It was recess, and they were on the playground, and Jackson needed to pee. The girl wanted him to play with her, but he wanted to pee. Not enough, mind you, to ask the teacher to send him inside with a buddy and actually relieve himself. But enough to not want to swing from bars or slide down slides or do anything that one does on playgrounds during recess when you’re in Kindergarten.

“You can just pee outside,” the girl insisted. “Come on. My mom does it all the time.”

Her mom did not do it all the time.

There was one time, though, when they were hiking in the woods, that her mother squatted and peed behind a bush. One time. That shouldn’t have been a problem, But then, when the girl was shocked by her mother peeing outside, her mother laughed and told her that of course girls could pee outside.

“I needed to pee! I’m not going to pee in my pants; I’m also not going to walk the last three miles completely miserable.”

If only the mother hadn’t been so cavalier with her tone. If only the mother had considered that the girl was a fast learner.

Now, on the playground, the girl was insistent. “No really, just pee outside.”

“I’m afraid to.” Jackson glanced around.

Nearly forty children were racing around, playing tag and jumping over the edge of the slide rather than taking the normal course down.

Five teachers stood to one side, lanyards tucked behind crossed arms. They weren’t quite watching the children, but also weren’t not watching them. It was more of the side-eye-while-chatting sort of monitoring.

“Well, I’m not,” the girl announced, tipping her chin up.

“I don’t know how.” This was a lie. Jackson had watched his family’s male dog pee on the mailbox on more than one occasion, and, testing the method for himself one day when his mother was unloading the car and talking to his father on the phone and not watching him, discovered that he quite liked seeing the dark lines form along the bottom of the post.

“I’ll show you.” The girl stood, dropping her shorts and underwear, and she urinated on the wooden barrier between the woodchips under the playground and the grass of the field.

Jackson stared.

The teachers were not impressed. The vice principal was not impressed. The girl’s mother was very much so not impressed.

But the girl proved it. It wasn’t difficult to pee outside. Anyone could do it.