Then, on Friday, Emma came home looking troubled.
Not sad. Troubled. Like she was trying to work out a math problem that didn’t have an answer.
She found me in the living room, folding towels on the couch.
“Mom, can I ask you something without you getting mad?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “That’s the best I can promise.”
She sat down on the other end of the couch.
“Tyler has something on his arms.”
I stopped folding. I waited.
“Red patches. Kind of scaly. All up and down his forearms and on his elbows. I saw them in gym today when he took his sweatshirt off for the mile run. He said it’s eczema.”
I nodded slowly.
“He told me some boys have been making fun of it since last year. Since eighth grade. They call his arms gross. They call him Lizard. Brandon started it.”
I felt something shift inside me. Like a picture that had been hanging crooked on the wall, and somebody finally straightened it.
The sweatshirt. In sixty-eight degrees. The way he’d yanked his sleeve down at dinner so fast I’d almost missed it.
“He wears long sleeves all the time,” Emma said, “because he doesn’t want anybody looking.”
“Oh, honey. That must be really hard for him.”
“Yeah.”
She looked down at her own forearms. She was wearing a T-shirt. Short sleeves. I hadn’t even noticed when she put it on.
“Mom,” she said quietly. “He knows what it feels like.”
I didn’t have to ask what she meant.
“He knows exactly how much it hurts when somebody says something mean about your body. He’s known it for a whole year.” Her voice cracked. “So why would he say that to me?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” I said. “But that’s a very fair question.”
“Do you think he wanted me to feel as bad as he does?”
I thought about that carefully.
“Not necessarily. Sometimes people are so scared of being embarrassed themselves that they hurt someone else to protect themselves. They don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
Emma sat very quietly for a long time.
Then she said, “I want to ask him. To his face.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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