Elena just listened to Doc’s words, not feeling the necessity to add anything to them. She just swallowed it. In some way, she rejoiced at the notion that she had perhaps helped, if only one single person, if only a tiny little bit. That would be well worth it, she told herself. Nonetheless it had felt wrong – she could not exactly name why, though. No matter how much she pondered over it, ‘great job’ sounded like an overstatement to her. A pretty blatant one. She felt tired, even though it was still rather early in the morning. At some point she rubbed her eyes, to rub away all the sorrows, but it did not help.
As soon as they met the second group of children – to Elena’s slight relief they were far more grown up already, she had to look up to look at many of the boys’ faces in fact –, she acted far less inhibited than before. That was owed to the way those teenagers had already grown out of childish cuteness – little body, big head, big staring eyes. It rankled with her less. She could not help but get reminded of her own time as a teenager, which had been a far more pleasant one than these kids could probably ever think of.
The case of teenage pregnancy got to her, though. At first she just stood at the sidelines, watching, face stemmed into one of her hands, not saying anything. The way the young girl reacted – panic-stricken, filled to the brim with overboiling dread - brought back a few memories on how she had reacted herself when confronted with the news of unplanned pregnancy. She had taken it lighter back then – less fear, more exuberant joy, but if she compared it to the outcome, she would have preferred it the other way around. Anxious beginnings, happy endings, not the other way around. And yet that was what had happened. Feeling no tears whatsoever running down her cheeks, she just dryly gaped at this girl named Rachel, numbed restless. At that moment, she actually felt somewhat empty, in all her restlessness.
Nonetheless she ended up pulling herself together suddenly, from one moment to the other, and decided to walk up to the girl and have a talk. Nothing big or outstanding – for any serious topics she would have needed nerves she alas could not call her own right now. With a frog in her throat she offered Rachel a bench to sit on and have a talk. The girl was still distraught, barely being able to squeeze words out of her mouth – in short, a state Elena had made her experiences with already. They would talk to each other for a while, though it was a very imbalanced talk to say the least, with Elena trying to steer the conversation away from the blatant, critical topic as much as possible, for both their sakes.
She couldn’t bite back a single remark though. “I’m sure you’ll be able to take care,” she said, like a hollow phrase dripping out of her mouth. The words made her throat tie up, eyes teary-eyed. Before she would lose her countenance completely, she would swiftly bid her goodbye – rather abruptly, the girl didn’t even realize what was happening – and try to hide herself away somewhere.
