I pull into the school parking lot with my head buzzing like a beehive and my stomach filled with dread. This is the same elementary school that I went to when I was Chris’s age. This is the school where I met Mack Forrester. Now his son is walking the same halls, charming some of the same teachers and stirring the same shit up as his dad.

Even if Joel hadn’t died last year, Chris would still be a handful. It’s in his DNA as much as the almond skin tone he gets from me is, or the mischievous smile he gets from Mack.

Since the day he was born, Chris has always been a handful. I was blessed with the kid who climbed out of his crib and pulled the curtains down when he was one. The kid who decided the bathtub was an ideal place to put garden snakes when he was four. The boy who stole cardboard and other trash on garbage day for months so he could build a huge Evil Knievel style bike ramp across the street of our subdivision.

It was two days in the hospital getting his leg set and casted up for that one. And, of course, about a week after it was removed he built another ramp. This time it was sturdier and he landed the jump. He also got to spend almost an entire month in his room being proud of himself.

Even before Mack was all over the news, I never had a chance to forget him. Not when his son has been putting me through the paces, giving me no rest, and melting my heart with his father’s signature smile.

Once Joel passed away, Chris spiraled out of control. Simple pranks and adventures took a darker turn toward destruction. He dropped out of almost all of his activities, giving up everything except football for a group of boys that look like a gang in training. All they’re missing are little name tags. Hello My Name is: Thug.

Initially when Joel was killed in the accident, I took Chris to a psychologist who said that he’d stop acting out after six months or so. We just hit the anniversary of Joel’s passing a few months ago and, if anything, Chris has only stepped up his efforts. I feel like he’s an engine that’s picking up steam on whatever this track is that he’s decided to head down, and I’m left feebly standing at the end holding my arms out to try and stop him. But we both know he has the power to mow me down.

I make my way into the principal’s office. A path I wish I couldn’t sleep walk to. My son is sitting on a little plastic chair against the wall across from the school secretary, Miss Wilmot. I give him a look and as he tilts his head and peeks up at me from under the brim of his ball cap. He knows he’s in shit, the flash of fear in his eyes doesn’t escape me.

However, the older he gets, the more we’re both coming to realize that a mother only has so much power. I can yell until I lose my voice, I can take away every single thing that he enjoys and ground him, but I can’t seem to change this path he’s on. He won’t be happy until he watches his entire world go down in flames. He doesn’t know yet how difficult it is to build a life from ashes.

Miss Wilmot looks over her glasses at me with a look that instantly transforms me back into a ten-year-old. My gut twists up into a knot and when I reach the edge of her desk I’m surprised that I don’t have to stand on my tip-toes to look over at her. It’s strange how a place or a moment can make us all children again. Like decades of growth haven’t slid by us. Like our timelines shrivel down, depleting years of experiences with a single stare.

“Ms. Brickman, how nice to see you again. Too bad it’s never under different circumstances.” She looks over her wire-rimmed glasses and I stare down into my palms. How does she do that? I need to bring her to my house to give Chris that look when he’s acting up. I’d most certainly have a much different son.

“Mr. Vaughn is waiting for you in his office, you can go right in.” he continues.

“Thank you,” I mutter, my ears burning up and the skin on the back of my neck prickling as I watch my feet shuffle to the office door. Put my hair in twists and my feet in Mary Janes because somehow the last eighteen years of my life have disappeared. I’m a butterfly who lost her wings, crawling into the office.

The door is open and Mr. Vaughn doesn’t look up from the file folder he has under his nose when he waves me in. “Come in, come in. Sit down, sit down.” he repeats himself.

I sit across the desk from him and fold my hands in my lap, waiting for him to stop reading whatever the folder holds. It’s thick and tattered around the edges. Chris Brickman is written down the side tab. I swallow hard when I try to imagine how many offenses that folder must hold for it to be so thick.

“Ms. Brickman.” I jump in the worn office chair as the principal jolts me from my thoughts. “As you can see, your son has had another incident here that we need to discuss.” Mr. Vaughn carefully places the file folder on his desk and fans several sheets out across the top.

“What happened?” My mind races with possibilities. What have I already been in here for this year? Disrupting classes, fighting, skipping school, the list swirls through my mind as I wait for the next step in his delinquency to be reached.

“Christopher was found with explosives in the boy’s bathroom today, Ms. Brickman. I’m afraid that between our zero tolerance policy on weapons at school and the damages that he and his friends did in the restroom, he’s facing expulsion this time.” Mr. Vaughn squints his already beady eyes at me, waiting for me to close the gaping hole my dropped jaw has left in my face.

“Explosives? Are you sure? I mean, I know you’re sure, of course,” I raise my hands like I’m trying to clutch my words from the air before they reach his large, flat ears. “I have no idea where he’d get them, I mean. Did they make a pipe bomb? Or maltov cocktail? Or …” I wrack my brain.

“Cherry bombs.” Mr. Vaughn answers me matter-of-factly.

“Cherry bombs?” I parrot his words, but they don’t match the pictures in my head. “That was the explosives?”

“Yes, Ms. Brickman. Christopher and a couple other students decided to drop a handful of lit cherry bombs into a student toilet this morning and blew it up.”

“Blew it up? It exploded?” I try to imagine the scene. Are cherry bombs that powerful?

“Well, it blew the lid off the seat, yes. And it also made a terrible mess. There was water everywhere.” His face flushes a deep maroon as he relives the horror.

“Cherry bombs.” I sit up straighter in my chair, suddenly feeling my butterfly wings return once more as I transform back into the twenty-eight-year-old I am.

“Yes.” Mr. Vaughn nods severely.

“Those were the explosives? So, Chris and his friends threw cherry bombs in a toilet and it blew water all over the floor?” The visions I had of shrapnel and smoldering tile laying in broken piles of the boy’s washroom are replaced with the kind of innocent foolishness that boys do so often, even Bart Simpson has been immortalized doing it on the Cartoon Network.

“That’s correct,” the principal snaps at me. He points down to the many forms he fanned out in front of his folder. “As you can see, I have plenty of witness statements, including one from your son admitting that he was the one who brought the explosives to school today and that he participated in the destruction of school property.” He taps his finger like he’s trying to communicate in Morse code against the sheets.

“Ok, so, Chris and his friends pulled a prank with some cherry bombs and now he’s getting expelled? Isn’t that a bit much? I mean, boys do this kind of thing all the time don’t they?”

“No, Ms. Brickman, boys don’t. In fact, with only three months left of the school year there has been exactly one incident with explosives in the school …”

“With cherry bombs, you mean?”

“Yes, with explosives. And it was Chris who incited it. If you’d like to take a look at his record, Ms. Brickman, you’ll see that Chris is often the ringleader in such cases. As I said, there’s a zero tolerance policy with weapons at this school.”

“Cherry bombs.” I repeat.

“Any weapons.” he answers firmly. “Unfortunately, I can’t extend Chris anymore chances. If his behavior wasn’t getting progressively worse with each incident, then I could think about suspension. However, it’s clear that he’s not getting the guidance he needs outside of school hours in order to modify his behavior.”

Well, that does it. “Listen, Mr. Vaughn. It’s one thing to drag me in here from work and try to make my kid sound like he’s a school shooter for throwing some cherry bombs in a toilet, ok? But, it’s quite another when you decide to insinuate that I’m not pulling my weight as a mother. If you bothered to look at that file, you’d see that a little over a year ago, when my husband died, I became a single mother. I don’t expect you to use that as an excuse for Chris, but it might explain his escalating behavior a bit. Maybe if you’d ever bothered to send him to the school counselor, you’d know that too. So, instead of sitting there judging my parenting skills, maybe you should be analyzing your supervising practices a bit.” I stand up, breathing in deep into my lungs. My transformation back to adulthood is complete and I’m ready to take my kid and go. Enough of this garbage. I turn on my heel and head toward the office door when Mr. Vaughn clears his throat.

“Ms. Brickman, before you go, we need to discuss the matter of financial compensation for the damages.”

So much for my dramatic exit.