Children Under Fire by John Woodrow Cox

Author:John Woodrow Cox [Cox, John Woodrow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

“There’s No Guarantee I’m Going to Live”

When the Help that Children Need Never Comes

Tyshaun didn’t want to feel angry, but he did, almost every day. The rage that took hold in the weeks and months after his dad’s body had been lowered into the ground in DC was like nothing he’d displayed before. The smallest difficulty—a tough math problem at school, a lost toy at home—could set him off. Once, after losing a game of Fortnite, he kicked a hole in his bedroom wall. At school, when he got frustrated with a classmate or his second-grade teacher, Nikki Lee, he no longer just put his head down or walked out of the room. Instead, the boy flipped chairs and tore signs off walls. “I don’t care,” he would say when confronted. He had never done any of that before, Nikki said, and knowing how to deal with it posed a challenge. “What are we going to do with Tyshaun now?” a security guard at Eagle Academy, Isaiah “Ike” Minder, heard staff members ask one another, because they didn’t know whether it was best to punish him after he acted out or give him a pass. Nikki believed in holding every child accountable, regardless of their circumstances, but she also knew that many of her colleagues couldn’t force themselves to reprimand Tyshaun anymore.

His mother, Donna, wrestled with the same dilemma. Even when Andrew was alive, she’d served as the disciplinarian, and after he wasn’t, Donna continued to take away Tyshaun’s electronics or confine him to his room when he misbehaved. None of it seemed to tame her son’s fury, though, so Donna did whatever she could to keep his mind off what he’d lost. She took him to Cub Scout meetings, where he was bored with the coloring sessions but enthralled by the s’more making. On Tyshaun’s birthday, his ninth and the first since Andrew’s death, Donna took him to dinner and bought him a massive sundae topped with whipped cream and a chocolate chip cookie. Two days after what would have been Andrew’s birthday, she splurged on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, where Tyshaun shot aliens at an arcade, bounced on an indoor trampoline, gorged on candy at Hershey’s Chocolate World, posed in front of a red Ferrari on the Strip, giggled next to a massive sculpture of a nude woman. The distractions were fleeting, because he could never escape the reminders of his father. A family friend had given Tyshaun a pillow printed with the image of Andrew holding him when he was a toddler. He slept beside it every night. He also couldn’t avoid the reality of his father’s violent end, because he had to pass the spot where Andrew was shot every time he walked from school to his grandmother’s house. “I don’t like this,” he told his mom one of the first times they took that route, but she insisted that he try. “You’ve got to face your fears,” she said. Far less obvious sights could trigger him, too.

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