The Surprise®™

I’ve never been crazy over kids. When I was one, I hated all the other kids because they gave me shit and made fun of me. As I grew up and out of the awkwardness that got me picked on, I failed to outgrow my dislike and mistrust for kids – especially little girls. To this day the sound of a group of little girls giggling together – a sound that fills most adults with fondness and delight – is like fingernails on a blackboard to me. There will probably always be some part of me that will secretly suspect they’re laughing at me.

Have you ever noticed that everything little girls do has to be steeped in melodrama and cloak-and-dagger maneuvers? When it comes to the oblique muscle to power, Machiavelli didn’t have shit on the average middle-school girl. I am convinced that the only thing standing between 9-to-14-year-old girls and global domination is curfew. They are devious creatures who’d just as soon knife you in the back as look at you if you’re standing between them and the holy grail of popularity. When I graduated from high school I breathed a heavy sigh of relief that my days among these vicious animals was finally over. I had made it through, I was alive, and best of all I never had to deal with the schoolgirls who’d made my school days endless torment ever again.

So by now you’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this – of course my only child has turned out to be a girl. Of course this girl is now middle-school age. And of course I’m beginning to suspect that my actual child was switched at birth with the satanically regenerated demon spawn of Machiavelli and Lucrezia Borgia. It’s only a matter of time before I wake up to find her standing over me with a butcher knife in one hand and a big chunk of my neck in the other. All it’s gonna take is one more fight over spike-heeled shoes or her boyfriend or homework or curfew to seal my fate. Go ahead and laugh, but I’m gonna have my husband post a picture of the carnage in this column when this finally happens. Then you’ll be fucking sorry.

This morning began more rockily than most, with an argument over getting up in time to eat breakfast that quickly escalated into My Lai and culminated with my daughter stomping out of the house to get on the school bus without her school materials. This was a calculated move of defiance on her part, because I happen to work at the school she attends and I knew that she was counting on me to cover her ass by bringing her things in with me when I arrived at school an hour after her. Knowing this, I called in sick at my job. That’d teach her, I thought angrily, and I get a day off in the bargain. Good deal. I sat back and waited for the angry phone call.

The phone first rang at 7:15 – fifteen minutes before she was due to arrive at school. Now I was really fuming – how the hell had she convinced the bus driver to let her off the bus to make a phone call? "Get your ass to school now," I snapped into the phone as I picked it up.

"Huh?" my neighbor’s puzzled voice came back at me.

"Oh, Talia," I said, a little sheepishly. "What’s up?"

"Do you know where Allison is?"

"Yeah, she’s on the bus," I answered a little defensively. "Look, if this is about the argument we had in the driveway this morning, I’m sorry, but she’s gotta learn..."

"No, no, I didn’t hear anything about that," my neighbor said quickly. "I’m asking because they just fished two little boys out of the river and the police scanner says there’s a little girl missing who was with them. They were supposed to be walking to school together." She paused, then added trepidatiously, "Are you sure she rode the bus? Because the little girl who’s missing is named Allison something."

"No, I saw her get on the bus," I said.

Why was I panicking? There was no way this missing-and-most-likely-drowned child was mine. But she had been out of my sight for nearly a half an hour now – had she somehow gotten off the bus and tried to walk to school on the path by the river? Her boyfriend, a source of contention between us of late, frequently walked to school this way, I knew. "Who were the boys?" I asked.

"The cops aren’t releasing their names."

"Well, no, it’s not her," I said as I rang off. Please God, I added silently.

The phone rang again three minutes later: the boyfriend’s mom. "Did Allison walk to school today?" she asked. (It probably goes without saying at this juncture that for some reason most of us who live in this city own a police scanner.)

"Did Ben?" I asked, now fighting hysteria.

"No," she said, "he took the bus."

"Thank God," I sighed, sagging into a chair. "No, Allison didn’t walk. I saw her get on the bus." I explained briefly that we’d argued, and while she listened she reported that the name of the missing child had just come over the scanner.

I was stunned. It may not have been my child, but it was a child I saw every day at school and had a pleasant surface relationship with. And the two boys too. Now they were gone and their parents would never see them again. Gone forever, when they’d gotten up and started their day just like every other child in the city and given nobody – certainly not themselves - any reason to think this day would be their last.

As I struggled to wrap my mind around this, the phone rang yet again. My daughter, finally having arrived at school. "Mom, did you hear?" she asked. I could tell she’d been crying.

"Yes," I said. "Are you okay?"

"I’m scared," she said.

"It’s a scary thing," I said. "Now do you see why Dad chewed you out for getting too close to the riverbank last weekend?"

"Yes," she said gravely. "I do." There was a long pause, then, "I hear you called in sick."

"Yes," I said.

"Can I come home?" she asked tremulously.

"Not under any circumstances," I replied.

"You BITCH!" And with that, she hung up.

I walked away from the phone feeling as though I had been picked up, spun around at a high rate of speed and dropped off a cliff, only to land back in my own chair at the dining room table.

This is the real stuff being a parent is made of. You won’t find it in any book, or on Dr. Phil, but this is what it’s all about. Love, hate, panic, confusion. It sucks, but what can you do?

Pray like hell every morning that God grants you just one more day with the little bastards, that’s what.

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