Now I Reeeeally Hate Winter

I just had a teenage kid knock on my patio door and ask for some paper towels because his friend "cut his head and is bleeding." I don't know the kids. I didn't open the door.

I looked to my right, where the building entrance is, and I saw at least one other kid standing there. "Do you or your friend live here?" I asked.

"Yeah, I do," he said.

"Well, you're better off getting everyone inside and getting it taken care of," I said. Call me mean, but I didn't want to get involved, especially when they had the means to take care of it themselves, and I didn't need someone's parents giving me a hard time for getting involved.

Now, I'm thinking the kid walked across the snow to get to my patio door, but NO, he then walked to my right towards the entrance--where there are just piles of uneven rocks, presently coated in ice where the water has dripped and frozen--and immediately he slipped on the ice.

The kids laughed. They sounded fine to me. He got up and walked away. I walked away.

It's about fifteen or so minutes later, and now there are two police cars and an ambulance outside my building and the next building over. I don't know if it's related. I just called the building manager--I am so fortunate to have an on-site manager where I live now--and she assured me I wasn't responsible for anything, and she'd go check out what was going on.

Oh, hey, now there's a third police car. The first two are leaving.

Today is not the day for me to handle this kind of weirdness.

Can it be springtime now, please?

UPDATE (11:45 p.m., just home from work): The manager left me a voicemail saying that by the time she got outside, all the vehicles were gone so she didn't know what had happened--and she said if she'd been in my shoes she wouldn't have opened the door, either.

UPDATE (01/31/2009): I was still ruminating over this while I was trying to sleep--beating myself up for apparently being a total hypocrite after this post--as if I'd failed some cosmic test and now I don't deserve a high school librarian job. (Sometimes, when I'm anxious and tired, the guilt just bubbles up.) Then finally this morning I said to myself, "You did the best you could! You were already worn out and having a bad day, and you were about to leave for work, and then you got the daylights startled out of you. You reacted the only way you could at the moment, and it wasn't the worst thing." I still feel as if I have to redeem myself, though. But I'm moving on.