I was in fourth grade. The bell just rang for recess. I was about to enter a building when I saw a friend coming. Whenever we see each other, we would play tag, so as soon as I saw her, I turned around to run. Forgetting that there was a wall on my right, I bumped into it so hard I fell face down on the ground. I got up with pain in my right temple, so it wasn’t really that bad. I sat up, and a friend sitting nearby gasped. She was gaping at my shirt. I looked down and found it blood soaked! That’s when I started crying.
My friends rushed to help me up and took me to the administration building. I remember I was almost dragged there, with each of my arms around a friend’s shoulder and my head dangling. I must have looked like a horror movie character, being almost dragged that way, wearing a blood-soaked shirt; it was a scene kids shouldn’t see.
When we arrived at the building, one of my friends went to the principal assistance’s office and asked her to come. When she saw me, she said, “Oh, my God, what on earth happened to you?” I don’t remember if I replied or one of my friends did, but then she asked me to go and wash my face in the bathroom. I was still crying when I went there. After I washed my face, I looked at my reflection in the mirror, and oh, I wish I didn’t: two of my front teeth were chipped, and that made me cry even harder.
I went back outside, and this time the principal was there. She said, sympathetically, “Oh, my God! Come here little girl. It’s alright, it’s alright,” and she hugged me (yup, that’s the same principal whose daughter spitted on me), with my blood-soaked shirt and all. The principal’s assistant was worried that I would stain the principal’s clothes with the blood on my shirt while she was hugging me, as if that’s the biggest issue there. She kept murmuring, “your clothes, your clothes. Be careful.”
Then, the principal asked me if I wanted to stay at school or go home, which was rather a ridiculous question, because when I said that I wanted to stay, she pointed at my shirt and said, “aww, how would you stay with your shirt soaked with blood?” The principal’s assistant asked me if there was anyone who could come and pick me up. I told her that my dad is at work and the place is pretty far from school, so she suggested that they drive me home (that’s something I really admire about that school’s staff: how caring they are. The events of the day showed that they actually cared; they didn’t just want to get rid of me). Then I told her that there wouldn’t be anyone home, because my mother used to study Qur’an at a society close to our house, but she said we would go anyway.
A teacher drove us, the principal’s assistant and I, to my house, and, as expected, no one was home, the door was locked, and I had no keys. So we went to the society where mom was. The teacher and principal’s assistant went inside to get my mom, and I waited in the car. About fifteen minutes later, mom rushed out of the building, crying! Oh, my God, what have they told her? Her friend was behind her, and they all got into the car. From what I recall, mom wasn’t relieved to see that I was alright; she was annoyed that she freaked out over nothing. She didn’t give any indication of that, but I realized it because she hadn’t talked to me at all during the ride home. She either misunderstood what they told her, or they misdescribed the situation.
I didn’t tell mom the truth about why I fell in the first place until a few years later, because it sounded ridiculous: falling like that because I misjudged the location of a wall because I was about to play tag? Kids’ lives are full of ridiculous, inexplicable events that adults don’t understand. However, she didn’t believe the true story nor the lie (in which I said that a girl pushed me! I can’t believe how I could blame it one someone else!).
That afternoon my dad took me to a dentist to get my chipped teeth repaired, and the dentist said that I should get dental crowns once I’m thirteen or fourteen, but the filling remained intact for fourteen years! It didn’t even fall off; I just had to get it replaced after I got my braces. That dentist was awesome!
P.S. I still have no idea where the blood came from.
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