A Day of Frozen Glass
by Angela Camack
I still wake up sweating and shaking after a dream about what happened
on the playground five years ago. For three of those years, I couldn’t
enter a school without having it come back, the mob of children, the
piping voices that sounded so sweet turned to the piercing sound of icy
glass shards falling, the bared teeth. I swear I see blood on those
teeth, although I know it didn’t happen that way. I hear, “Fall, Tree,
fall,” and hear little children crying as they are pushed in a circle.
I see grasping fingernails drawing blood, and tight fists, and small
bodies pushing into each other. I smell rank, heavy sweat, not the
dewiness of children’s efforts. I see stones flying (stoning, the
ancient ritual). I am scared. I learned long ago that there was
cruelty, the desire to cause harm in the world, but I never knew that
it could start so soon. “Mean girls,” yes, and teasing and bullying,
but a drive to create physical damage? To act as a mob to cause havoc?
If I knew what caused it perhaps I could rest easily, but maybe getting
it all out will help. Psychologist, get off thine ass and heal thyself.
I am Dr. Melinda Wight. Five years ago, I was school psychologist for
two elementary schools. One of my patients at Orville Elementary was
Trina: Tree for short.
Trina was a depressed 6th grader. Who was this poor child in a past
life to deserve such trouble? Chubby, frizzy-haired Trina had a
stutter, an overbite and a chronic skin condition. Small wonder she was
struggling to keep up with it all.
Her parents weren’t abusive, just in denial. “What do children have to
be depressed about?” “Her skin will clear up.” “If she tries harder,
she can speak better.” “We’ll watch her snacks.”
Cognitively she was fine, intelligent and creative, just sad and
defeated. She had a small group of friends, other girls considered to
be misfits, but was otherwise alone. She was picked on of course.
Nothing short of a cattle prod would get anyone at school to intervene.
I spoke to the children when I saw anyone being bullied, but I had no
authority.
God, kids could be mean. “Tree-trunk, wire-hair, fatty, scabby-arms.”
They imitated her speech and overbite. A favorite maneuver was for a
group to act friendly to her, then jerk away the welcome mat when she
responded. It was heart-breaking to see her in the hall, eyes down,
pale, getting to her classroom or outside as quickly as possible.
All year we worked on improving her self-esteem and coping abilities,
getting her to express her worries, encouraging her to work with her
speech therapist, helping her prepare to move to a new school for 7th
grade. She hung on, doing well in her classes but doing it alone.
The day of the playground incident I was coming back from lunch.
Children were on the playground equipment, playing ball, sitting in
small groups. A favorite pastime that year was to get on a swing and to
swing as high and fast as possible, with the idea that you could sail
over the top of the swing and come down on the other side. The
playground monitors didn’t let this go on long.
That day the monitors stopped two swinging students, who joined a ball
game. Trina sat on a swing and began, chubby legs in blue corduroy
pumping. Faster and faster she swung, her head back, freer than I’d
ever seen her.
The others began to stop their play to watch her. “Trina, stop now,
you’re going too high,” said one of the monitors. Trina continued to
swing in wider and wider arcs, legs pumping furiously.
“Tree, please stop, you’re going to fall!”
To this day, I don’t understand what happened. One student shouted,
“Trina’s a falling tree!” Others took up the chant. “Fall, Tree, fall!”
Students sat in the swings beside her, swinging dangerously close to
her widening arcs. Their laughter rose, cutting, like glass, and cold,
like ice shards shivering in the air. Mouths opened wide, their teeth
looking feral. Several students began jumping on the spiral slide.
“Fall, Tree!”
Their attention moved from Trina to the smaller students. Some were on
the carousel; older children pushed them around, harder and faster, as
they held on and pleaded for them to stop. Children on the see-saw held
their partners in the air, jouncing them. Bigger children tried to jump
on the large tubes that smaller children could tunnel through; failing
that, they pushed at them, trying to rock the children inside. Students
bumped into each other as they ran and began pummeling each other or
pushing each other down. Fingers tore at clothing or scratched at
exposed skin, leaving bloody marks. Students scooped up stones, hurling
them around, none of the stones large but able to sting the skin.
Children flung handfuls of stones at Trina (stoning, the ancient ritual
,,,), who kept on swinging.
Other teachers came out to try to control them. They tried to grab the
children on the swings but risked being kicked. A teacher called the
security guards.
Trina swung on, reckless, heedless of the chaos. Then the impossible
happened, breaking every physical law. Trina’s swing rose straight up,
perpendicular to the ground. She seemed to stop, toes pointed like a
ballet dancer, blue slacks against a lighter blue sky. Her swing fell
over to the other side. Back and forth she swung, until the swing
slowed, and she dismounted like a gymnast.
The crazed playground action began to stop. “She did it!” “Jeez,
Trina!” The bell rang, ending recess. Trina turned toward the crowd.
“To hell with all of you,” she said. She walked into the school,
dusting off her hands.
The noise started again, but it was children’s noise once more. Little
ones on the carousel were crying. Some were vomiting, and a few
smallest lost control of their bladders. Most were shaking and ashen,
as if waking from a nightmare and waiting for a parent to comfort them.
They were children again. The staff moved toward them.
The faculty and staff tried to analyze what happened, urged by angry
parents. The superintendent asked me to do research. I talked to the
faculty about mob mentality, how it led to bullying,
deindividualization, shared emotions, a like-minded group with a
decreased sense of responsibility. But to me, any explanation was just
words, jargon that didn’t begin to describe what I had seen. As I was
Trina’s therapist, another psychologist came to work with the children,
counseling and comforting them, looking for a reason for what happened.
I was relieved. After what I had seen, I would be useless, too angry at
what they had done to Trina (“Fall, Tree….”).
Trina held on. We talked a little about that day, but we both sensed
that what happened was beyond the world of science and psychology. She
seemed, if not happier, more peaceful. I did notice that the children
stopped bullying her. Perhaps they were frightened or awed; maybe, in
doing what others only played at, she had earned some credibility. I
did notice that one day in the cafeteria a group of students, sounding
sincere, asked her to sit with them. She walked past without
acknowledging them.
Trina’s parents continued to avoid her problems. Finally her aunt, a
wise woman with a comfortable income, stepped in. Now came the
orthodontist. The nutritionist. The new dermatologist for a second
opinion. She found Trina a place at a school for gifted children.
I quit the school at the end of the year. I worked part-time at a
hospital and took private patients. Trina’s aunt hired me to continue
treating her.
Slowly, the real Trina emerged. The braces controlled her overbite and
she doubled her efforts with her speech therapist. She lost weight and
her skin cleared. Her depression lifted as she talked about her anger,
at her parents who never noticed and at children who noticed too much,
at herself for being sure it was all her fault. Happy at her new
school, she made friends and top grades. After a year, the newly
confident, happy, suddenly pretty Trina left my care.
After three years I returned to the school system. Too many troubled
children had parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for private
treatment. But some hope had left me. Can we truly help anyone cope
with a world where cruelty is just below the surface, even in the
young? Is there an atavistic need to torment the vulnerable ones? To
band together and choose people to exclude? Will Trina stay well? What
does it mean when an 11-year-old feels so removed from people that she
can turn to them and say, “To hell with all of you?”
THE END
© 2021 Angela Camack
Bio: A librarian who has spent her career connecting people to
ideas and information. Angela Camack is now getting her own ideas out.
She has been published in Choice, a magazine for academic librarians.
Her short stories have been published in periodicals such as Ocotillo
Review and East by Northeast Literary Magazine.
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