I have been the school nurse here in Marion for fifteen years, and you learn quick to tell the difference between a child who is really sick and a child who just needs somewhere to be. This one little girl, fourth grade, started coming to my office every single day right before the final bell. A headache, a tummy ache, something vague, and it was always, always right at the time the buses load up. Never in the morning. Never at lunch. Right when it was time to go home.
Now, a kid dodging class is not news. But this was not a kid dodging a spelling test. She would come in pale and quiet, curl up on the cot, and the closer it got to bus time the more she would insist she was too sick to ride. And once the buses had gone and she had to be picked up late, she would relax, you could see it, the tension going out of her little shoulders. It was going home that made her sick, not anything in her stomach.
I have raised kids and nursed hundreds more, and a child who feels safe at school and dreads the bus home is a child telling you something the only way she knows how. So this one afternoon, with the buses honking out front and her still on my cot, I sat down beside her and asked her, soft, why she always felt sick right before it was time to go home. She pulled her knees up to her chest, looked out the window at the buses, and whispered that at home her daddy and her mama new man fought something terrible, screaming and throwing and worse, and that some nights she hid in her closet with her hands over her ears, and that school was the only place all day that was ever quiet and safe.
Nine years old, and a school cot was the calmest place in her world.
I did not send her home to that. I am a nurse, which means when a child tells me a thing like that, I am bound by law and by conscience both to act, and I did, that same hour. I made the report to the people whose job is protecting children, careful and complete, so it could not be waved away as a busy woman imagining things.
It turned out worse at that house than even she let on, and it turned out she had an aunt who had been trying to get to her for a year. That little girl is living with her aunt now, in a quiet house where nobody throws anything and nobody screams, and she gets on the bus every afternoon and rides it home like a child ought to.
I did not know a grown-up could make it stop. I thought I just had to be sick enough, long enough, and maybe it would go away.
She does not come to my office at bus time anymore. She waves at me in the hall, quick and bright, on her way to catch her ride to a home she is not afraid of.
Watch the children who get sick at the same time every day. Sometimes it is not their stomach. Sometimes it is the only way they have to say help me, and it is on us grown-ups to hear it.