Reason Why
by Whitney Kenerly
The first time I ever faked being sick was somewhere around the beginning of 7th grade, long before there could be what one would call (particularly seedy) ulterior motives. My mom came to pick me up, like always, having to drive across town after leaving her new job early, to collect her sneering daughter standing alone in front of the auxiliary gym with a large, purple Trapper Keeper.
“Did you have a temperature?” she asked me over the phone when I called from the faded red and gray itchy couch of the “Nurse's Office.” It wasn’t even a real Nurse's Office, just the attendance room where the front receptionist had a box of cartooned band-aids, tissues, and the emergency pack of cheap tampons that everyone knew were there in a locked drawer. No girl would ever submit herself to the humiliation of retrieving one. Everyone knew the girls who had their periods, and with my, as my mother euphemized it, “mature figure” it was clear to me that they would soon figure me out too.
“I just feel like I’m going to get sick everywhere!” At my old school this would have been an impossible lie to pull off. The registered nurse of Emerald Grove Day School had been there though all the illnesses of my educational career, from dysentery, to chicken pox, to the mortifying discovery of head lice, which I made her “pinky swear” to me that she would keep a secret. Now I had a powerful honesty because no one seemed to care if I were lying.
“So they took your temperature?”
“Mom, pleeeeeaaaase, I feel like I’m dying.”
“Whitney Ayres, did they or did they not take you temperature?”
“Yes, and it’s high!” I quickly touched my forehead and convinced myself of its warmth in order to mitigate my immediate guilt.
I laid the back of my hand on my forehead, cheeks, and lips from the backseat of my mom’s new forest green BMW. I hated that car. I hated the way everyone at my new public school stared at it and my mother in her designer suits and sunglasses. Although, when I saw the flash of green slowly turning the corner to pull into the gravel circle drive by the auxiliary gym, I looked behind me to see if anyone was around, and upon seeing a group of 6th graders in their PE uniforms walking to the track I thought, Please let them see my mom’s car. Please let them see her and know that I’m not like them. I am not one of these people. But I still hated that car.
“You don’t look that bad,” my mom said when I opened the passenger door to see a large, colorful plastic bag with shiny clothing boxes in it. “Oh,” my mom could say things with such and air of flakiness, “You’ll have to sit in the back.” I slammed the door shut.
“So, what was you exact temperature, Booger Bear?”
“I don’t know; it doesn’t matter!” This truth occurred to me when we came to the wrought-iron gates of my neighborhood. Paul, the main guard, waved from his gatehouse and leaned down to my mom’s window with his creamed-corn smile. Mom rolled down her window with the lazy touch of a button.
“Hello ther’ Nancy, what’s lil’ Whitty doing home so early?” I hated how adults never asked the questions directly to you.
“She’s a little ill ... She’s still adjusting I think.”
That was not fair. How dare she condescend to me when she didn’t even know how upset I had been. I was furious. “I feel like I’m going to die!” I yelled from the backseat.
Paul quietly stared at me fuming, with my arms crossed and my eyes becoming glassy from the excess water starting to build in them. He let us through with a contrived smile.
There was a space between Mom and I in the BMW sedan. I could hear the sound of the engine slowly accelerating over a barely audible Andrew Lloyd Weber CD. “Do you feel better though, not as feverish?”
Why wouldn’t she just leave me alone? “Yes, I feel better now that I’ve pretty much escaped from that place ... I hate it.” I was choking now. Every breath had to be carefully controlled and I didn’t want to talk anymore.
“Whitney.” I felt the tension in my mother’s voice also starting to build, in a different way. “Your father has lost his position and we have all had to give up things we enjoy or wanted. Grover Middle School is in the best public school district in town. Plenty of girls from church go there, from the nice summer camps you get to go to, from your ballet classes ... There is no reason why you can’t find girls to be friends with if you really want to ...”
I made a noise combined of a growl and a scream before she could go on with the same lecture I had heard, what felt like, a thousand times. I was concentrating hard on staring out the window of the backseat with the blankest expression I could hold. I didn’t know then how soon it would be before I would have perfected this to art form.
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Whitney Kenerly was in Greensboro NC March 2nd 1986. She graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2008 majoring in Psychology and Creative Writing. She's been writing poetry since she was 7 years old and would like to get her MFA someday.
