Done Adulting Vol. 1 Ch. 52 (Patreon)

The next morning found Jamie at an activity table with a tub of small blocks, isolated from the room by the best headphones he’d ever listened to, let alone owned. It felt good to listen to music from home again. He’d downloaded a little bit of everything. Just at that moment, he was listening to Bach’s Cello Suites. He put his pacifier in for good measure, hoping to blend. April sat down across from him, and he took out one of his headphones and his pacifier. Her, he actually wanted to talk to.

“What are you building?”

“Notre Dame de Paris, as best I can remember it.”

“What’s that?”

“A cathedral. Um, an important church.”

“What’s it like?”

“I’ve never seen it, actually. Just pictures.”

“How’s it coming?”

“If I squint it looks sort of like a gothic cathedral, but more like a pile of loosely stacked balsa wood.” He sat back. “At this rate I’m going to end up being very good at a lot of hobbies.”

This wasn’t the light and happy conversation April was hoping for. “Listening to anything good?” She held the earpiece up to her ear. “Wow. Most music we get in here involves ears hanging low or wheels going ‘round.”

“The cello always calms me down.” April scrutinized his face and couldn’t tell if he was oddly calm or on the verge of popping. Sudden, angry crying caught her attention.

“Fair point,” she said taking a deep breath. “I gotta go deal with that.” She handed back the earpiece.

“Thanks for stopping by.” Once again, he was sealed off, with both earphones in and his pacifier back in his lips. Perhaps if kept it in, he wouldn’t attract attention and could just do his thing. With the nise cancelling on, the room was completely soundless except for his music and his breathing, like someone hit mute. The music was helping, but he was frustrated with his building.

The problem with the blocks, other than they weren’t nearly as ornate as the actual cathedral, or anything like it, was they were too light. Getting the flying buttresses to stand required dropping the keystone in place perfectly. The wall was supposed to be pushed out by the weight of the ceiling, and it was supposed to be pushed back in by the buttresses. Without weight to push back against it, the blocks just balanced there held in place by downward gravity. There was no weight to counter, so no counterforce from the buttress, so nothing for the keystone to do but pretend it served a purpose, making it all look loose and disjointed and fragile. “Maybe they make stone blocks,” he mused, barely audible even to himself. Maybe there was something else he could build instead.

That thought was half-expressed when a hand knocked it all over. Jamie took a deep breath to gather his patience before even looking up. He knew who was there. Jamie was against any form of corporal punishment, but in his less-than-charitable mood the thought of Bobby over someone’s knee was satisfying. Jamie didn’t like his mood or that thought or Bobby. He put his pacifier back in his pocket and stood up. Bobby stood there grinning, and when Jamie didn’t react, he swept the blocks clear off the table.

No reason to even bother trying to rebuild his lousy cathedral anyway, Jamie walked past him and went to his cubby, where he retrieved his sunglasses and headed for the door. He was reaching for the knob when a big hand got to it first.

“Where do you think you’re going,” Jean said. Not harshly. Just the opposite. As if to a newly mobile infant who was crawling where they didn’t belong. His headphones still in, he didn’t hear what she said, but he could read her lips well enough, and her smile belied an insipid tone. He took out his earpiece again.

“Outside.”

She put her hands on her knees and bent down to his level. “Sorry, Jamie, but you can’t go outside alone.” That’s it, Jamie thought, a little lower so I can reach your face. He could picture the headline: Firemen Wrest Bloody Ear from Little’s Victorious Fist. At least the noise from the littles wasn’t directed specifically at him, unlike her mouth hole.

He swallowed the aluminum taste of bile and spit through his teeth, “Well, Jean …” Little Wins Prize Ear Back; Firehouse Plunged Into Mourning.

“Hey! What’s going on,” April exclaimed in an excited and happy voice. It was directed at Jean, not Jamie.

“O, no big deal. Jamie wanted go outside but …”

“What a great idea! Let’s do that.” April hip checked Jean out of the way and opened the door, smiling at Jamie and nodding at him to walk under her arm and outside. She shut the door behind him.

Jean protested, “He can’t be outside alone!”

And April cut her off, “And he won’t be in twenty seconds. You gotta pick your battles and learn to read their body language. Did you see that, like, at all?”

“Well, he looked like maybe he was going to throw a tantrum, but that happens here five times a day.”

“Jean, he’s not regressed, remember?”

“Yeah,” Jean said impatiently. “So what? It’s the rule, and if he throws a tantrum over it, we’ll deal.”

“The ‘so what’ is when he throws something at you, he’s not gonna miss.” And you are so worth throwing things at sometimes, April left out. “Look at Billy.” Jean rolled her eyes and looked at him. “Throws epic tantrums, right? Look at Jamie.” He was outside taking his shirt off and stretching his hamstrings. The six pack he didn’t have even after the plastic surgery was there now, courtesy of working out almost two hours a day every day. He was stronger and far more coordinated than the average little. A physical tantrum from him could end with someone hurt, including him.

“So?”

“So instead of getting in his way, you could have offered to go outside with him. And instead of being obtuse about it, you could realize that he’s struggling with a lot of shit you and I will never understand, and needlessly pushing him over the edge is going to get him in trouble and you hurt.”

“He’s still a little.”

“And that just makes it harder to grab hold of him when he throws a punch at you.”

“Yesterday you said I was coddling him. Today you’re saying I’m being too strict when all I did was follow the rules.”

“Yeah,” April cut her off, “so you’ve been wrong about him two days in a row. Make it three, and it’ll be a streak.”

April went to the fridge and got a bottle of water, a regular bottle, and went back to where Jean was still pouting. Apologize later, April reminded herself. “Give me a few minutes, and then let anyone who wants to come outside.”

Jamie was stretching his hip flexors. April set the water bottle down by his shirt. He looked up at her with what would have been a smile if he weren’t in such a foul mood. “Thank you.”

“Well, you looked a little murder-y.”

Jamie scoffed. “That’s ridiculous. Worst I’d have done is maimed her a little.”

As much as she understood Jamie was an adult human, sarcasm from a little still seemed odd to her. “Yeah, well, remember I’m here for that. You don’t have to carry it alone, whatever it is.”

He nodded and stood up, bouncing in place a couple times.

“I gotta let everyone out, but do what you feel,” she said.

He sighed and softened his face. “Thanks, really. I’m gonna …”

“Go; don’t let me hold you up.”

Jamie took off at a faster clip than he’d be able to sustain, but he wanted to get these feelings out of him. Nirvana, very loud Nirvana, was helping him do that. The cello was for when he was stressed and needed to calm down. Nirvana was for when he was pissed and needed to calm down. He wasn’t even sure why he was angry. He tried to do a mental inventory, and the best he could come up with was he was away from Amanda and Becky, stuck in place where he didn’t technically need to be, and bored out of his mind. Worst of all, there wasn’t an obvious end to it. The next day and the one after and on and on would be the same until Becky figured something else out or whenever the next extended break from school was.

So he ran laps around the field, hugging the perimeter as close as he could and avoiding eye contact with anyone, not that they’d notice on the other side of his sunglasses. At one point Bobby tried to chase him, and Jamie just shook his head and picked up his pace. When he got bored of running in circles, he retreated to the back of the field behind the small rise and did shuttle runs the width of the field and finally got down on the grass for plyos. The other littles could see him popping up over the rise with each burpee.

At last too exhausted to be angry or frustrated or not nauseated, he laid down on the grass. He didn’t need Nirvana anymore, for now. April decided it was time to check on him when she saw he’d stopped jumping up and down. He heard her coming.

“Hey,” he said without turning over.

“Feel better?”

“Yeah. Gonna regret that tomorrow, but for now, yes.” She set the bottle of water down next him, which he drained without putting down.

“Got a change of clothes for you, too. But maybe … Come with me.” She held out her hand and helped him to his feet.” They walked around the third building, the one between the little care the daycare for Amazon children that looked to be a utility or storage building. A sidewalk led from the side of that building around Little Hearth and to the parking lot. Jamie hadn’t noticed the path. They went to the back of the building where a shower head and hose protruded from the wall.

“We have a tub inside, but I thought maybe you’d be okay with just this?”

“Thank you.” She stepped toward him and he stepped back.

“Sorry, Jamie. Rules are rules. Even with me. Besides, Diane would get a lot more pissed at me than you.”

Jamie let it go. No reason to ruin what was a, well, a neutral mood. She helped him out of his clothes and held the hose over him. It was too cold, but it was fine. It stopped the sweat at least. She dried him with the t-shirt she’d brought over; his other was where he’d left it. He laid down and submitted to his diapering, and she pulled his clean shorts up for him.

“Ready to go back?”

“Yeah.” They walked back toward the group where a few of the littles were doing burpees.

“They think you were pretending to be a kangaroo.” Jamie laughed. What else to do but laugh in the face of this absolutely absurd world.

“It’s lunch time. Do you wanna eat alone?”

“Well …” He didn’t want to come off like a jerk, but yes, he did. “Yeah.”

“Did you see the door next to Diane’s office, in the gym area? Let me get everyone settled, and I’ll be in.”

Jamie picked up his shirt and put it back on. His eye caught a little seated against the wall a few meters away wearing a sundress that went down to her calves. She was reading.

Jamie went inside and into the room April indicated. It looked like a cry room in a church, with a glider chair and crib. Tired, he laid down on the plush rug, not thinking how normal it had become for him to sit on the floor, listening to the racket at the other end of the classroom. After not too long, April came in, and Jamie sat up. She held a bottle.

“I, uh, don’t mean to be presumptuous, but, well, your mom said this always made you feel better. You can have regular food, if you want.”

“That’s …” Jamie looked away, partly out of embarrassment but also thinking of how kind and caring April was being after he’d been anything but that morning. “The, uh, food yesterday didn’t really agree with me … and, uh, yeah, that sounds good.”

April hinted toward the glider with her eyes. It was a question, and Jamie nodded yes. She sat down, took a cloth from her back pocket, and lifted Jamie into her lap. He let himself slump into her arms. She pushed the cloth under his chin, and he closed his eyes. She gently rocked the chair and brought the bottle to Jamie’s lips. He sighed and began to drink, the formula and the exhaustion of his workout and feelings making him sleepy. It was odd to him that he was okay being in the arms of basically a stranger, but he sensed he could trust her, and he wanted to be touched.

April watched him drinking and wondered what was going on inside him. When regressed littles get ready to throw a tantrum, it’s undirected. They’ll thrash in any direction. The tantrum she helped Jamie avoid would have been a lot uglier. And he’d worked it out himself, literally, by pushing himself to the point of exhaustion. And then he meekly climbed into her arms and accepted a bottle from her, which he was slowly suckling on now as he drifted off to sleep. She had to respect how complex he was, how complicated his inner life must be. She didn’t know much about him but what Diane had told them, and she only knew what Rebecca had told her, which was only what she needed to know. Jamie interested her, and she suspected being his champion and caregiver would be more rewarding than it was being those things for the average little.

A hand reached around the doorframe and knocked. April held a finger to her lips when Jean peaked around the door. She looked humbled, not that she wasn’t a sweet person but that she was still a kid figuring out that she didn’t know much about the world and that the rules she’d followed all her life applied only so well outside the cocoon of school. The scene in front of her made sense, though. A little taking a bottle, regressed or not, made sense.

She said quietly, “I’m willing to admit I don’t understand him, and you do.”

“I don’t, really. I just understand littles, and the first thing to understand is they’re not unlike us; him even more so because he’s not regressed. We have to treat him differently than the others, even differently than Ella.”

“I’m sorry.”

April nodded toward the crib, and Jean sat down against the edge. “I’m sorry, too, Jean. I was out of line. I had no right to say what I said to you.”

“Thanks for … thanks for saying so.”

“It’s just, he’s my guy. It’s my job to be his champion.”

“I get it. I just … I want to learn.”

“So let’s learn together. Really. Lesson number one is his emotions don’t fly everywhere like a regular little’s. He’s going to bottle them up way past the point a regular little would lose it, and when he does finally lose it, it’s gonna be directed at whatever set him off.”

“Kinda like a big.”

“Exactly like a big. I don’t know what he would have done, but he was ready to go around you however he needed to. I didn’t want either of you to get hurt. Either of you.”

“So, how do I help?”

“For now, step back and try to observe more. We all have to learn him; he’s way more complex than regressed littles. Just … give him space. Same as yesterday – don’t pick him up or coo at him unless he’s really hurt, don’t get in his way unless he’s really in danger. We have to … We have to make the rules work around him. Does that make sense?”

“Kind of. But rules are rules. It’s only fair everyone follows them.”

“You’re legally not a kid anymore. When you’re in charge, fair is whatever you say it is. Lesson number two: people who aren’t good daycare teachers think ‘fair’ means holding everybody to the same standard. Good daycare teachers know ‘fair’ means holding everyone to the standard they can meet.”

“I think that makes sense.” April stood up and walked toward Jean.

“Here. Take him.” Jean took him into her arms and looked at him. He looked like any little on the outside; she was starting to see how he wasn’t.

“Let’s put him down and go have our own lunch, huh?” Jean placed him the crib and lifted the rail quietly. “And we can talk to Carrie, too. She’s known Ella a long time.”