By lunch, half the school knew about the blue stripe.
By the end of fourth period, the office had killed the feeling.
The call came while my class was working on a vocabulary packet they suddenly cared nothing about.
The phone rang.
I answered it.
Then I felt every set of eyes in the room land on my face the second I said, “Yes, he’s here.”
Mason looked up at me before I even hung up.
Kids who spend enough time around adults learn to read trouble fast.
“The office wants to see you,” I said.
His hand tightened on the wheel.
“Why?”
I hated that I didn’t have a good answer.
“Probably because they noticed the chair.”
The room changed right then.
It was like somebody had cracked a window and let the cold in.
A few minutes earlier, Mason had been making smooth turns in the aisle between desks, his grin showing up in flashes like he didn’t fully trust it yet.
Now that grin was gone.
He nodded once.
“Okay.”
I walked him down myself.
The chair moved quiet as a thought.
That somehow made the trip worse.
Because the whole point was that it finally worked.
Outside the front office, the nurse was waiting with our principal, Ms. Keene.
She looked at the chair.
Then she looked at me.
“Mason cannot use this chair at school.”
Then the nurse glanced toward the storage room and said, “We have a transport chair.”
And the second they rolled it out, every bit of dignity Mason had just gotten back was about to be tested in front of the whole school…
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