Calen’s Sandbox

“This is the playground to Nurse Riona,” said a voice through the crackle of my walkie-talkie. 

I picked up the black receiver and pressed the side button with my thumb. “This is Nurse Riona. Go ahead.” 

“We have a girl out here who said she hurt her ankle. I think she’s okay, we just can’t get her to come to you or get up.”

I asked the secretary to watch my clinic as I hurried outside, searching for a student that looked hurt. I spotted a girl sitting on the blacktop leaning over her knees, with her upper half tucked face down into crossed arms, making herself as small as her body allowed. She had on a small pink backpack that rose and fell in the breath of her sobs. She was probably embarrassed, I thought. Poor girl. 

“That’s Calen,” a teacher informed me.

So that’s Calen, I thought.

“She tripped and fell and became really upset. She won’t let any of us help her get over to you, which isn’t unusual as she has sensory processing disorder and a slight intellectual disability.” 

I had already known that and more about Calen, though. A week before, a special education instructor called Natalie stopped by the clinic. She stood in the doorway and dangled a pair of pink and green shoes by the laces.   

“Can I trade you these size 3s for a size 4? Calen said they were hurting her toes when I put them on this morning.”

“Sure thing.” I stood up and walked over to the shoe rack I kept in the clinic as a backup. I checked the shoe tags for a size 4 and wondered why Natalie wanted to trade shoes, rather than just borrowing them for the rest of the day, sending the child home with the too-small pair, like usual.

I pulled out a pink and black pair of gym shoes and handed them to her. 

“Thank you so much. I might come see if I can exchange clothes she’s grown out of too. You don’t mind me keeping the shoes, right?“

“That’s fine. Is Calen your daughter?”

Natalie raised her eyebrows and leaned back on the door frame, seemingly settling in to tell me a story and surprised that I didn’t already know. “You haven’t met our Calen yet?” 

I shook my head. 

“She’s one of my students. I keep a supply of clothes and shoes for her in my classroom, and have since kindergarten. Every morning she gets new clothes and shoes to change into, and then leaves them here before she gets on the bus.” 

I placed the shoes Natalie gave me onto a shoe shelf. “Why is that?” 

“Because kids were making fun of her, calling her dirty and stinky because of the clothes she wears from home. They’re always either too small or too

big, too.” She shook her head, like she didn’t believe it herself, and furrowed her eyebrows.

My heart tugged and I put a hand over my mouth. “That’s terrible. Does she not have the greatest home life, or can they just not afford it?” 

“Not a great life at home, at all, unfortunately. Frankly, her parents really suck.”

As I walked up to Calen on the playground, I could see that her ankle was bent and carrying weight as she leaned over, which told me that her ankle was most likely okay. 

I introduced myself and gently tried to coax her into letting me have a look. Although she had stopped sobbing when she heard my voice, she didn’t budge. 

“Let me see your face, at least, so we can properly meet and be friends.” 

Calen bobbed her head up for a second then brought it down again. Shoot, I thought. I was so close. 

She lifted her head back up and focused her large green eyes on my neck. I raised my hand to where she was looking and felt the smooth rock at the tip of my necklace that I had gotten on a trip to the beach. 

“Do you like my necklace, Calen?”

She nodded her head, then slowly brought up a clenched fist and opened her palm, revealing a small rock that she’d likely found on the playground. Calen’s pouty lip withdrew and a smile lit up her face. 

“I have one of those, too!” She spoke clearly, not even a quiver in her voice, with the only evidence of her previous sadness shown in her still-wet eyes.

“I love it,” I said. 

“Can I have yours, too?” Calen held out her other palm. 

“I tell you what, let’s head up to my clinic and we can make your own necklace.” Her eyes widened. “That is, if you let me check that ankle out first.” 

At that, she stuck out her foot, displaying a healthy-looking ankle. “It was a pretty bad fall, but I’m tough so it doesn’t even hurt.” She scrunched up the side of her face as if she were considering something. “You know, I think I’ll be able to walk there, because I’m probably the strongest person I know. Let’s go.” She hopped to her feet. 

She wasn’t wrong about that. She was a strong kid and one of the most admirable traits about Calen was that no matter how hard some people - adults at home or children at school - could be on her, she had this sweet toddler-like innocence and attitude towards those things. 

“Why do you get to wear a backpack everywhere? No one else does, and it’s weird,” one boy huffed towards Calen while I applied a baking soda paste to his bee sting. Although she had definitely heard him, she ignored what he said and kept coloring with an unwavering smile on her face. 

“We all have things we can and can’t do, it’s just different for everyone and it certainly doesn’t make anyone weird,” I had told him. 

“Why do you sit so close to me?” a girl asked Calen while I checked the girl’s blood sugar.  

I was about to speak up when Calen shrugged and said, “in case you need a friend when your finger gets stabbed. That has to hurt!” The girl lifted the corners of her mouth into a friendly smile, which made me do the same.

We all adored Calen for who and how she was. As she got off the bus in the morning, it didn’t seem to matter to her that she’d woken up early that day and every day, to feed her 5 year old brother breakfast and get him on the preschool bus while her parents slept. No matter what troubles she had at home, she left them there, and she walked in those doors every morning with a huge smile plastered on her face and endless joyful hugs to give.

Don’t get me wrong, though, Calen wasn’t always sunshine and smiles. What did upset Calen often was the disruption of her senses, such as a blaring alarm during fire drills, rain on her face, extremely dark or bright rooms, or loud voices, to name a few. And when Calen was upset, it was a struggle to get her to do anything except make herself as small as possible and pull wails from her lungs. 

That was, until she helped me discover the Calen Ritual. 

“Look what I found,” Calen said one morning as she strolled into my clinic before school. She set a small piece of gravel rock on my desk. 

“Dang, you’re a pro at this rock thing.” I picked it up and made a show of inspecting it, then whistled, “that’s my favorite one you’ve found.” 

She eyed my necklace. “I wish I could find one like that.”

That night, I was standing in my kitchen and thought of Calen while looking at my decorative vase filled with glass gems. She would love those, I thought. I remembered that I still had extra, so I went to the storage closet and grabbed a handful. 

A couple of days later, Calen came in the clinic sobbing, her left hand in a strong grip that I could only guess was one of her “gems.” After checking that her teacher knew she had come to me from lunch - Calen loved to stop by the clinic on her way to other places she was meant to be at - I had her sit down and asked why she was upset. 

She didn’t acknowledge my question, she just gripped the rock tighter. 

“Hey,” I said gently while crouching to her eye level. “You’re going to hurt your hand.” I paused and considered how I could get her to open up to me. “You know what that gem in your hand is now? It’s not just a normal rock anymore, girl. Your have squeezed your pain into it, and now that’s what it holds. Can I see what it looks like now?” 

That got her to open up her hand. “It doesn’t look any different.” She kept her palm open as she pulled her head back to her chest and cried through tightly squeezed eyelids. I noticed she had been holding the opposite hand close to her body and conjected that was where the boo-boo was. 

“Oh my goodness, Cal, I can see it. It looks so different.” 

She looked at it again, this time trading in her sobs for a raised eyebrow. 

“You think so?” 

“Absolutely,” I told her. “So, if your pain is right there, then it won’t hurt any worse to show me what hurts.” 

She sniffled once and turned her other palm towards me. It wasn’t bleeding and didn’t appear scratched or red. “A bear was on my hand and I think it burned me.” She frowned, but had completely stopped crying - that was, until she turned her palm back around to her field of vision. I could see the tears welling in her eyes, threatening to run loose again, as she remembered the alleged wound. I quickly grabbed a soapy washcloth and a few of my manuka honey bandages, then sat back in front of her. She was crying again and wouldn’t let me anywhere near her hand. 

I thought of the gems I had in my bag. I pursed my lips as I considered how to use them to help; I didn’t think I could just give her one to make her stop crying - I needed to make it mean something for her. 

I remembered the box of sand I kept for sensory distraction and had an idea. I turned my back to Calen as I pushed a single glass gem I’d brought from home into the sand on the left half of the box. I then turned around and set it on my desk. 

“I almost forgot, look at this Calen!” My voice expressed sheer excitement. 

She eyed it curously, and with caution in her voice she asked, “What is it?” 

“This is a special ritual that people do. It a magic box and it turns sadness, pain, or scared feelings into happy ones.” I pointed to the rock in her open hand. “All you do is put your gem full of hurt on the right side of this box” -I drug my finger across the sand from the right side to the left side- “and it travels through here, then turns into a peaceful, healing gem! Do you want to try it?” 

She looked at the rock in her hand like she was considering whether she wanted to risk losing it, then slowly pushed it into the sand with one finger. 

Her eyes watched the box intensely. After a few seconds I said, “There! It should be done, now dig in on that side until you find it.” 

I was suddenly worried that sand was an aversion of hers, so I was relieved when she reached her hand in without hesitation. She dug around for a few seconds and her face immediately lit up as she pulled out the shiny blue gem. 

“It’s a JEWEL!” She shrieked. She rubbed it between her palms, her “bear burn” seemingly healed and tears dried away. 

After that, when Calen came to the clinic unconsolable about a (real or maybe-imagined) ailment, I could almost always get her to perform the “Calen Ritual” - named by Calen herself. It wasn’t a perfect solution, as she sometimes stopped at the clinic in a good mood, demanding a gem for nothing. Once I explained that you could only get a gem from a rock squeezed with genuine bad feelings, though, those visits mostly stopped. 

On the last day of school, I gave her back all of the rocks she had put into the box. I told her that I’d traded some of my own good-feeling gems for her yucky-feeling ones, so that when she was home and felt sad, she could pull one out, transfer her big emotions to the rock, then save them to turn in for next year. 

“It will give you a head start by earning them over the summer,” I told her.  

She hugged me goodbye and I hid my face as tears welled up in my eyes. When I started my new occupation as a school nurse, I never thought about how badly it would hurt to let the kids like Calen go home for the summer. I, like many others at Kinderton, wished we could just go and get her - that we could save her. We couldn’t, though. During the school year, we could give her all of the love and care that we could - but over the summer, there wasn’t anything we could do for her except hope she’s okay and silently beg that she returns the following year. 

And, if anyone was wondering why Calen’s abuse and neglect were never reported, let me reassure you they were. Half a dozen times, in fact, by just as many different staff members over the years, including twice myself. If anyone wondered why nothing was ever done and why neither her nor her little brother were removed from their gut wrenching, sad-excuse-for-parents homelife . . . well, the rest of us - through frustrated tears and investigative reports stating “no further action required” - we all always wondered that too.