The secretary rose from her black swivel chair and announced my name.
“The doctor will see you in room two,” she said, adjusting the strap of her eyepatch.
He wasn’t there when I stepped inside, so I took a seat and scanned the room, zooming into the enlarged eyeball staring back at me; panning across the variously sized letters on the poster on the wall behind; alighting upon a framed photograph of his dog, which looked exactly like my teacher’s.
“So,” he said waltzing in: “What brings you in today?”
“My teacher said I can’t see properly and recommended I come see you.”
“I can certainly help with that,” he said. “My wife is a teacher actually.”
“Oh and what does she teach?”
“The sixth grade.”
“I’m in grade six actually,” I said. “Elizabeth Simcoe Secondary.”
“Do you know a Missus Madoff?
“She’s my teacher!”
“Well she’s my wife!”
Our palpable excitement, in a room meant to be so clinical, felt incongruous.
“I thought that that dog looked familiar. But how come you don’t have the same last name,” I asked, wiping the smile off his face, causing him to raise his bushy, grey eyebrows instead.
“She chose not to make that change,” he responded. “You’re very observant, you know that?”
“Of course Doctor: but supposedly it is my vision that lacks definition.”
Two weeks later, on the first Saturday in May, I returned with a cheque for two hundred dollars in my skirt pocket and ran into classmate at reception desk, a neurotic girl named Donna, who informed me she’d been sent here by our teacher too, due to “poor vision” as well, which aroused suspicions.
Were we being bamboozled, I suddenly wondered, and when I turned my head to verify my doubts with the secretary, she removed her eyepatch and flashed the rosy socket at me. Aghast, cheque still in my pocket, I grabbed Donna’s hand and pulled the both of us out of that predicament.
“So what are we going to do,” she asked. “Where will we going?”
My trust in adults—their supposed authority, their so-called advice—had been obliterated, forever, and now we would carry out fugitive existences.
“Well,” I replied, pondering the possibilities.
We had enough money to survive on our own awhile, before our luck ran out and we inevitably had to return to our respective homes.
I’d always wanted to go to Manitoba—and told her so.
“But I’m so very hungry,” Donna wined.
Up until that moment I hadn’t been able to clearly see that she wasn’t yet, like me, independent and self-sufficient, and I, still invested in my personal development, wasn’t interested just then in being bogged down by someone who couldn’t suppress their primal urges, to feed off the emptiness.
We could have a celebratory meal, I thought—my treat, obviously—and immediately after that I’d drop her ass, and go west.