LOM Chapter 32. Dr. Wallace

That evening I took Travis’s advice and called Julie. I had decided not to go to youth group, but I still wanted to talk to her, anyway. This was not the first time I had ever called a girl, but you would not have known that from my anxiety and hesitance. As soon as I looked at the scrap of paper with her number on it, my heart fluttered and my mouth went dry. I told myself that she was not so overwhelming, and this call not so bold, that it should make me so nervous. I sat down at the kitchen table with the phone handset, and spread the scrap of paper out in front of me. I dialed with trembling fingers, then listened to a vast silence occasionally punctuated by deafening ringings.

After four or five rings, maybe forever, someone answered. “Hello?”

“May I speak to, ah, Julie?” I asked.

“May I tell her who’s calling?”

“Wesley Peary, from, um, church,” I said.

“Just a moment.”

I heard the phone set down, then picked up again and a new voice answer. “Hello? Wesley?” It was Julie.

“Hi – um, Julie, it’s Wesley,” I said, then realized that I did not need to tell her who I was if she already knew.

“Yes, hey, how are you?” she said.

“I’m good, I’m okay,” I said.

“Good.”

“Yeah.” I had momentarily forgotten why I had called. “Uh, look, I wanted to call and say that I don’t think I’m going to make it to youth group tomorrow night.”

“No? That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, sorry – thanks for inviting me. I’ve just been a little tired lately, and I’m behind in my schoolwork.”

“I understand,” she said, although she did sound genuinely sorry. “Maybe next week.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Do you know about the beach retreat in two weeks?”

“No,” I said.

“We’re going to this hotel in Cocoa Beach for the weekend. You should totally come.”

“Yeah?” I hadn’t been back to the beach since my trip with Matty and Pete.

“I went last year and it was way fun; there’s not too much actual church stuff, so you get a lot of time to hang out and bond.”

“In two weeks?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, not quite – weekend after next.”

“That sounds cool,” I said. “I’ll look into it.”

“Cool. See you in church this Sunday?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said, even though I didn’t actually want to go to church. It would make mom happy, anyway, and I didn’t have to tell her my real reason.

I wandered dreamily through the next few days after my call to Julie, thinking of her whenever my mind was otherwise idle. Meanwhile, the medicine was definitely beginning to help, but my bowels remained unpredictable. Most of the time, I could hold out for the entire school day, but not always. The urgency had decreased – I had fewer emergencies – but the necessity still arose on occasion.

Since I knew that I was going to be late for Strunkel’s class anyway, there was no point in hurrying into the restroom. Instead I waited in the boy’s room for a few minutes after the bell rang, and then crept into the faculty men’s room just down the hall. It was usually empty at the beginning of the period, so I often had it to myself. Sometimes someone would come in, but always to urinate.

Except for the one time that someone did not. I was almost finished when he came in, but I figured I would wait and start wiping until after he had left. I knew he was there because I heard the door open, heard someone walk in, but I could not see his feet yet because he had not walked past the stall to the urinal. That meant he was stopped at the sink, but I heard no water or anything else. The room was silent, and remained so for a few long minutes.

“Are you just about done?” the man said.

If I said yes, he would keep waiting, and I would be caught. I tried to summon up my deepest, manliest voice. “No,” I grunted.

I heard him groan, “You want me to bring you some prunes? Jesus Christ, how long can it take – just squeeze them fuckers out.”

Under normal circumstances, conversation in a men’s room – especially through a stall door – is deeply abnormal behavior, yet this guy wanted to have a chat about my bowel movement.

“Do you mind?” I said, but my voice cracked and betrayed me.

“Wait a goddamn minute,” he replied, and I could tell he was squatting a little to get a look at my shoes. “Are you a student? You come out of there right now.”

“Just a sec’.” I tore off a length of toilet paper and began to fold it.

“No, right this second,” he demanded.

“My asshole is still covered with poop, so I’m going to wipe first” – and I did, then flushed.

“You can’t use that language here, mister,” he said, as I exited the stall. It was Mr. Simmons, the school baseball coach, also a driver’s ed instructor. I don’t think he remembered me from his class, which I had taken over the summer and learned precisely nothing while still earning an “A” and a discount for my parents’ car insurance policy.

“But I can ‘squeeze them fuckers out’ and ‘wait a goddamn minute’, right?”

“Don’t you talk back to me. Whose class are you in?”

“Strunkel.”

“We’ll see what she has to say,” he huffed, and he marched me across the campus to her room. When we entered the room, she stopped writing on the board.

“Coach Simmons,” she said, warmly – and then, somewhat less warmly, “Mr. Peary.”

“I found this one in the faculty restrooms,” Simmons said.

“Up to no good I’m sure,” Strunkel replied. “And he’s late for class, again.”

“I was taking a dump,” I said, which elicited snickers from my classmates. “The boy’s room was out of toilet paper.”

That was no defense, and I was given a referral to the office again. The dean was out for the day, so I had to wait until the principal was free. He called me into his office.

“Hi, Dr. Wallace.” He was an Ed.D, not an M.D., but I respected the man’s credentials.

“Mr. Peary,” he said, reviewing the referral, which was now at the top of a small stack in the folder that held my academic records. “Mrs. Strunkel seems to think you were in the men’s faculty restroom. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, “but she didn’t catch me. Mr. Simmons caught me, but he didn’t want to bring me here because he was embarrassed about his choice of words during the incident.”

“Why were you in the faculty restroom?” he asked.

“Because I had to use the bathroom, and the boy’s rooms are always in terrible shape. There’s piss on the seats, on the floors, on the toilet paper, everywhere. It’s disgusting.”

“You could bring your own toilet paper,” he said.

“Can I bring my own seat?”

“You could wait until after school, and use your own restroom,” he said.

“No, sir – really, I can’t,” I said. I reached into my backpack and pulled out the note my mother had written me about my diagnosis. I pushed it across the desk to the principal.

He read it, then handed it back. “Oh yes, I remember – this is why we had to change your class schedule? You’re right, the boys’ rooms are a problem. Still, we just can’t have students going into the faculty restroom.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll tell you what: there’s a restroom next to Deputy Daughtry’s office. That used to be the nurse’s office, back when schools had nurses instead of police. I can write you a permission slip that you can take to Deputy Daughtry, so you can use that restroom whenever you need to. Maybe that will keep you from coming back here.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, “but actually, the other problem is that Mrs. Strunkel doesn’t like me to be late for class. That’s why I keep getting referrals.”

“Can you go during lunch?”

“Well, that’s the thing. We only get twenty-five minutes. So I get in line, get my food, and eat, and that takes twenty minutes. Sometimes I have to go right away, but usually it takes a little while for the food to settle before I have to go. Even if I do go right away, it sometimes takes a while, and then I’m late.”

“Okay,” he said. “I will talk to Mrs. Strunkel. You’d better hurry back to her class, or you’ll miss it.”

I returned to class for the last five minutes of it, but it was a good five minutes, buoyed by the results of my talk with Dr. Wallace. He was the the only doctor that had done me any good lately – and he wasn’t even a real doctor.

League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a
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