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2002-03-26 | 5:02 p.m.

It doesn't seem fair to be in such a bad mood two days after my period ends. I don't think that's how it's supposed to work.

I knew I would regret telling Barbara that there were no kids in the reading lab that bugged me, because today there was this new kid who was really pushing my buttons. Literally. First she walks in the door bickering loudly with another girl. Then, despite being almost as tall as I am (which in retrospect suggests to me that she is repeating first grade), she insists on sitting on top of three pillows, which prompts more bickering from other, pillowless kids. Then when I check over her worksheets, I discover that she is pretending to be further along in her work than she really is. I take a long time getting it all sorted out. Then I discover that the whole row of girls is guilty of this Peter Pan collar crime. I finally get her settled and start helping another kid when she starts hollering at me, loudly, that her tape player doesn't work. Neither does that of her neighbor. It takes me all of ten seconds to figure out that the ON/OFF button on the surge protector under her desk is switched to the off position. So I crawl under the desk, turn it on, and go back to what I was doing before. Not one minute later, the two of them are complaining again. I say, "You're kicking it off accidentally," and she swears upside down and backwards that she hasn't touched it. See? She was holding her feet like this. I fix it again. When it happens for the third time in three minutes, I don't call her a lying little sack of shit and say I'm going to kick her ass from here to eternity. They don't let us say that to the first-graders. Instead I say, "You know what? I think you're right. It is broken. We'll have to look into it. You can go back to class now." She looks me right in the eye and says, "Thank you." Meaning she never wanted to be here in the first place. I think to myself, you think I'm doing you a favor. That's what you know. I know she is expecting her friend to come with her, and I let her think so until she takes a step out the door, at which point I quickly divert the friend to another workspace. A ha! I feel a surge of triumph, as if I were myself a first-grader who has just outwitted the class bully.

Then after all the kids leave, I tattle on her to the teaching assistant. Hah!

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