Ministry Fiction Irritant #012

Damage Control

Lemmy Mauer’s mother made all of his sandwiches on Texas Toast. Not the real thing – no butter, no garlic – but what they sold in the grocery store, thick cuts of chewy white bread. The sandwiches were carefully placed in a Ziploc bag but the fit was so tight that they were mutilated when he pulled them out.

So he brought the plastic-handle scissors from his homeroom desk to lunch and he sliced the bag open. And he cut the sandwich into two triangles just because he could.

When he was finished eating, Lemmy raised his hand and was excused to the bathroom where he washed his scissors with runny pink soap and dried them with two feet of scratchy paper towel.

Assistant Principal Vargas had no patience for this. Dennis Bruner was stabbed in the shin and Vargas watched the paramedics pull the scissors out. But Lemmy’s mother wanted her son to explain it himself.

Didn’t matter to Vargas. Of course Bruner provoked it. There was a history. But you couldn’t just take Lemmy’s scissors and send him back to lunch. There was procedure: Let the mother make her case all she wants and then take care of it.