“Don’t cry, Honey—she’ll be just as happy as she’s always been with you….”
That was Mommy’s logic to her daughter, seven going on forty-two. Well, Mom was forty-two, at least, and wanted everything to go as planned—each increment of seven years a battle between feeling blessed and feeling damned. The daughter’s name was Tabitha, and boys at school would tease her for that name, naïve to witchlike prejudice; they rather thought it sounded babyish—Tabby, Tabby, Tabby as the babble they’d exchange.
The fact she brought this doll to second grade—second grade!—instead of something sleek like neon-flashing sneakers or an iPhone 17—made the kid seem ancient, out of touch. At recess, then, these boys would trade their game of peacocking a football for the chance to kidnap baby Tabby’s baby doll, run it to the bushes and negotiate her ransom.
Twice this happened before a teacher’s notice; threats were levelled at the boys, but their apologies appeared ingenuous—even smileworthy from the teacher’s point of view, as school attempts holistic learning, and what more perfect tool than the playground and decision-making there.
The fourth time came and went without such witness, and instead of bushes, the heftiest of boys stuffed Dolly down his baggy pants. Tabitha had seen this act, and for all her years of reticence, determined she had been abused enough.
She kicked him in the nuts, well aware she might be maiming Dolly, too. The teacher now took notice and did not think it ticked a box of something ‘teachable’. She hollered everyone away and grabbed poor Tabitha by the biceps to march her to the principal, where Tabitha would have to stay until her mother came to pick her up.
The rhetoric was limited—the principal would not call the burly kid to ascertain his point of view, as that might victimize him twice. And Tabby’s claim about the doll did not make sense: upon inspection of her cubbyhole, there it was—more or less intact. Sure, an arm was missing, but how would school keep track of private property? Anything that came or left the campus was at the bearer’s risk. That’s the way the real world works, now, isn’t it?
A girl name Agnes wrote a note and folded it into the passing hand of Tabitha, suspended for the coming days . Do not wory [she misspelled the double ‘r’], I will find the arm and we can stich [one ‘t’] her back togehter agen [quite a feat for second grade].
And though she didn’t read this to her Mommy, both had learned today that tears were not exclusive to one’s pain.
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2025)
