South Park: Her Special Little Boy (30_tears prompt #17)
South Park
Her Special Little Boy
Prompt #17: "Fall"
PG (language)
1,712 words
Approx Age: 14
Kyle breaks his wrist playing basketball, but Stan soon learns that there's something bigger bothering him.
Her Special Little Boy
He heard the impact from halfway across the gymnasium.
“Man!” Craig shouted. “Broflovski down! Foooouul!”
Stan had thought he’d run fast in the suicide sprints earlier, but those had been light jogs compared to how he sprinted now.
“Kyle? Kyle!”
Everything happened at once. Butters assaulted him with apologies, nearly screaming that it had been an accident; Craig was jumping and shouting with half-terror, half-jubilation that they had won by the default; Cartman was laughing so loud that the sound seemed to ricochet off the walls; and in the middle of all the confusion, Kyle sat cross-legged on the floor, holding his right arm to his chest with a dazed expression on his face.
A girl howled from the other side of the gym. “Is there blood?”
The others took up the cry: “Blood? Ew! Blood!”
Stan fell on his knees next to Kyle, willing all the commotion to just stop for a moment and leave them alone. “What happened?”
Kyle looked up at him with a look of surprise on his features. “I fell.”
“I pushed him, Stan!” Butters yowled. “It was an accident! I’m s-so sorry!”
“It’s okay, Butters,” Kyle assured him patiently.
“He fell into the wall, Stan!” Butters went on, frantic.
“Kyle!” Token was above them.
“Kyle?” Kenny joined them now, too. Cartman had stopped laughing, but made no move to help. Infuriatingly enough, the rest of the class did: they swarmed around them, buzzing with barely contained excitement, pushing each other away to get a glimpse.
“Fuck off!” Stan shouted, waving his arms dismissively. “Leave him alone!”
“Jesus Christ, dude,” he heard someone- Craig? Clyde?- snap. “We were only trying to help.”
“Stop dancing around like pansies and get the kid to the nurse!” The gym teacher’s voice cut through the whirr of confusion in the room. “Marsh! You take him!”
“I think I need the hospital, Stan,” Kyle told him quietly, bringing his attention back to a focus. Stan looked down at him and smiled encouragingly, isolated for just a moment from the rest of the senseless world.
“Hang in there,” he soothed. “I’ll tell him.” Then, louder, he addressed the rest of them: “he needs an ambulance! Somebody call an ambulance!”
“I’m on it, Marsh.” The deep-voiced shout sounded flippant and insulted. “Just do what I tell you!”
Stan shook his head. “Come on, dude,” he said gently, helping Kyle to his feet. “Does it hurt a lot?” Kyle didn’t respond, but Stan got his answer from the tears that were pooling at the corners of his eyes. He resisted putting his hand on Kyle’s back to lead him, but couldn’t prevent himself from holding his arm out in an arch above his friend’s shoulders, keeping him away from the other students and guiding him without touching towards the door to the hallway. Kyle’s right forearm was gripped tightly to his chest with his good hand, but his upper arm was jutting out as though trying to push the pain away from his body.
The instant the door swung shut behind him, Kyle let out a whimper. Tears began to spill down his cheeks. “Oh my God,” he moaned.
“Let me see,” Stan commanded. Kyle held his arm out, trembling, rubbing the tears away with his other hand.
“It’s broken,” Kyle told him, and although Stan was no expert, he couldn’t disagree. “I’ve jammed it before and it wasn’t like this.” Stan didn’t know if there was such a thing as a “good” broken wrist, but if there were indeed, this wasn’t it─ Kyle’s hand drooped like a dead man’s, the skin shiny, bloated and reddish-purple for a few inches up his arm.
“Let’s wait in the nurse’s office,” Stan told him softly. “The ambulance is on its way.” Kyle nodded wearily.
Inside, Stan pushed Kyle into the sole chair and leaned against the wall nearby. “Where is she?” He murmured, looking around for their deformed school nurse.
Kyle shrugged. His eyes were wide and his teeth chattered with barely contained panic. Alone in the room, away from the eyes of the other students, Stan felt free to take Kyle’s hand and held it in both of his own, squeezing slightly before letting it go. “You’re gonna be fine, dude. Don’t worry.”
Kyle shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?” Stan asked, confused.
“Oh dude, oh dude, oh dude” Kyle wailed, his face scrunching up in terror. “My mom is gonna kill me! She is gonna chop me up into a thousand tiny Kyle pieces and then kill them each one at a time!”
“Dude, what? Won’t she be more worried about you being okay?”
“She’ll be pissed at me for not being okay,” Kyle moaned. “You don’t understand. Her mind works like… she’s from a different dimension or something. Every September I have to beg her not to write me out of gym completely.” He bit his lip and his eyes welled up again; Stan was beginning to suspect that perhaps his tears were being fueled by more than just physical pain, but said nothing. “It’s always, ‘Kyle, the other boys don’t get rough, do they?’ ‘Kyle, are you sure you should even be playing bay-skit-bawl?’” Kyle probably didn’t want to hear it, but his imitation of his mother’s shrieking accent was worryingly accurate. “‘Kyle,’” he continued, nearing hysterics, “‘remember, you’re my special little boy and you have to be extra careful. How’s your circulation today?’ Well, gee, Mom, I don’t fucking know, let me stab my toe and see how fast the blood squirts out!”
He was panting by the time he stopped. “Finished?” Stan said quietly. He wanted to say something about how he sympathized, or understood─ but did he? Asthma as a kid seemed insignificant next to diabetes forever, and his own mother seemed as docile as a tranquilized bunny compared to Sheila Broflovski.
“Yeah. I’m finished.” His sigh came with a heavy shudder. “I’m sorry.”
“Um,” Stan said quietly. “Do you… need anything… different?”
Kyle looked as though he might start crying again. “I might need extra insulin,” he admitted. “Bad pain can screw up your sugar.”
“Are you going to be okay ‘til you get to the hospital?”
“Yeah. I probably won’t even need it. It doesn’t even hurt that bad.” Kyle shifted around in the chair, obviously lying about the pain. “I shouldn’t have freaked out.”
“Aw, dude, you didn’t freak out,” Stan assured him, though he knew that, for Kyle, the past few minutes could have certainly been considered as such. He steered the conversation away as quickly as possible. “So, what happened?”
“Butters was blocking, and he knocked into me,” Kyle told him. “On accident, I mean. I put out my hand to catch myself─” he illustrated─ “from hitting the wall, and it just snapped.”
“Butters is going to apologize for years.”
A tiny smile appeared on Kyle’s lips and lingered a moment before vanishing again. “I know. It wasn’t his fault, though─ I-I should have tried to hit with my shoulder.”
“With your luck, you would’ve missed and hit with your head.”
“Quite possibly.”
“So do you want to get, um, The Call over with?” Stan asked tentatively. He gestured at the phone.
Dramatically, Kyle sighed. “Might as well. Not going to leave it up to the office, that’s for sure.” Standing at the nurse’s desk, he picked up the receiver, put it down to dial, then held it to his ear. “They’ll have me with my arm broken off or some─ hi, hey, Mom. No, everything’s okay. No, I’m not cutting, I’m here. I tripped, though… no, I’m fine. I hit my wrist… no, I’m fine. I hit my wrist but I don’t think it’s broken.” He looked up at Stan as he lied, his expression pained. “But… no, I don’t think it’s broken. But they want to be sure, so we’re going to the… yeah, Hell’s Pass, Ma, where else? No… sorry, Ma. Yeah, it was in gym. Look, I’ve gotta go, okay? Bye, Mom. Ma… bye.” He hung up the phone, looking exhausted, and pinched the bridge of his nose between the fingers of his good hand. “Goddamn, she pisses me off,” he sighed. “Sometimes, I swear, I really do hate her, Stan.”
Stan held his arms out in front of him and stuck his lower lip out in a pout. “Hug?”
“No,” Kyle snapped, frowning, and when Stan ignored his reply and wrapped his arms around him anyway, he stayed completely stiff and motionless, save for moving his injured arm carefully away. When Stan squeezed him tighter, though, shifting them from side to side in an absurd little dance, he relaxed into the embrace, and Stan gently kissed the top of his head.
“It’s gonna be okay, dude,” he assured him, and despite his initial objections, Kyle hooked his good arm around Stan’s back and wouldn’t allow him to pull away. “Just tell her you heard that the new history teacher is being insensitive about the Holocaust to the seventh graders or something. Y’know, get her on someone else’s case.”
Kyle nodded and laughed, his face smothered comfortably in the crevice of Stan’s neck. A sudden voice boomed through the nurse’s office and they broke apart as quickly as they could, sighing with relief when they realized it was only the intercom.
Broflovski to the main office. Broflovski to the main office. Your ambulance is here.
“Fucking nutjobs,” Kyle breathed. “Every last one of th─” He giggled with fear as Nurse Gollum entered to escort him to the waiting paramedics, biting off the last of his words.
“They won’t let me ride with you, will they?” Stan asked, pulling a face.
“Probably wouldn’t even notice, but you should get back to class.”
Gollum harrumphed impatiently.
“I’ll bring your stuff over later,” Stan assured him, as the grotesque woman led Kyle out into the hallway. Kyle nodded his thanks before disappearing as the door swung shut and silence seemed to materialize, a genuine entity, in the room.
Stan never made it back for the end of the scrimmage. For as long as he judged that Gollum would be safely distracted, he leaned heavily against the wall of the nurse’s office, staring at the silent phone with a frown.
Her Special Little Boy
Prompt #17: "Fall"
PG (language)
1,712 words
Approx Age: 14
Kyle breaks his wrist playing basketball, but Stan soon learns that there's something bigger bothering him.
Her Special Little Boy
He heard the impact from halfway across the gymnasium.
“Man!” Craig shouted. “Broflovski down! Foooouul!”
Stan had thought he’d run fast in the suicide sprints earlier, but those had been light jogs compared to how he sprinted now.
“Kyle? Kyle!”
Everything happened at once. Butters assaulted him with apologies, nearly screaming that it had been an accident; Craig was jumping and shouting with half-terror, half-jubilation that they had won by the default; Cartman was laughing so loud that the sound seemed to ricochet off the walls; and in the middle of all the confusion, Kyle sat cross-legged on the floor, holding his right arm to his chest with a dazed expression on his face.
A girl howled from the other side of the gym. “Is there blood?”
The others took up the cry: “Blood? Ew! Blood!”
Stan fell on his knees next to Kyle, willing all the commotion to just stop for a moment and leave them alone. “What happened?”
Kyle looked up at him with a look of surprise on his features. “I fell.”
“I pushed him, Stan!” Butters yowled. “It was an accident! I’m s-so sorry!”
“It’s okay, Butters,” Kyle assured him patiently.
“He fell into the wall, Stan!” Butters went on, frantic.
“Kyle!” Token was above them.
“Kyle?” Kenny joined them now, too. Cartman had stopped laughing, but made no move to help. Infuriatingly enough, the rest of the class did: they swarmed around them, buzzing with barely contained excitement, pushing each other away to get a glimpse.
“Fuck off!” Stan shouted, waving his arms dismissively. “Leave him alone!”
“Jesus Christ, dude,” he heard someone- Craig? Clyde?- snap. “We were only trying to help.”
“Stop dancing around like pansies and get the kid to the nurse!” The gym teacher’s voice cut through the whirr of confusion in the room. “Marsh! You take him!”
“I think I need the hospital, Stan,” Kyle told him quietly, bringing his attention back to a focus. Stan looked down at him and smiled encouragingly, isolated for just a moment from the rest of the senseless world.
“Hang in there,” he soothed. “I’ll tell him.” Then, louder, he addressed the rest of them: “he needs an ambulance! Somebody call an ambulance!”
“I’m on it, Marsh.” The deep-voiced shout sounded flippant and insulted. “Just do what I tell you!”
Stan shook his head. “Come on, dude,” he said gently, helping Kyle to his feet. “Does it hurt a lot?” Kyle didn’t respond, but Stan got his answer from the tears that were pooling at the corners of his eyes. He resisted putting his hand on Kyle’s back to lead him, but couldn’t prevent himself from holding his arm out in an arch above his friend’s shoulders, keeping him away from the other students and guiding him without touching towards the door to the hallway. Kyle’s right forearm was gripped tightly to his chest with his good hand, but his upper arm was jutting out as though trying to push the pain away from his body.
The instant the door swung shut behind him, Kyle let out a whimper. Tears began to spill down his cheeks. “Oh my God,” he moaned.
“Let me see,” Stan commanded. Kyle held his arm out, trembling, rubbing the tears away with his other hand.
“It’s broken,” Kyle told him, and although Stan was no expert, he couldn’t disagree. “I’ve jammed it before and it wasn’t like this.” Stan didn’t know if there was such a thing as a “good” broken wrist, but if there were indeed, this wasn’t it─ Kyle’s hand drooped like a dead man’s, the skin shiny, bloated and reddish-purple for a few inches up his arm.
“Let’s wait in the nurse’s office,” Stan told him softly. “The ambulance is on its way.” Kyle nodded wearily.
Inside, Stan pushed Kyle into the sole chair and leaned against the wall nearby. “Where is she?” He murmured, looking around for their deformed school nurse.
Kyle shrugged. His eyes were wide and his teeth chattered with barely contained panic. Alone in the room, away from the eyes of the other students, Stan felt free to take Kyle’s hand and held it in both of his own, squeezing slightly before letting it go. “You’re gonna be fine, dude. Don’t worry.”
Kyle shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?” Stan asked, confused.
“Oh dude, oh dude, oh dude” Kyle wailed, his face scrunching up in terror. “My mom is gonna kill me! She is gonna chop me up into a thousand tiny Kyle pieces and then kill them each one at a time!”
“Dude, what? Won’t she be more worried about you being okay?”
“She’ll be pissed at me for not being okay,” Kyle moaned. “You don’t understand. Her mind works like… she’s from a different dimension or something. Every September I have to beg her not to write me out of gym completely.” He bit his lip and his eyes welled up again; Stan was beginning to suspect that perhaps his tears were being fueled by more than just physical pain, but said nothing. “It’s always, ‘Kyle, the other boys don’t get rough, do they?’ ‘Kyle, are you sure you should even be playing bay-skit-bawl?’” Kyle probably didn’t want to hear it, but his imitation of his mother’s shrieking accent was worryingly accurate. “‘Kyle,’” he continued, nearing hysterics, “‘remember, you’re my special little boy and you have to be extra careful. How’s your circulation today?’ Well, gee, Mom, I don’t fucking know, let me stab my toe and see how fast the blood squirts out!”
He was panting by the time he stopped. “Finished?” Stan said quietly. He wanted to say something about how he sympathized, or understood─ but did he? Asthma as a kid seemed insignificant next to diabetes forever, and his own mother seemed as docile as a tranquilized bunny compared to Sheila Broflovski.
“Yeah. I’m finished.” His sigh came with a heavy shudder. “I’m sorry.”
“Um,” Stan said quietly. “Do you… need anything… different?”
Kyle looked as though he might start crying again. “I might need extra insulin,” he admitted. “Bad pain can screw up your sugar.”
“Are you going to be okay ‘til you get to the hospital?”
“Yeah. I probably won’t even need it. It doesn’t even hurt that bad.” Kyle shifted around in the chair, obviously lying about the pain. “I shouldn’t have freaked out.”
“Aw, dude, you didn’t freak out,” Stan assured him, though he knew that, for Kyle, the past few minutes could have certainly been considered as such. He steered the conversation away as quickly as possible. “So, what happened?”
“Butters was blocking, and he knocked into me,” Kyle told him. “On accident, I mean. I put out my hand to catch myself─” he illustrated─ “from hitting the wall, and it just snapped.”
“Butters is going to apologize for years.”
A tiny smile appeared on Kyle’s lips and lingered a moment before vanishing again. “I know. It wasn’t his fault, though─ I-I should have tried to hit with my shoulder.”
“With your luck, you would’ve missed and hit with your head.”
“Quite possibly.”
“So do you want to get, um, The Call over with?” Stan asked tentatively. He gestured at the phone.
Dramatically, Kyle sighed. “Might as well. Not going to leave it up to the office, that’s for sure.” Standing at the nurse’s desk, he picked up the receiver, put it down to dial, then held it to his ear. “They’ll have me with my arm broken off or some─ hi, hey, Mom. No, everything’s okay. No, I’m not cutting, I’m here. I tripped, though… no, I’m fine. I hit my wrist… no, I’m fine. I hit my wrist but I don’t think it’s broken.” He looked up at Stan as he lied, his expression pained. “But… no, I don’t think it’s broken. But they want to be sure, so we’re going to the… yeah, Hell’s Pass, Ma, where else? No… sorry, Ma. Yeah, it was in gym. Look, I’ve gotta go, okay? Bye, Mom. Ma… bye.” He hung up the phone, looking exhausted, and pinched the bridge of his nose between the fingers of his good hand. “Goddamn, she pisses me off,” he sighed. “Sometimes, I swear, I really do hate her, Stan.”
Stan held his arms out in front of him and stuck his lower lip out in a pout. “Hug?”
“No,” Kyle snapped, frowning, and when Stan ignored his reply and wrapped his arms around him anyway, he stayed completely stiff and motionless, save for moving his injured arm carefully away. When Stan squeezed him tighter, though, shifting them from side to side in an absurd little dance, he relaxed into the embrace, and Stan gently kissed the top of his head.
“It’s gonna be okay, dude,” he assured him, and despite his initial objections, Kyle hooked his good arm around Stan’s back and wouldn’t allow him to pull away. “Just tell her you heard that the new history teacher is being insensitive about the Holocaust to the seventh graders or something. Y’know, get her on someone else’s case.”
Kyle nodded and laughed, his face smothered comfortably in the crevice of Stan’s neck. A sudden voice boomed through the nurse’s office and they broke apart as quickly as they could, sighing with relief when they realized it was only the intercom.
Broflovski to the main office. Broflovski to the main office. Your ambulance is here.
“Fucking nutjobs,” Kyle breathed. “Every last one of th─” He giggled with fear as Nurse Gollum entered to escort him to the waiting paramedics, biting off the last of his words.
“They won’t let me ride with you, will they?” Stan asked, pulling a face.
“Probably wouldn’t even notice, but you should get back to class.”
Gollum harrumphed impatiently.
“I’ll bring your stuff over later,” Stan assured him, as the grotesque woman led Kyle out into the hallway. Kyle nodded his thanks before disappearing as the door swung shut and silence seemed to materialize, a genuine entity, in the room.
Stan never made it back for the end of the scrimmage. For as long as he judged that Gollum would be safely distracted, he leaned heavily against the wall of the nurse’s office, staring at the silent phone with a frown.