Last Chance

Chapter 17:

We ask Jamie later that night if he would be alright watching the girls well we go to Joel’s appointment that Sunday. He says that’s fine considering we haven’t asked him to do much else and figures it’s the least he can do.

The next day we wake Jamie and the girls up at 10:00 am, we feed the girls breakfast and tell them we’ll be back at two. Ash seems dismayed by Joel leaving, they’d bonded over watching the revamp of American Idol the night before.

The session goes normally, we report little to no side effects and go through the whole IV, shivering temperature drop and drossiness as unusual and get updates on Sophie from Maria. The recent MRIs have come back and shown no expansion on Joel’s tumour which is neither good nor bad. It’s slowed the spread and the effects so far, we have to go through further treatment to see if the tumour will shrink or eliminate the thinner, weaker parts of the tumour so the edges will be more solid and they can remove it via surgery.

When we arrive back at the house to pick the girls up to go shopping for a new bed for them and toys and clothes, Jamie had fed them lunch clothed and dressed them. He’s being the helpful, respectable older brother figure and Joel is proud of him for that. He truly was a good kid, despite what Charlotte thought.

We pick the kids up and take them to Ikea, I figure we’d bring Jamie and he could pick out some accessories for his room.

The girls pick out a plain oak wood bunk bed with their own sheet, blanket, and pillow sets, Aimee’s is a sea world theme with tropical fish, whales, and dolphins, and Ash, who looked so happy when we said she could pick any of the themes from either the boy’s or girl’s section, went and picked out a space theme with planets and a spaceship. They also picked the letters out for their names to be put on their bedroom door. Aimee’s letters were in Indigo and Ash’s were in orange.

When we went to the mall to go clothes shopping Joel took Aimee and Jamie, just in case he had a dizzy spell, and I went with Ash to find clothes in different stores. Ash gravitated towards boys' clothing, I just made sure they were the right sizes and didn’t judge, I could feel some mothers' staring at me as I followed this young girl around the normal boy’s sections. I wasn’t sure whether they were judging me for shopping with my daughter or for allowing Ash to wear clothes from the boy’s section.

Ash was happy though, when we moved on to toys, she picked out some Pokémon cards, some new Hot Wheels cars, and some key chain figure emojis.

When we met back up with Joel, Jamie, and Aimee, she had a whole new line of clothes from skirts, to dresses, to shorts and hair accessories. We brought them home and I and Jamie carried the boxed-up bunkbed inside and placed it in the upstairs hallway. We told the girls we’d put it together tomorrow well they were at school. They sorted and folded their clothes and toys in an organized fashion before we had a late dinner. We set the kids to bed but at around nine Ash comes downstairs. She stands in the doorway nervous and scared.

“What is it, honey?” Joel asks.

She comes closer.

“Can I get my hair cut?” she asks.

“Sure, we’ll make an appointment for after school tomorrow,” I reply.

She seems elated before pausing again.

“Is it okay if I want it all shaved off?” she asks.

“You can do whatever you want, it's hair, it’ll grow back if you don’t like it,” Joel replies.

She’s ecstatic and bounces off back upstairs. I and Joel both smile.

We wake up the next morning and take Aimee and Ash to school. Ash seems nervous. We take them into the main office and wait with them till they get their schedules and guides and are led off to their classes. We go back home and I call the local hair salon and set up an appointment for Ash. I then start working on the computers I’ve fallen behind on since we adopted the girls. I get through about seven before I have to go pick the girls up well Joel starts dinner.

I arrive at the school and parked by the door the principal instructed me was the pickup spot for the fifth graders. I got out and stood by the car to wait for the girls. Aimee bounded out to me first looking excited tagged along by a pale red hair girl. Ash came trudging behind the two.

“Did you have fun?” I ask Aimee more so than Ash because I can tell she hadn’t.

“I made a new friend, this is Kristen,” Aimee introduces the redhead.

“Hi, Kristen,” I say.

Ash walks right past us and gets into the car without a word.

A redhead lady comes up to us, Kristen’s mother, I assume.

“Who’s your new friend Kristen?” she asks.

“This is Aimee,” Kristen says.

“Are you her father?” she asks.

“Yes,” I answer.

I guess that’s what I was even though the title felt a little weird still.

“Can we get their number?” Kristen asks.

Her mother smiles at her daughter and so do I.

“Sure,” I reply.

I open the car door and find a piece of scrap paper and pen and write down my number and hand it to her mother.

“See you tomorrow, Aimee,” Kristen bids as her mother and her leave to go back to their own car. Aimee and I get in the car and I start it up. I drive Aimee home before taking Ash to her hair appointment.

“You okay, Ash? Was school okay?” I asked glancing in the rear-view mirror.

“It was alright,” she mumbles.

“Did anything happen?” I ask.

“The teacher introduced me as Ashley and kept calling me it even when I and Aimee corrected her. Kids also teased me about my hair and clothes,” she replied.

I could see where this would be going if I let it continue.

“Do you want me to talk to the teacher about your name and the kids?” I ask.

“You can try, but she said she calls me by what it says on the attendance regardless of what I want,” she answered. “Even if you talk to her about the kids, they’re kids, they’ll do what they want, too.”

At this point, I consider talking to the principal rather than the teacher as she didn’t seem to be any help in either situation.

“Do you know what kind of haircut you want?” I ask.

“I want shaved sides and a few inches on top,” she replies.

“Okay, just try to ignore those kids okay? If you want your hair short, that’s your preference. It doesn’t matter and they’re not worth your time if they’re going to judge you over something as simple as your hair or clothes,” I remind her.

When we arrived at the hair salon I and Ash sit in the waiting area looking through hairstyles, she said she wanted some gel so she could style it in the future.

One of the hairstylists calls Ash’s name and I follow her in and sit beside her chair, out of the way. The hairstylist is a bubbly, early-twenties-something-year-old with tattoos and her dark black hair up in a bun with curls trailing down.

“What would we like today?” she beams.

I pull up some of the pictures Ash picked out of the hairstyle book out front.

“Okay, great, let’s start by shaving the sides,” she replied.

She pulled out the shaver plugged it in and figured out which cover she needed before turning it on and shaving off the hair on the sides of Ash’s head. Ash has a smile on her face the whole time as the hair becomes what we saw in the picture.

When she’s finally done she brushes off all the hair clumps and removes the cover so Ash can go look in the mirror more closely.

“Do you like it?” the hairstylist asks.

“Yes, thank you,” Ash says politely.

“You’re welcome,” she replies.

We go off to find some hair gel and pay and leave. We arrive home at about 5:30 pm and Ash is a much happier camper than when we left school. The five of us eat dinner together and we help the girls do their homework, we send them to bed at eight and I tell Joel about what Ash told me about the teacher and kids and we decide to go in the next day to make an appointment to talk to the principal.

“It’s hard to believe kids are still like that, thought they would have progressed by now,” I reply.

“They’re still like that because parents and adults like that with their own judgments and opinions still exist,” Joel replies.

He was talking about Charlotte, the teacher, and his parents. I hoped the principal would be more reasonable, he seemed pretty open to us as a gay couple, so surely, he could talk to the teacher and the kids about treating people fairly and calling people what they want to be called.

But I knew both of us had that small fear deep inside from experience, that he was only open to us because he was making money off of us, to educate our children, not to make them happy or fit in, but to educate them. Some people would say what was happening to Ash was just part of life, that it would toughen her up or prepare her for the real world, but she was ten, and she deserved to be a kid for as long as possible especially when she hadn't really been one in recent years, when she had little to no stability or constant love or people she could trust, she deserved it.

Now if we went on our trip to Japan, we’d need to either have to bring the kids along or find a sitter, I trusted Jamie to an extent, but we couldn’t expect him to watch the kids twenty-four-seven when we’d most likely be gone for a week, he was a teen, and even if it was one week out of the summer, I knew what it was like to have one week taken away from you to watch or visit family members.

Joel had set a date, July 17th, we had a venue, a cake was being designed and he was in the middle of designing flower bouquets and invitations. He’d been doing ring shopping from home, this required Alice going out to ring stores on her days off and looking through rings that fit Joel’s description and sending him pictures, he had set two piles, no and maybe but nothing had really struck gold with him yet. Neither of us wanted anything flashy but we wanted more than our silver engagement rings.

“I’ll go tomorrow,” I replied trying to steer away from the subject of the principal and school.

“This would never happen at the middle school, especially, if I still worked there,” he mumbled.

“They think sexuality and gender have no place in elementary schools even though it kind of does when you develop your sense of self during this time,” I answered.

Ash’s sense of self couldn’t even have been blamed on us, she had been a tom-boy before we met her. She had always been like this, she was born this way, and we had no impact on it.

Sometimes, I think people are born the way they are just to spite their parents like a joke from God. You didn’t want them this way? Too bad, they are. Or something. Having people say it was wrong or that you’d go to hell if you participated in those activities just caused self-hate and confusion. It destroyed a person, they had to fake who they were for their whole lives if they choose to follow them. They looked over their shoulders, and monitored their every choice, their every move, to make sure what they did fell within the guidelines of what the people around them wanted until it drove them insane and they entertained other possibilities or told them and got rejected and kicked out like Jamie.