Fiction
The High Five
And other things my mother refused to teach me
I got my ass pounded on my first day of public school. I was fourteen and had previously been schooled at home.
This beating happened fifty-six days after my father left my mother.
It was the day Mom started her new job, the first job she’d held since she was 28 years old. She quit her last job because the office cleaning crew used “caustic chemicals” to clean her workspace every night.
She had a tote on her desk with cleaning products that wouldn’t make her sick. Vinegar. Was there something, anything, wrong with good old basic vinegar? Pine cleaner for the floors. Bleach for the toilets. Even though she left notes, and cleaned her own area, even though she stayed at work after hours to catch the crew, begging them to spare her health by using her “safe” cleaners, she was ignored.
The man in charge of the cleaning crew, a big fellow named Ronnie with blurry black tattoos and creases in his khaki uniform pants and shirt, talked about her behind her back.
Suspicious that these things were going on, she left a cassette recorder on her desk and replayed the entire conversation to her boss.
