He had not meant to scare the child.

(Warning: some foul language)

- Mr. Wilkinson called me recently to tell me that his daughter had been seeing something strange on the internet. A person named Fran grew to be slightly nuts about a school district she has always felt guilty about not getting to know her former school.

Having always had some sort of irrational fear of school, it only makes sense that Fran would scare her daughter with ideas she read online. Her daughter kept asking every day about a reason why her name was known and talking about the number of times her name was thought to be odd. This made her smart and easy to scare. Her dad knew it, too. She even went through her collection of cards to see if she could find a family member who could tell her why.

Being a parent is no joke. It’s a huge responsibility to carry your child’s fears, worries, and fears with you 24/7. I would not say that to frighten my child, as I am too attached to her to do that. But after coming back from a 25-minute phone call with Fran’s brother (his name was not mentioned during the call, but I assumed it was Fran), I realized that Fran really does scare my daughter. I almost didn’t mind because I could talk to him.

During the phone call, he was shocked when he heard the story about my daughter. He couldn’t believe how smart my daughter was to scare her away from her school. He told me that my daughter had the fact that her name was ugly enough for any person to stare at her. She’s not even in school anymore. He asked me to take her to a psychologist and mentioned some of the educational specialists he thought could help her.

It makes me wonder if she's been a victim of various things. Once we left Fran’s apartment, my daughter looked up at the room and said, "Why are all these boys calling me ugly?"

At that moment, I felt sick and I wanted to be the mean girl.

I had to force myself to talk to her about it. My daughter did tell me to go to the mall and purchase some makeup for her and take my daughter to two different stores.

On our way out to his car, we discussed the situation with him, and she mentioned that Fran had been using some exercises and experiments on her. At first, I thought this was weird, but I was glad that I went with her and saw what she had done. To my astonishment, she showed me how she turned her hair dark enough. This made me furious.

But the girl seemed to smile and she even said that she looked handsome with her hair dark enough.

During the next month, Fran went to great lengths to spread the truth about the field. She took me to several stores and would bribe the girl behind the counter with her honeymoon suite. From them, her behavior is remarkably normal. I feel sorry for her; she is more than a girl with ugly hair in the sea of human beings.

My daughter is a pretty smart girl. She is smart enough to understand that people have to be themselves and that strangers don’t stare at you when you’re on public transport, but she is having crazy cases of mind control. She is afraid. Since her memories are hazy, she has made me feel stronger.

When her fears occurred, I told her the truth. I simply said, "You have nothing to fear because no one looks at your name." If there are more than five looks, they’re in a zoo. "

Her screams when my first words hit the console perfectly. She tried to ignore it but it shook her. I immediately calmed her down but she was still screaming, "Please tell me why my name is ugly! Why do I have to explain that to people? Why does anybody have to speak about it to me? Why do people have to stand in front of me, in front of people?"

She absolutely lost it. She only calmed down after she calmed her grandfather who was next to me on the bench. His face started shaking. He put his hand on her and put his arms to her shoulder.

He immediately shook too. He didn’t even take his mouth off. This frightened her and she nearly cried. The crying had almost brought our car to a halt.

My grandfather was so scared to see his granddaughter get so rattled. She was mean at first. She knew the only way to calm her was to mention that it wasn’t me who was scaring her, it was Fran’s fascination with her.

In the end, we all understood. I promised her that when she got away from it, she would look through her newspaper, pick up her phone, and tell me about everything that she’d learned about herself and my attitude towards people.