I spent most of 6th grade working out ways to avoid going to school. There was nothing particularly terrible about school that year, just your basic pre-adolescent social anxiety, that who-will-I-sit-next-to-in-the-cafeteria, who-will-let-me-stand-around-and-talk-with-them-at-recess kind of thing. I would start my planning the night before an anticipated bad day, weighing the pros and cons of feigning cold, flu, or fever. I knew better than to try heating a thermometer with the light bulb, because I’d read a book in which the girl narrator tries it, and the thing explodes, sending little mercury droplets around the room. Somehow I was successful often enough that I kept doing it, although (unbeknownst to me at the time) I would have been quite a bit more successful if my sister hadn’t done the same thing, seven years earlier. My mother was working full-time by the time I went on my school strike, and so aside from just recognizing the signs, simply couldn’t afford to indulge me.

Today, Ben stayed home from school, and I swear if he were my daughter, if he were older, I’d think he was trying to tell me something. He woke up complaining of a sore throat, threw up his breakfast and then, after I’d made the calls to say he wouldn’t be at school, or at soccer practice, was fine. Skipping around playing a concert fine.

I know he loves school right now. And he certainly didn’t fake throwing up (something I was neither brave nor stupid enough to attempt). So we’ll chalk this up to one off day. But I’ve got my eye on him…