Knight With Paper Towels

This morning I awoke with the sudden urge to save the day. This day. Today.

I'd forgotten about that time I became a knight and have since had this strange inner responsibility to help people. But the thing is, helping people is hard. Putting coins in a plastic box is one thing, but finding people - real people - who truly need it, and who you're actually able to help, as a teenage girl, without possibly being harmed in some way? Helping is really hard.

But I needed to save the day. I needed to.

And I didn't. Not even a little bit, all through the morning and afternoon.

The last class of the day was Economics. No one learns anything in Economics, because 1) It makes no sense, 2) The original hired teacher had a baby and left us with a very kind old retired teacher who doesn't ever use the white board and talks like he's murmuring you to sleep, and 3) We get to sit where we want.

This is the phenomenon that has occurred in the Economics room since changing seats:

I wondered why I was so aghast at this transition, until I realized I sit here:

The teacher kindly refers to the line of desks against the back wall as "Murderer's Row." This is not really because we are all that awful, but because of the terribly good behavior of the boys and girls at each other side of the room.

Imagining they would all have soo much to talk about, being around their own gender, and soo little learning going on, they ought to be a happy chorus of giggles and goofs.

This is not what happens.

They are very quiet. And very bored. And try to pay attention and can't. And they hate the class and everything in it.

Then there is us.

I think it would do us all a bunch of good to say, before I start, this is a pre-IB classroom. The prestigious, intelligent, hard-working brilliance of the next generation. Seated here. In this class.

Murderer's Row is segregated, not as much by gender as by conversation.

The blue square sitting next to me is named Martensen. Martensen loves. A lot.

Today Martensen brought pizza.

An entire Ziploc freezer bag of pizza and a bowtie he'd found on the floor. I wore the bowtie and he ate the pizza and things went very smoothly for about thirty minutes until he started laughing.

We spend most of the class laughing, and were used to joining in, whether the joke was funny or not. Martensen forgot how. Martensen kept laughing. Martensen could not stop.

After a while we became concerned. "Marten, calm down now," the musicals girl said.

"Martensen." The math puns kid put his hand on his shoulder. "Breath in..."

Martensen breathed in.

But then the math kid went back to doing his work, and Martensen did not breathe out. He waited for further instructions until the laugh bubbled and boiled inside him and erupted in a sudden and tragic display of outright hysteria.

Laughing, crying, drooling, banging his head against the desk, he lost it. At first we tried laughing. Then it wasn't funny. It was just very disconcerting.

"Marten - Marten, are you okay?"

It was then that Marten started bleeding from his nose and promptly left the classroom without another word.

Thirty seconds later I noticed several texts on my phone.

"Hey do you think Marten's doing okay?"

"Oh. Um - I'll be right back."

It was an easy save, right? Get to the girls' bathroom, get some paper towels, knock on the boys' bathroom, hand him the paper towels, boom - saved. Knight in shining armor.

Except I never use the school bathrooms around that area and couldn't understand that the boys' bathroom is always right next to or in front of the girls'.

There was hurried wandering from one hallway to the next until I finally found the girls' bathroom, ran in whistling the Indiana Jones theme song, got the paper towels and left down another hallway, before returning to find that Marten was directly next to the restroom I had just been in.

A girl was playing on her iPod in front of the restrooms. She looked at me, looked at the paper towels, and responded to my pointing by saying, "He's in there."

I knocked on the door a few times and nothing happened. Guys went in, and almost immediately came back out with a sick kind of look, until eventually I called his name. He opened the door, smiled broadly despite the blood, and took the paper towels.

The sink was red and the floor was spotted and no one else was inside.

He returned almost immediately after I did with an entirely different dilemma.

His clean white shirt was now spattered with the blood of angry men and his tear-stained face of hysteria was still in full bloom. After a difficult changing of shirts, he wiped the emotion from himself and apologized for the outburst.

"Don't apologize for bleeding," I told him.

"I was laughing but I think I meant to cry..."

"That's okay."

"I'm sorry you had to save me."

"I'm a certified knight. It is my honor and privilege to do so. Emotional instability aside."

"Thank you for being my knight with paper towels."

Thank you for being my knight with paper towels.

I think I feel a pin being made for this one. Or better yet, a name-tag.

MORAL: We should always help wherever we can, even if it's doing really stupid stuff, like holding open doors and letting people ahead of us in line at the store. Chivalry isn't always found in steel-plated armor atop a strong-legged stallion. Sometimes it's found in a friend in a bloody bathroom.