally throw out the caved-in jack-o’-lanterns that have frozen to my porch.
All the while, I think of Gladwin’s smug little digs.
PS: Isn’t Sabrina Carpenter’s music a little too mature for a thirteen-year-old?
Thank you for finally giving me some credit!
Thorn! What an apt name!
“You’re an apt name,” I mutter viciously, flinging tinsel onto my Christmas tree at one point. “Gladwin? Pshh. More like Sadwin.”
“You say something?” Kaylee asks me, cross-legged on the floor wrapping presents for her friends and teachers.
“No.”
My saltiness does begin to abate upon receiving certain news on Friday, however.
“I get to go to the dance!” Kaylee sings to me when I get home from work. She pirouettes into the fridge, then hops about on one foot. “Ow. Ow. Ow.”
I gasp in delight. “You brought your grade up?”
She shrugs. “I dunno.”
“How do you know you’re allowed to go?”
“The principal said on morning announcements that he’s not going to prohibit students from going even if they have low grades.”
“Huh.” I prop my hands on my hips. “Good.”
“Right?” She twirls and twirls.
“And you’re still sure you’re okay with me chaperoning?” I watch her skeptically. “I can tell them no. They can get somebody else, I don’t wanna cramp your style.”
“It’s fiiiine, I’ve told you a million times. Stop asking meeeee.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Are you still okay with me chaperoning?” I ask her again on Saturday evening as we pile into the car on our way to the school.
Kaylee’s trying to hide that she’s upset I’ve made her wear a big puffy coat over her (thin, spaghetti-strap, definitely more appropriate for summer) pink dress when it’s nine degrees with a windchill of negative two.
But she’s also extremely excited. Her eyes are lit up, and she keeps checking herself out in the mirror.
She’s wearing mascara for the first time ever, and from the way she talks about it, I think Kaylee half expects that her friends won’t be able to recognize her.
They will surely think she is a twenty-one-year-old woman of the world.
“Mom,” she groans. “Don’t make me turn this car around.”
When we file into the gymnasium, Kaylee immediately beelines for one of the far walls where all of the girls are awkwardly loitering, casting interested looks over at the opposite wall, where the boys are doing things like trying to stand on their heads and cheering on one another’s TikTok dances.
I notice it’s really only the boys who are exceptionally well-dressed in bow ties and gelled hair that are paying any attention to the girls, and they look so anxious that I worry they might pass out.
I spot Kaylee’s former sixth-grade math teacher and ask how I can make myself useful.
“We need someone over there to ladle punch,” she tells me, gesturing.
“And if you notice anyone getting too rowdy, threaten that you’ll have the deejay play nothing but slow songs if they don’t stop.
That usually calms them down for a minute.
These kids are terrified of slow songs.”
I snigger in response and make my way to the refreshments table.
Strobe lights scatter off of every surface, highlighting tinfoil snowflakes hanging from streamers, twisting this way and that in the reverberating howl of the speaker system they’ve got set up in here.
Near one of the doorways they have a blue-and-white balloon arch where couples are supposed to pose for pictures, but it’s been taken over by twelve-year-old boys rubbing their heads against the balloons to make their hair stand up from static.
“Punch duty, eh?” a voice asks. I glance to my left, where a man is situated similarly to me, arranging snowflake-shaped cookies onto individual Thanksgiving-themed napkins.
I can almost visualize whichever parent or teacher donated those napkins as they stood in the grocery store aisle, sighing at the price of winter napkins versus the turkey ones on clearance.
Whoever did this has Given Up, and you know, I respect that.
“Looks like it.” I stir the pinkish-red liquid with a giant plastic ladle, sniffing its weird fumes. The carbonation tickles my nose. “What is this, anyway? It smells like someone poured Mountain Dew into Kool-Aid.”