Excerpt: Recovering

Chapter 1
I slumped in the red chair, sitting in the principal’s office, waiting for my parents to come.
Expelled.
I had gotten expelled in the second to last month of school.
I had been leaning against my locker, talking to my group, when Mrs. Morrison, my homeroom teacher, came up to me, lips pursed.
“Adelaide Parker, you’re wanted in the principal’s office. Immediately.” She shot me an evil look. “Follow me.”
I turned around, rolled my eyes at my friends, and said, “I’ll see you later, guys.” I noticed that some of them looked like they pitied me. I remembered that some of them had gone out of classes during the day to see the principal too. What was up?
So I followed Mrs. Morrison to the principal’s office. Once we got there, the principal gestured for me to sit down, and said, “Adelaide, would you be so kind as to sit, please? Thank you, Mrs. Morrison. You may go now.”
After Mrs. Morrison left, I said, before Mr. Johnson had a chance to say anything, “Don’t call me Adelaide, I go by Addie.”
He replied pleasantly, “All right. Well then, Addie, I assume that you know that it is not normally a good thing to be sent to the principal’s office.”
I replied, in a mocking tone that suggested that I thought that he was stupid, “Of course I know that. EVERYONE knows that.”
He said, “Well, then, do you know WHY you have been sent here?”
I stared at him defiantly. “No, that’s for YOU to tell ME.”
“And I will, but I wish I didn’t have to.” Mr. Johnson looked straight into my eyes. “Addie, you and a group of students have been turned in numerous times for underage drinking, underage smoking, illegal drugs, and a staggeringly long list of other charges.”
I barely heard his words. I was thinking, We got found out? How? Someone must have told, but who? Who ratted us out? Who squealed? I thought of many other questions similar to these, but the principal kept talking.
“As we have gotten numerous reports from concerned students, we have decided to expel the people whose names were given.”
Another thought shot through my head now: I just got suspended for something that I didn’t want to do in the first place.
So that was how I came to be in the pricipal’s office, waiting for my parents. I could hear the clock ticking. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. It sounded like a bomb, ticking down until explosion time, the explosion that I knew was inevitable. And I knew that when my parents came, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
I was right.
First thing that happened when my parents walked into the room?
My mom walked up to me and slapped me across the face.
Mr. Johnson stood up and said, “Mr. and Mrs. Parker, I know that you must be upset, but I beg you, please do not resort to physical violence to punish your daughter, at least not while you are under the roof of this school.”
My father nodded, and then spoke quietly to my mom. My dad is the mellow one. My mom’s anger flares up really easily, so I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I had never been caught doing anything quite this drastic before.
My parents discussed the matter with Mr. Johnson. I didn’t know why all these little tin details mattered so much. I grew more and more uncomfortable sitting in the office listening to them talk. Finally, I burst out, saying, “Do I have to stay sitting in here? Can I wait for you, like, by my locker or something?”
My mom started to say, “no-“ but my Dad cut her off and said, “Of course, Addie. We’ll;; find you later.”
I muttered my thanks and stumbled out of the room. I decided to go outside for a little fresh air. Expelled. The word still sounded weird to me.
I was surprised to find my group outside when I walked out of the school. I walked over to them.
Jess, a beautiful blond, and the leader of the group, was standing with her arm around her boyfriend, Steven. She asked, “Expelled?”
I answered, “Yeah. How many of you?”
Steph, a charming brunette, and another girl in our group, replied, “All of us. Every single person in the group. Every one of us!”
Her boyfriend, Adam, added, “Yeah, and at the end of the school year too! We almost got through the year without being busted once!”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was thinking, What happens now?
Kelly, the nicest girl in the group, a shyer blond, asked, “Were your parents really mad?”
I gave a that’s-an-understatement laugh and replied in a bitter voice, “Yeah, first thing that happened when they got there, before a word was even said, was my mom slapped me across the face.”
Steven said, “Right in front of the principal? She’s got guts.” I envied Steven’s nonchalance. I heard he had already been expelled from several schools, and he had been to juvie jail a couple of times, too. Another expelling wasn’t bothering him.
Beth, Jess’s second in command, asked, “So is the meeting over already?”
I laughed. “Not if my mom is still involved. I asked to be excused, and my dad granted my wish.”
Adam grinned. “Just like a genie.”
I laughed again. “I guess.” I had a ridiculous image of my dad in billowy genie pants, a red vest, and a white turban fastened with a jewel. I loved my father. It was one of two loves that didn’t fade after I joined the “In Crowd”.
Jess asked, “So was your mom pissed when your dad excused you?”
I rolled my eyes. “Take a wild guess.”
She smirked. “Dumb question, right?”
“No, just obvious answer.” I smirked back.
Kelly timidly asked, “So, how many think that their parents will ground them?”
I shrugged. “It’s a given that my mom will ground me.”
“Same here,” a pretty girl with red-gold hair named Angie said. “It’s inevitable. It took the combined efforts of me and my mum to convince my dad to let me stay at school for the rest of today. Mind you, my mum’s not to happy about it either.” There was a bit of an Irish lilt to her voice. Her family had moved here from Ireland the year before.
Jess looked bored. “OF COURSE they’ll ground me, but they can’t ground me for forever, plus I doubt that they’ll take my cell phone away, which is really all I need. I just need to be connected to the world, and I’m fine.”
Adam looked forlorn. “Well, the consequences will be more stiff for me, I’m afraid. I won’t be able to use the home phone, they’ll take away my cell phone, I won’t be able to go out, won’t be able to use the computer, won’t be able to watch TV. In a previous grounding, my parents put security cameras up all over the house to make sure I was following their rules.”
Pretty much everyone except Steven said that they’d get punishments when they got home. Steven simply shrugged and said, “Well, my parents both do stuff like this, so they know that they’d just be filthy hypocrites.”
We talked some more, and then my parents came out of the school building. My mom looked thoroughly pissed off. Talking to her tonight was going to be FUN.
My mother walked up to me, her body radiating so much anger that you could almost feel it. “GET. IN. THE. CAR. NOW!”
With a farewell wave to my group, I followed my parents to the dirty green van that my dad drove. On the way home, they gave me my grounding rules. Rather, my mom gave me the rules.
“You won’t communicate with ANYONE while you are grounded. That means NO facebook, NO phone, NO myspace, NO computer, NOTHING that will allow you to communicate with anyone. NO television. I will give you assignments, since you are no longer in school, and you MUST complete them. The ONLY time you can use the computer is for an assignment that I have given you, and then either your father or I will be standing behind you, monitoring you. ONLY recreational activity that you can do is reading, and I will tell you when and what you can read. You are not allowed out of the house except for church or unless we give you permission. Have you got the rules?”
I stayed silent. My mom turned around and screamed, “HAVE YOU GOT IT!”
I didn’t answer the question. Instead, I said, “How long?”
My mom’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “What do you mean, how long?”
“How long am I grounded for?”
She huffed angrily. “That is yet to be decided, but I can assure you, it will be no short amount of time.”
Oh, great. Wasn’t this going to be fun. I stared out of the window, signaling to my mom that as far as I was concerned, the conversation was over. I was sure that my grounding would last well into summer vacation, which started in two months, so probably at least four months of grounding. It went without saying that this was not going to be my best summer ever.