Page 96 of Best Frenemies

“You okay, Brooke?” I hear him ask her, and all she can do is shake her head.

So slowly, it feels like I’m watching a car crash, I see Brooke’s knees buckle, and Noah just barely reaches her before she faints. He catches her in his arms and gently lays her on her back, and I’m already running across the stage to help.

Principal Dana has finally reached Seth Brown, but it’s too late. The damage is already done.

“Oh my God, she’s died!” one student yells, and that makes the rest of them scream in horror.

The entire auditorium turns into complete chaos, and I’m left standing in the middle, powerless to stop it at all.

Mack

“Call a doctor!” Bobby Carol yells at the top of his lungs.

“I think that man is a doctor!” another student shouts.

A bomb of fear and terror explodes in the auditorium as more kids start shouting from their seats, and teachers bounce around the room like pinballs trying to calm them down.

“Call 9-1-1!”

“Call my mom! I want to go home!”

“I’m so scared! I’ve never seen a dead woman before!”

“You think they’re gonna make us look at the body?”

“I’ll puke!”

“My mom loves to listen to smodcasts about people dying!”

See, the thing about having nearly three hundred elementary students in one room at the same time while something unexpected is happening is that there’s almost nothing in the world that could or would calm them down.

Their minds are a filterless abyss of commentary and conclusions.

“Damn, cuz,” Thatch says from right behind me, startling me completely. Apparently, he’s arrived just in time to see the shitshow. “I don’t know if I can follow this act,” he says. “I was just planning on talking about finances and shit.”

“How about you do something to help? Go manage your kid and the ones around him,” I order as I take off for Principal Dana and a group of other teachers to try to get a game plan.

I can’t see much from my vantage point, but it looks like Brooke’s eyes are opened again, and her service dog isn’t as amped up as he was mere minutes ago.

“Everything is going to be fine,” I announce to the rows of students closest to me. “Brooke Baker is going to be okay.”

“She’s not dead?!”

“No,” I tell second grader Landon Evans and gesture for everyone to sit back in their seats. “She’s okay, Landon.”

“Well, then what happened?”

“Yeah, what happened?”

“And why is her dress all wet now? Did she pee her pants?” Mary Thomas, one of my second graders questions. “I stopped peeing my pants in preschool!”

When more kids start to chime in about peeing their pants, I realize that things have gotten really out of control. I look toward the stage again, where Brooke Baker is now sitting upright, but Katy looks…really bad. Her face is ashen, and in a split second, she goes from kneeling down toward Brooke to shooting up to standing and walking quickly toward the stage stairs.

I follow her the entire time, and when she reaches the auditorium floor, she’s at a full run with one hand on her stomach and the other pumping wildly in an attempt to pick up the pace.

Instinctually, I take three steps in her direction, the urge to chase after her crashing over me like a wave. But an old memory of her scolding me for scapegoating all the responsibility in work assignments like this one makes me pause.

The queen of organization is no doubt mortified by the chaotic scene, and the best favor I can do for her—the best way to prove to her that she can always trust me, no matter what—is to deal with the fallout and make things right.

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