Angels Watching Over You
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11: The First Weeks
The First Day
The board’s ruling arrived in writing eleven days after the hearing, three pages long and lacking any of the warmth Dr. Marsh had shown from the dais, but it said what it needed to say. Liam Doyle would be permitted to accompany Cecelia Roberts at all times during the school day. Staff were to be informed of the accommodation before the first day of classes. Cissy’s medical information would remain confidential and would be shared only with those who required it to keep her safe. Bea read the final line twice, tucked the pages into the front pocket of the binder, and told herself that the hard part was finished.
On the first Monday of the school year the sky over Towson was a clean, rinsed blue, and the two mothers stood together at the curb in front of Larkspur Elementary while the buses discharged their loads in a long, noisy tide. Liam wore a collared shirt that Étaín had ironed twice and a backpack nearly as wide as his shoulders. Cissy wore the purple sneakers she had picked out herself, and she carried nothing at all, because Liam had already taken her bag from her hands and settled it over his other shoulder.
“You have the letter from the board?” Étaín asked.
“Front pocket. Four copies.” Bea crouched in front of her daughter and straightened the collar of a jacket that did not need straightening. “If you need to leave a room, baby, you leave. You don’t wait to be told. Liam will go with you, and nobody’s allowed to stop you. Do you understand?”
Cissy nodded slowly. Then she leaned forward and rested her forehead against her mother’s shoulder for a long moment, and Bea held her there and did not say anything more, because there was nothing more that would help.
The main hallway at Larkspur ran the length of the building, wide enough for two lines of children and no more, and at ten past eight it was a river. Backpacks swung, lunchboxes knocked against knees, and a pair of older boys pounded past with the reckless joy of children who had been released from a bus. Cissy stopped just inside the doors and drew a sharp breath, and Liam felt it before he saw it, a bright, tight flare of dread that lit up behind his own ribs as though someone had pressed a thumb into the same spot on him. Her stomach was still tender where the scar ran and the radiation had done its work, tender enough that a stray elbow could take her breath away, and there were two hundred elbows in front of them.
He did not need to be told. He shifted to her left, the side facing the traffic, and turned his shoulder outward so that it made a wall, and Cissy, without a word or a glance, slid her arm through his and pulled herself close against his side. Her free hand came up and pressed lightly over her middle. They began to walk.
They had made it perhaps thirty feet, past a bulletin board still bare of its autumn decorations, when a voice cut through the noise.
“Stop right there, you two.”
Mrs. Pruett stood at the junction where the kindergarten wing branched away from the main corridor, a clipboard held against her chest and a lanyard around her neck. She had been assigned hall duty for the first week, and she had clearly decided to be thorough about it. Her eyes went to the joined arms and stayed there.
“We don’t walk like that at Larkspur,” she said. “Hands to yourselves, please. Arms down.”
Cissy’s fingers tightened on Liam’s sleeve and then, with visible effort, began to loosen. Liam did not move.
“She’s,” he began, and stopped. The word she was hurting sat in his mouth, ready, and he swallowed it. Cissy had worked so hard all summer to keep her body her own business, and here in front of a hundred strangers he was not going to hand it over. “We’re going to class.”
“You’ll go to class when you’ve learned how to walk down a hallway.” Mrs. Pruett’s tone was crisp, not angry. She sounded like a woman reciting from a manual. “This is a school, not a playground. That kind of public affection is inappropriate, and it’s against the code of conduct, and it’s going to be written up. Follow me.”
“But that’s not,” Liam tried again, and this time it was Cissy who cut him off, with a small, tugging pressure on his sleeve that meant don’t. He closed his mouth.
The front office had a long counter, a wall of cubbies, and a row of plastic chairs beneath a poster about kindness. They were seated in two of those chairs with a form on a clipboard between them and Mr. Tibbs looking down at it, and Liam read the upside-down words with the fluency of a boy who had learned his letters early. Reason for referral. Beneath it, a list of small boxes. One of them, near the bottom, had been checked in blue ink: PDA.
“Public displays of affection,” Mr. Tibbs read aloud, in the neutral voice of a man reading a menu in a language he did not speak. He turned to Mrs. Pruett. “For kindergartners.”
“The rules don’t have an age exception, Roland.”
“No. I don’t suppose they do.” He pushed his glasses up into his hair, and Liam watched him look at the pair of them, at the boy sitting rigid with his chin lifted and the girl beside him folded small and pale against the chair back. “Liam, can you tell me why you were walking that way?”
“I can’t say.”
“You can’t say, or you won’t?”
“It’s hers,” Liam said. He glanced sideways, and Cissy’s eyes, dark and wide and shining, were fixed on the linoleum. “It’s not mine to say.”
Mr. Tibbs studied him for a long moment. Then he sighed, capped his pen, and clipped the referral onto a folder. “I’ll note it. Let’s not have a repeat, all right? For everyone’s sake.”
They were released back into the hallway, now empty, since the first bell had long since rung. Cissy stood on the threshold with her hands at her sides. Liam stepped up beside her and held his arm out, crooked, the way he had a hundred times, and she looked at it. Then she looked away and folded her own arms across her chest, and she walked to the classroom two inches from him and did not touch him once.
It was the worst thing that had happened to him all day, worse than the referral, and Liam felt it settle in his chest and stay there. Somewhere in the second-grade wing a class was singing, thin and cheerful, and behind them the office door clicked shut.
The Second Teacher
Bea saw the referral that evening, when Cissy’s backpack was unpacked on the kitchen table, and she stood with the yellow carbon copy in her hand for so long that Étaín, arriving with a casserole, stopped in the doorway with the dish held out in front of her.
“They wrote her up,” Bea said. “On the very first day, with the board’s letter in the front office, they wrote up my child for affection.”
“Let me see.” Étaín set down the dish, took the paper, and read it once through. Her mouth went thin. “PDA. They’ve a label ready for tenderness and none for what she’s carrying.” She glanced through the kitchen doorway toward the living room, where Cissy sat on the sofa with a blanket over her knees and Liam sat beside her, a careful foot of cushion between them. “Have you spoken to her?”
“She won’t say anything. She just keeps looking at her hands.” Bea laid the paper on the table and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand, as though it might otherwise curl into something worse. “You know what that was, Étaín. She was protecting her stomach. She holds on to him because if somebody knocks into her she won’t be able to breathe for a minute. They took the one thing that helps and made it a violation.”
“Aye.” Étaín folded her arms. “And in the process taught her the very thing she was already afraid of, that even a hand on an arm can bring a scolding. I could have wept.”
She went into the living room a little later and lowered herself onto the arm of the sofa, near enough to reach both children without seeming to. Liam did not look up. He was tracing the seam of a cushion with one finger, over and over, following it from corner to corner as if it might lead somewhere.
“Did I do it wrong, Mam?”
“Do what wrong, a stór?”
“Walk with her. The teacher said it was bad.” His finger stopped. “Cissy won’t hold my arm now. She doesn’t talk to me with her hands anymore, not even at home. I think she thinks I got her in trouble.”
Étaín drew a breath and let it out slowly, and looked at the small figure on the far cushion, who had turned her face toward the window and was pretending not to hear. “You didn’t get her in trouble. A grown woman looked at the two of you and didn’t understand what she was seeing, and that’s her mistake, not yours and not Cissy’s. What you did was right. It was as right as anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Then why does it feel so bad?”
“Because you love her, and she’s frightened, and the two of you have been made to feel ashamed of something that isn’t shameful.” She reached out and smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “Give her time. She’ll come back to you when she’s ready, and you’ll know it before she does.”
He nodded, unconvinced, and went back to tracing the seam. On the far cushion, Cissy’s fingers crept across the blanket toward him, stopped an inch short of his knee, and stayed there.
For the rest of that week the two children walked the hallways of Larkspur with a foot of air between them, and Liam kept himself just off Cissy’s left side and slightly ahead, where he could take a bump meant for her. It was not enough, and both of them knew it. By Friday Cissy came home with a bruise the size of a plum blossom just under her ribs, and Bea did not say a word about it at dinner. She only cut the child’s chicken into smaller pieces, and afterward she stood at the sink for a long while with the water running.
The second incident came the following Monday.
Ms. Vance’s classroom was a bright, cluttered room with a reading carpet in the shape of a map of the United States, and on the second Monday of the term she gathered twenty-two children onto it for the afternoon story. Cissy and Liam sat on Maryland, at the back, near the wall. Cissy’s knees were drawn up and her hands were knotted together in her lap. She had been very still for several minutes, and the stillness of a child who does not want to be noticed is a different thing from ordinary calm.
Liam had felt it arrive some time before it showed. First a low, insistent pressure, a fullness deep in the belly that was not his and yet lay under his own hand as clearly as a stone. Then a spasm, and the sharp, embarrassed knowledge that in a few minutes her body would decide something without consulting her. He lifted his hand.
“Ms. Vance?”
“Not now, Liam. We’re at the good part.” Ms. Vance did not look up from the picture book, which featured a bear and a pot of honey.
“Ms. Vance, Cissy has to go to the bathroom. Right now.”
The teacher lowered the book and gave him the patient, hard smile of a woman who had already heard a great many reasons for interrupting story time. “Then Cissy can raise her own hand and tell me herself. That’s what we do in kindergarten. We use our words.”
Cissy’s lips pressed together until they went pale. Her hand did not move. It lay knotted in her lap, and Liam could feel through his own skin how badly she wanted to lift it, and how much the whole room’s attention weighed on the wanting.
“She can’t,” he said, more quietly. “She’s too scared. That’s why I’m supposed to.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s a rule about leaving the carpet during instruction. We’re five minutes from the end of the chapter. She can hold it until then.” Ms. Vance’s voice had lifted a notch, and heads were beginning to turn. “Please sit down.”
He had half risen to his knees when it happened. There was no dramatic sound, only a small, terrible warmth, and a darkening along the edge of Cissy’s leggings that spread quickly across the blue of Maryland. A hush came over the carpet, and then, from the front row, a boy with a gap in his teeth said with astonished delight, “Ewww! She peed!”
“That’s enough.” Ms. Vance was on her feet, and her voice rang out through the room in the tone of a woman who has decided to take control of a situation by making it larger. “Everyone stay in your places, please. Cissy has had an accident. It happens because of her cancer treatment, children, so nobody is to laugh or point, and nobody is to be unkind. Do you understand?”
She said the word cancer again, more gently, as though softening it would undo the damage, and a ripple went through the carpet, a dozen small voices whispering it back to one another. Cissy had gone the color of paper. She was staring at the wet place on her leggings and at nothing else, and the trembling that had begun in her hands had reached her shoulders.
Liam was at her side before the whisper had finished. He knelt on the carpet and laid one palm flat against the middle of her back, and said in the low steady voice he used only for her, “Breathe. Slow. Like this. I’ve got you.”
“Liam.” Ms. Vance came down the row, and her hand closed on his upper arm, hard, and pulled. “You are not going anywhere with her. Denise will be here in a moment to take care of it. Back to your place.”
He turned his head and looked at the hand on his sleeve. When he lifted his eyes again, they were level and dark, and his small fists were clenched at his sides.
“I ain’t leaving her side,” he said. “You grab me, you’ll pay for it.”
Ms. Vance’s fingers loosened, more from astonishment than from any decision. A flush climbed out of her collar.
And then, from the floor, in a voice that nobody in that room had ever heard raised, Cissy spoke.
“You leave him alone!” Her small hands were clenched now, too, tight against her chest, and tears ran unchecked down her face. “I can’t even walk right without him!”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.