Chapter 5 #2
What the hell was I supposed to do with Josh and Louie? Was I supposed to discipline them differently? Talk to them differently? Was there a leeway with them that wasn’t possible with girls?
I didn’t think so. I could remember my parents being a lot more relaxed—and that was saying something because they were strict—with Rodrigo than with me.
It used to piss me off. They would use the excuse that he was a boy and I was some sort of innocent flower that had to be protected at all costs as their reasoning behind why I would get grounded for weeks if I got home past curfew while he would get a sigh and an eye roll.
There had been plenty of other things that my parents had expected of me that they hadn’t of Drigo.
So, as I sat in my Honda with Josh and Louie in the backseat, both strangely silent, I still couldn’t decide how to handle the situation.
After I had picked up Josh from school, neither one of us had said a word as I drove back to work and proceeded to go back and forth between color jobs for my last two clients of the day until it was time to pick up Louie.
And as if sensing the tension in the car, Lou had been suspiciously quiet, too.
The fact was Josh had punched a little boy in the face.
Now I had been pissed off about it for all of ten minutes until I’d shown up at their school to talk to the principal and Josh himself, to find out that yeah , he had hit someone in his class.
But he had punched him because the little shit had been beating up on a different kid in their class in the bathroom.
The fact that they were in fifth grade doing this kind of crap didn’t escape me at all.
Josh had supposedly intervened, and the little shit had then turned his attention and aggression on my nephew.
The slight amount of irritation I’d felt having to go pick him up had disappeared in an instant.
But the principal had something up his butt and was talking about how severe the offense was and blah, blah, blah, the school doesn’t condone violence , blah, blah blah.
The asshole then proceeded to try and suspend Josh for a week, but I argued until I got it down to two days with a promise to have a long talk and consider disciplining him.
That was where my problem came in.
Diana, the aunt, wanted to give Josh a high five for standing up for another kid. I wanted to take him for ice cream and congratulate him on doing the right thing. Maybe even buy him a new game for his Xbox with my tip money.
Diana, the person who was supposed to be a parent figure, knew that if it had been me who got in trouble at school, my parents would have beat my ass and grounded me for the next six months.
My mom had slapped me once when I was fourteen for yelling at her and then slamming the door in her face.
I could remember it like it was yesterday, her throwing my bedroom door open and whack.
Getting suspended from school? Forget about it. I’d be six feet in the ground.
So what the hell was I supposed to do? What was the right path to go down?
Sure, my parents had an iron grip on my life back then and I had turned out okay, but there had been problems along the way.
I couldn’t count the number of times I had thought that my mom and dad didn’t understand anything, that they didn’t know me.
It hadn’t been easy feeling like I couldn’t tell them things because I knew they wouldn’t get it.
I didn’t want Josh or Louie to feel that way toward me. Maybe that was the problem between being an aunt and being a parent figure. I was one, but had to be the other.
So where the hell did that leave me?
“Am I in trouble?” Louie randomly asked from his spot in the backseat on his booster chair.
I frowned and glanced at him through the rearview mirror, taking in that small, slim body angled toward the door. “No. Did you do something I don’t know about?”
His attention was focused on the outside of the window. “’Cuz you’re not talking, and you got Josh outta school early and not me.”
Josh let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re not in trouble. Don’t be stu—” He caught the “stupid” before it came out. “—dumb. I got in trouble.”
“Why?” the five-year-old asked with so much enthusiasm it almost made me laugh.
Those brown eyes, so much like Rodrigo’s, flicked over toward the rearview mirror, meeting mine briefly. “Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because,” he repeated, shrugging a shoulder, “I hit somebody. I’m suspended.”
“What’s suspended?” Lou asked.
“I can’t go to school for a day.”
“What!” he shouted. “How can I get suspended?”
Josh and I both groaned at the same time. “It’s not a good thing, Lou. If you get suspended to miss school, I’ll kill you.”
“But… but… how come Josh isn’t going to get killed?”
Those blue eyes met mine through the mirror again, curiosity dripping from the corners of those long lashes. “Because I’m not going to get mad at you guys for getting in trouble when you’re doing the right thing—”
“But why would you get in trouble for doing the right thing?” Lou blurted out.
What the hell was I supposed to say? I had to pause to think about it. “Because sometimes, Lou, doing the right thing isn’t always considered the best thing for everyone. Does that make sense?”
“No.”
I sighed. “Okay, like Josh, do you have bullies in your class? Someone who picks on other kids and tells them ugly, mean things?” I asked.
“Umm… there’s a boy who tells everyone they’re gay. I don’t know what that is, but our teacher said it wasn’t a bad thing and called his mom.”
Jesus. “I’ll tell you what gay is later, okay? But it isn’t a bad thing. Anyway, so that kid tells other kids things to try and make them sad and mad, right? Well, that’s a bully. It’s someone who picks on other people to try and hurt their feelings. That isn’t nice, right?”
“Right.”
“Exactly. You should be nice to other people. Treat them with respect, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, bullies don’t do that, and sometimes they’re mean to people who don’t know how to defend themselves.
Some people can ignore those mean comments, but other people can’t handle it.
You get what I’m saying? They might cry or feel bad about themselves, and they shouldn’t.
There’s nothing wrong with someone not liking you, right? ”
“Right?”
The question in his voice almost made me snort. I had to let it go. “So, this kid in Josh’s class was picking on another kid…. Josh, tell him what happened.”
Josh sighed. “He was telling him he was a fa—” He stopped and shot me a look through the rearview mirror.
What the fuck? Kids used the “F” word when they were ten?
What decade was I living in? When I was his age, getting called “fart face” was about the biggest insult getting thrown around.
“He was calling the other kid ugly names like Shrimp because he’s short, and making fun of his shoes because they weren’t Nikes—”
Oh hell. I hadn’t heard that part in the office.
“I told him to stop saying that stuff, but he wouldn’t. He started telling me… stuff.”
What kind of shit had he been telling Josh? And why did I suddenly have the urge to go kick some ten-year-old’s ass?
“He kept pushing and pushing me, and I told him to stop. But he started saying stuff about me and the other boy—”
I wasn’t just going to kick the kid’s ass, I was going to kick his mom’s ass too. And after I was done kicking his mom’s ass, I was going to kick his grandma’s ass to teach the whole family a lesson.
“He kept flicking me on the ear and my neck, stepped on my shoes, kicked me a bunch of times, so I punched him,” he ended simply while I was still thinking about maybe even hunting down an aunt or two of the little shit’s.
“ Oh ,” was Louie’s serious, thoughtful response.
I put off my plan for later, reminding myself I needed to be an adult for now. “So, the principal got mad at Josh for hitting him, even though he hadn’t been the one to start anything. I think it’s stupid he got in trouble even though the other kid was the one being an asshole—”
That had Lou giggling.
“Don’t tell your abuelita I said that. I’m not going to get mad at Josh for what he did, even though the principal doesn’t think it’s right.
If you aren’t purposely trying to hurt other people—and you can hurt them with your words and your actions—and you’re trying to help someone or defend yourself against somebody who is trying to do something wrong to you, I’m not going to get mad.
Just tell me. I’ll try to understand, but if I don’t, we can talk about it and you can tell me what happened.
You should never pick a fight with someone for no reason though.
Sometimes we all make bad choices, but we can try and learn from them, okay? ”
“I don’t make bad choices,” Lou argued.
The fact that Josh and I both laughed at the same time didn’t go unnoticed by the youngest person in the car.
“What?” the five-year-old argued.
“ You don’t make bad choices .” I laughed and reached back with my palm up; Josh smacked it. “I told you not to stick foil in the microwave like a dozen times and you still did it and broke it!”
Josh slapped his palm into mine again. “Ding-dong, remember that time you said you really had to poop and we told you to go use the bathroom—”
“Be quiet!” Lou shouted. I didn’t need to look to know his face was turning red.
“—but you didn’t, and you pooped in your underwear?” Josh continued, laughing his ass off.
“It was an accident!”
My shoulders were shaking, and it was only because I was driving that I didn’t fall apart on the steering wheel while remembering Louie’s sharting accident last month.
“It was an accident, and you learned to quit prairie dogging it, didn’t you?
So see? You learned your lesson about making bad choices when it comes to poop. ”
“Yeah,” he muttered, sounding so defeated it only made me laugh more.