You don’t want this kid turning 14 like this.

Salem Admassu writes in bed, hiding from the San Francisco fog. Though English is her third language, her love for fiction has made it her favourite.

She had actually managed to not think that far in her son’s life! Did parents always think 10 years ahead? Well actually, yes there was a time. At the very beginning. She was an excited, in fact super-enthused young mother, thrilled to have him, thrilled to be the one to put him through the world.

SLINGSHOTS BY SALEM ADMASSU 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 07

“Christy, your son is a vicious bully,” she says, so very matter-of-factly, so very in a nutshell, but this mother is still stuck at the beginning of the sentence, evaluating the meaning of this grade school principal addressing her by her first name. If it is as brown woman to brown woman Christy isn’t sure, though the principal barely looks of color.

The principal, Principal Lashawn Fitch, is a long and lean woman, age peer of Christy, whose immaculate twist-braids and Nefertiti busts ha…