Not-So-Silent Reading
by VATERGrrl
Cory Svendsen tried to concentrate on the chapter from the reader which had been assigned for that afternoon's "sustained silent reading" period, but it was hard to not fidget behind the desk he shared with one of his classmates, Tom Wyman, a big kid with long brown-black hair and eyes nearly as dark. They were getting to know each other slowly – there wasn't much time to talk during class, and Patrick O'Hearn looked on passing notes with the same wrath as a librarian shushing people who dared whisper in the stacks. During recess, they would occasionally join in the same game of kickball, but usually ended up on opposite teams. Cory was a better runner, sometimes even the best, but Tom could kick the ball with force and accuracy over the heads of his fellow third- and fourth-graders. Even so, even given their status as semi-competitors, Cory figured that maybe he and Tom might eventually end up being friends – real friends, not just two kids who shared a desk because they had to – and it seemed like a good thing to him.
Harder than not fidgeting, however, Cory had to fight the urge to sniffle and rub the heel of his hand hard up under his nose. Now that spring had arrived – a wet, dim season which had almost nothing in common with the springs he recalled from Topeka except that the calendar was turned to the same month – his nose had begin to tickle, itch, and even run a little. It got worse during recess, then mostly subsided once he'd come back indoors, but in the past few days, the symptoms hung on longer and longer into the afternoons.
To his immediate left, Cory heard Tom turn the page of his own reader with a particularly vigorous swish, and took the opportunity to make a bit of noise of his own, sniffing as hard as he dared so that his nose might stop running and tickling. Mr. O'Hearn didn't notice anything, simply sat at his own very large and very tidy desk off to the right of the front of the room, flipping through a stack of what Cory figured must be the math quizzes they'd taken earlier that day.
Tom had noticed, but when he tilted his head up and to the right, he was grinning a little. "You want me to cough some so you can do that again?" Unlike Cory, Tom seemed to relish the thought of doing rude things during class and inviting the "wrath of Pat" on himself."No!" Cory's reply was a hiss, and Tom merely shrugged before looking back down at his book.
Another five minutes of reading didn't make the insipid short story in Majesty and Mystery any more interesting, much to Cory's frustration, and his nose was threatening to drip again, forcing him to sniffle repeatedly and draw his forearm under his nostrils. Tom responded to the noise by coughing, but he stopped when Cory elbowed him in the ribs.
"Cory?"
Both boys looked up to find their teacher looming over their shared desk, glaring at both of them over the imposing, thick black frames of his horn-rimmed glasses. Mr. O'Hearn had crossed his arms over his chest, ratcheting up his commanding teacher stance, and dropped the position only long enough to set a box of tissues in front of Cory.
"Yes, sir?" It was as much a diversionary tactic as an automatic response to his teacher's question, and he guiltily hid his right arm in the metal drawer under his desk, pretending to fumble around for a pencil or a piece of paper.
Mr. O'Hearn, who had spent the last thirty years of his life working in the classroom with elementary school students, recognized the gesture for what it was, and pushed the box of tissues across the desktop so quickly that Cory had no choice but to reach up with the same arm to avoid having the box hit him in the chest and bounce off onto the floor.
"Now." He paused a moment to let his next words gain additional force, even though they were delivered in a whisper that only Cory and Tom were meant to hear. "Blow. Your. Nose."
Cory was too startled and embarrassed to refuse the demand, mechanically pulling tissues from the box and pinching them around his nose. It was a relief, albeit short-lived, to breathe freely after a forceful blow, but even as the teacher gave a curt, satisfied nod and moved to take the box back, Cory's nose itched furiously, inescapably, and he slapped both hands to his face to contain a quick burst of sneezing. "Ishhh! Chshh! Chhh!"
A couple of students – girls, Cory thought – who sat closer to the chalkboard, giggled, but they stopped as soon as Mr. O'Hearn glanced over at them.
"Bless you," he said after a minute or two had passed without Cory sneezing again, taking more tissues out to offer his student. This time, he didn't object when Cory accepted the tissues, shoved them deep into the pocket of his jeans and sniffled, rubbing the slightly damp arm of his sweatshirt under his nose.
"Mr. Wyman, would you take Mr. Svendsen up to see the nurse?"
Tom and Cory spoke at the same time, Tom squeaking out a confused "Uh, sure," while Cory tried to explain, "Bud, Bister O'Heard, I doad have a cold."
"Humor me."
"Huh?" Both boys said in unison, not understanding what their teacher meant.
"Just go see the nurse. Tom, I think you know where she is," he added, obliquely referencing Tom's astounding ability to gain cuts and scrapes out on the playground.
"Yeah." Tom scooted his plastic chair out from under his desk and closed the textbook he'd been reading. "Can I stay up there, too?"
A smile flitted across Patrick O'Hearn's face before he could squelch it, and he cleared his throat before stating, "No."
Tom sighed, frowned. "Oh, okay." He waited for Cory to clear off the top of his half of their desk, then began to escort his desk mate out of the classroom and up the hallway toward the administrative wing of the elementary school, Mr. O'Hearn's "Come right back!" echoing behind them.
"Good one." Tom said, once he and Cory were out of earshot of their teacher. "I wish I could come up with something like that to get out of that stupid "sustained silent reading" period."
Cory had to clear his throat with a cough before he could say anything. "I wasn't trying to get out of anything."
"You w---." Tom, who had been walking a few paces ahead in the hallway, stopped and turned around, his jaw slack. "Oh, jeez, I thought you were just kidding around, trying to hack off…" He studied the blue, black and green-flecked industrial carpeting for a moment, trying to figure out what he could say to redeem himself. "Sorry."
"S'okay." Cory pushed past the larger, slightly heavier boy, reaching the double doors at the end of the hallway before he said anything else. "O'Hearn did look kinda bothered, didn't he?" A small note of pride crept into his tone.
"Oh, yeah." Both boys smiled, relishing the thought of having "gotten" their teacher.
The doors opened out onto a covered square of pavement, basketball hoops anchored to the ceiling at the west and east ends while the side directly opposite the doorway was open and led to a long, gentle slope of more pavement. Tom pointed up toward the left of two parallel buildings. Cory knew that the one on the right housed the library, but from this direction, he didn't recognize the one on the left as the administration building he'd gone into three months earlier to get registered at the new school.
"The nurse's office is up there. Or," Tom said, pointing down toward the lower playground, "we could just go shoot some hoops or something."
"We don't have a ball," Cory reasoned, feeling his nose beginning to itch again. Spring always seemed to be the worst time of the year for him, though he had hoped that moving so far out west would have made some difference. One of the books he'd pulled off his parents' bookshelves back home had said something to the effect that lot of people got relief from their allergies when they moved out West, beyond something called the "Great Divide," and out of the immediate reach of ragweed and other especially tenacious pollens. He recalled his parents had even talked a few times about trying to get a transfer to Seattle from Topeka, since his dad could work for Boeing out there, but nothing had materialized.
Now he was out in Seattle, or close to it, he thought to himself, pausing at the north end of the covered play area so he could dig out the spare tissues that had been forced on him by his teacher. Part of him wanted to just use his shirtsleeve again, swipe his forearm carelessly under his threateningly drippy nose, but it was a gross combination of damp and kind of stiff from where he'd used it before when he thought no one would see. Instead, he forced himself to uncrumple one of the tissues from his pocket, fold it back in half and blow into it, folding it into quarters after he was done so he could scrub at the edges of his nostrils with a dry surface. The combination of blowing and rubbing would, he knew, only cause him to sneeze again, and then again, and probably a few more times after that, but he didn't have much of a choice, only a vague hope that his desk partner wouldn't find it overwhelmingly gross or, worse, laughable.
"Hehh, ihb…" He pinched his nose shut with his left hand, trying to discourage the itchy, burning pressure just below and behind his eyes. The gesture didn't even buy him enough time to take the last clean, dry tissue from his pocket, and he ended up launching a poorly stifled "Hbshhh!" into the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger.
Cory expected that Tom would wrinkle his own nose in disgust and proclaim "Ewww! Gross!" It was more than a small shock, then, when the other boy simply muttered, in a small and slightly embarrassed voice, "Bless you," then gently placed his hand around Cory's shoulder and began to propel him up the walkway toward the nurse's office.
"Th-huhhh… Ubtchhh!" Cory stopped for a moment, unable to see clearly for his watering eyes, and concentrated on covering his nose and mouth with his hands. It wasn't exactly necessary, he knew, since he wasn't contagious, but his parents had drilled it into him that it was polite. "Besides," his father had reasoned once, "other people don't know you don't have a cold, and they don't like it if they think you don't keep your germs to yourself."
The logic of his father's statement seemed flimsy, at best, but Cory had accepted it nevertheless, and by now it was simply habit to turn his head to the side and sneeze into a hand. Unfortunately, his sneezes seemed to be growing wetter by the second, and he forced himself to dig out that last tissue and try to sneeze into it, rather than into his bare palm.
"How f-stchh! Far is the durse's awh-histshhh! Office frub here?" Another sneeze finished off the tissue, and he was reduced to sniffling and rubbing his nose against his shirtsleeve.
"Just ten or twenty more feet?" Tom was awful with judging distances, but he also wanted to make the remaining trek sound like it was going to be quick and easy. He'd spent enough afternoons after school let out in the waiting room of his father's doctor's office, filling in worksheets, assembling jigsaw puzzles or reading books, half an ear open to the noises around him, to be very familiar with the dissonant sniffles, sneezes, coughs, throat clearings and nose blows that marked the spring tree pollen season. By his experience, his desk mate, who was forced to stop every three feet or so on the walkway to sneeze convulsively and repeatedly into his cupped hands, or rub the cuff of his sweatshirt sleeve against his bright red nose for what little relief it gained him, was suffering with a vengeance from hay fever.
"Oh-huh…Huh-shooo! Tshooo! Tsh-hoo!" Cory sniffled, tried to catch his breath. "Ogay."
"We're almost there." Tom tried to keep Cory walking, figuring it was more important, really, to get inside and out of the pollen-laden air than to worry too much about etiquette. A few sneezes did mist him a little, but he ignored it, focusing on pulling open the heavy white door to the administration building and all but shoving Cory inside ahead of him.
"Hi, we need to see the school nurse?" Tom addressed himself to the secretary at the front desk. He didn't know if the woman was a receptionist for the whole building, like the ladies at his father's office, a complex he shared with other specialists, or if this receptionist was only serving the principal and vice-principal.
"She's right down that hallway." The receptionist, who had been concentrating on Cory, sniffling and coughing as he was into a less-damp portion of his sleeve, looked over at Tom and grinned. "I think you know the way by now."
"Yeah. Thanks." Tom pulled again at Cory's shoulder, and the smaller boy relied on the larger to guide him down the corridor. When they found the doorway to the nurse's office, they stopped just inside, reluctant to go all the way into the room. Fortunately for them, the nurse was already looking up, possibly having been alerted to their arrival by either the receptionist or simply by the noise of Cory's snuffling and throat clearing.
"Well, now, what seems to be the problem?" The school nurse, a stocky, dark haired woman, looked from Tom to Cory and back, not quite sure which of the two she was supposed to treat. Her eyes narrowed as she recognized Tom. "You didn't fall off the playground equipment again, did you?"
Tom shook his head, but before he could say anything else, Cory sneezed again, a loud "Ubtshh-huh!" which he tried without much success to muffle behind his hand.
"Bless you." The nurse reached up toward the top of a low, double-doored cabinet, taking down first a box of tissues, then a thermometer. The box, she offered to Cory with the same no-refusal posture Mr. O'Hearn had shown him not ten minutes earlier, and waited only until he'd tucked it under his arm before she poked toward his face with the thermometer. "Best see if you have a fever."
Cory opened his mouth to protest again that he was sure he didn't have a cold, or a fever, but the nurse slipped the thin glass rod under his tongue before he could say anything, taking his free left wrist in her hand and feeling for a pulse. Once she was satisfied she'd measured it correctly, she let his arm drop, and Cory immediately swept his hand up and under his nose, pressing the length of his index finger firmly against the top of the divot in his upper lip. He figured his nostrils must be twitching and flaring like a rabbit's with the urge to sneeze, but he didn't dare give in, not with the glass thermometer parked in his mouth.
"Alright, then, let's see what this says." The nurse pulled the thermometer out of Cory's mouth a moment later and none too soon, in his opinion. It was becoming all but impossible to hold a sneeze in any longer, and before he could turn his head away, he let out a quick succession: "Tshhh! Tshhh! Tshhh!"
"Oh, dear." Cory couldn't tell if the nurse was commenting on his non-existent fever, or the force and volume of his sneezing fit, which went on another round or two before he could sniffle in another breath and let it out on a sigh.
"He already told our teacher, he doesn't have a cold," Tom volunteered. "Mr. O'Hearn didn't believe him, so he told both of us to come up here."
"Id's allerg-ishhh! – allergies." Cory didn't add that he'd been prevented from telling the nurse that in the first place. "I've had theb for a log tibe."
"Well, you don't seem to have a fever." She appraised her patient skeptically, watching as he rubbed the heel of his hand at his nose and sniffled rather than pulling out tissues from the box she'd given him. "You felt well when you came to school this morning?"
Nod, sniffle.
"And you just started sneezing a little while ago?"
Sniffle. "Uh-huh." Snff!
"Feeling any better now, since you've been inside?"
Cough, cough, sniff. "Sub."
"Do you think you could blow your nose for me?"
Cory wondered where the school had found this nurse – maybe right out of a preschool or something, where she'd grown used to chasing after little kids with runny noses. Her question was so insulting, he contemplated sniffling again just to be annoying. Instead, he sighed, dropped the tissue box onto a nearby chair and pulled out three or four squares. Although he didn't care to admit it, all the sniffling wasn't accomplishing much, and it felt as if his nose was about to start dripping in earnest. Stacking one square atop another, he emptied his nose into them until he could find no dry patches left, then crumpled up the bunch and repeated the procedure again with the other set.
"Uhb," Cory started, looking around the room. "Do you have a trashcad or subthig to throw these away id?" He hoped it was far away from the nurse, so that when he sneezed again, the itch already building back up, neither she nor Tom would notice.
"Right there." To Cory's disappointment, she pointed to a place just under the desk near where she was standing.
"Jeez, it's getting kind of late." Tom gave a deliberate look in the direction of the office clock.
"Uhb, yeah," Cory chimed in, grateful for his new friend's diversionary tactic as the slow-witted nurse looked away from him just long enough for him to toss the used tissues into the garbage can and muffle a quick "Ishhh!" in the crook of his elbow. "I doad thig Bister O'Heard beadt for us to be out this log. Baybe we should go back."
The nurse still seemed doubtful. "You're absolutely sure you don't have a cold? Maybe I should call your parents, have one of them pick you up from school."
"Oh, dough, bab," Cory protested. "I'll be fide. Could you just give us a dote for Bister O'Heard, telling hib we were here?"
"Well…" She worried at her bottom lip with her teeth, considering. "You left your backpack in your homeroom?"
Both boys nodded, though the question was addressed solely to Cory.
"We're supposed to have a social studies quiz this afternoon – we shouldn't miss that." Tom explained. Cory couldn't recall any such thing, but he went along with it – any excuse to get out of the overly warm office and out from under the "care" of the school nurse.
"Oh, alright. The two of you just sit here for a second, and I'll go write you that note." Once she had turned her back on both of them and walked back into a small inner office, Tom took the opportunity to open the cabinet, look around, and grab something out of it. Cory couldn't see what his desk mate had pilfered, but he hoped it would be something good, like hard candies or something.
The nurse returned to the room a split second after Tom had closed the cabinet door, and he clasped his hands together in front of him, looking as innocent as a choirboy.
"Well, I'm still not sure that I should do this, but you do seem to be feeling better, so…" She handed the note over to Cory, who read it before tucking it away in the front pocket of his jeans.
"Thags, Bissus DeStefado," he said, making sure to use her name and keep her just a little bit off-balance. Though he didn't consider himself to be half the conniver Tom apparently was, he did know a thing or two about manipulation. Not that he would ever use it for nefarious purposes, he promised himself, but still…
"We appreciate it." Tom motioned to Cory, and together they scrambled out of the nurse's office as quickly as seemed diplomatic. Only once they were a good ten feet away from the administration building itself did Tom start chuckling to himself, pushing a hand down into his own pants pocket to retrieve whatever it was he'd taken out of the cabinet.
"Whad' you get?"
"A couple of suckers," Tom explained, holding out two by their long, thin white paper sticks. "Root beer or lime?"
"Libe, I guess." Cory took the bright green one and briefly debated trying to eat it before he and Tom got back to the classroom. If they were still sucking on the contraband candies when they walked in, he was sure Mr. O'Hearn would pitch a fit, so he settled for the promise of having it later on that afternoon, maybe during the walk back to the Marshalls' house. Tom apparently thought the same thing, but he switched out the sucker for something else.
"I thought you could use these." He held out a small, blue-and-white plastic wrapped packet of Kleenex. ""My dad has about a million of them in his office cabinets at work, so I figured the school nurse would have them, too."
"Your dad's a nurse?" Cory accepted the packet reluctantly, knowing he'd probably need a tissue, or three, even before they got back to their homeroom.
"Nah, allergist."
"Huh." Cory stopped for a moment to tear open the wrapper. "So, you –"
"Knew you didn't have a cold?" Tom watched as an odd flicker crossed his friend's face. "Bless you."
Cory's mouth dropped open slightly, skeptical, but a second later his lips contorted into a grimace and his eyes pinched themselves shut. "I haaa- hashhh! Haved eved sd-chshhh!chshhh! Sdheee-shhh." He sniffled, rubbed under his nose with a forefinger before dropping his hand away from his face. "Sdeezed yed," he finished feebly.
"But you were going to." Tom shrugged, waited until Cory had unfolded a tissue from the packet and blown his nose before he said anything else. "It's like, I dunno, why not just get it out of the way?"
"I – ishhh! I guess so." Cory half feared that Tom would try to bless him again, but the other boy kept silent. One thing that drove Cory absolutely nuts were the well-intentioned people he met from time to time who felt some weird need to bless him every single time he sneezed, which to him was just embarrassing. Better that they not say anything at all than fall all over themselves to be solicitous.
"We're dot really havig a quiz this afterdood, are we?" The thought occurred to him that maybe Mr. O'Hearn was really going to give them two quizzes in one day – he seemed a little bit like the sort of mean guy who would pull that kind of crap.
"Naah. I just wanted to give us an excuse to get away from Nurse Moron."
"She's dot that –" Cory started to defend her automatically, then recalled how quick she'd been to shove the thermometer in his mouth, without even giving him a chance to explain himself. "Okay, baybe she is that dub."
The two boys grinned at each other, one more moment solidifying their budding friendship. Tom even sensed when Cory needed to pause for a second, near the double doors of the upper classrooms building, place a hand up against the wall to steady himself and sneeze repeatedly and openly, not bothering to cover his nose with his hand or a shirtsleeve or anything.
"Got that out of your system, you think?" He joked a moment later, earning a weak smile.
"I cad hope." Cory risked taking out a few more tissues, reasoning that the clearer his voice sounded, the less likely their teacher would be to send him right back up to the nurse's office.
And it did seem to mollify Mr. O'Hearn, even after Cory had to muffle a sudden, residual "ishhh!" into the back of his left hand while giving his teacher the nurse's note with the other.
"Bless you." Patrick O'Hearn took off his glasses to read the scribble on the small slip of paper, then replaced them and pointed back toward the back of the classroom where Tom was already waiting at their desk. "Ah, Cory, could you please see me briefly after school?"
A cold ball of dread thumped into the pit of Cory's stomach, but he nodded and hoped his worry didn't show on his face. He did notice, once he'd come back to his desk, that the box of tissues had been removed from his work surface, and he flung the packet Tom had stolen for him into the deepest recesses of the metal drawer, hoping he wouldn't need it for the rest of the afternoon, if ever.
"Now, who can tell me about the significance of the Lewis and Clark trail?" The history lesson continued uninterrupted, followed by a fun science experiment in which teams of four had to try to identify small plastic bowls of mysterious substances using only their five senses. A few students made gagging noises when they tasked small amounts of what turned out to be baking soda, and of course everyone honed in on the small bowls of table sugar. Cory genuinely loved science, and became absorbed in the tasks, forgetting his trepidation at the thought of staying after school until the final bell rang and he realized that he was supposed to stay after.
"Hey, catch you later, right?" Tom took a bit longer than usual to gather up his jacket and backpack, but gave Cory a wave when the teacher cleared his throat in a deliberate and slightly intimidating manner. "Gotta get my bus."
Mr. O'Hearn waited to say anything until the room was absolutely quiet, and he and Cory were the only two people left.
"Cory…" The tall, thin man began to speak, but Cory, in his anxiety, interrupted him.
"Am I in trouble?" He automatically raised a hand up to rub at his nose – it had begun to itch again, just a little bit. "I really didn't mean to sniffle so much in class today, honest. I just – I forgot to bring any tissues to school, and they make me sneeze anyway, and…"
"Mr. Svendsen," Mr. O'Hearn began again. "You are not, may I repeat, not, in any trouble."
"Oh?" Cory felt the tightness in his chest ease a little, ventured another, more vigorous, rub of his hand under his nose. He still didn't relish the thought of needing to sniffle or, god forbid, having even a brief sneezing fit in front of his teacher, but at least he was reasonably sure the guy was not going to punish him.
"I simply wanted to take a few minutes and jot a brief note to your – uhm." He consulted his grade book. "Your guardians. For you to take home and give them."
"Oh," Cory said again, a fizzling, bubbling sort of tickle building up again in his sinuses. He was torn between going back to his desk for the small pack of tissues he'd left in the drawer and, heaven forbid, having to strip yet more Kleenex from the box beside him on the teacher's desk.
Patrick O'Hearn, who had been studying his student carefully, if inconspicuously, for the past few seconds, tugged open the drawer of his own desk, reached toward the back left corner of it, and took out an Irish linen handkerchief, snapping it open by one corner and placing the huge square over Cory's hand, which promptly disappeared under the drapes and folds of fabric.
"You do know how to use one, I imagine?" He asked when Cory just kept staring at the cloth rather than raise it up to his face. It was painfully evident that the kid needed to sneeze, and badly, if the odd contortions of his face and the desperate little sniffs he was making were any indication.
"Uhb, yezzir." Cory was still a bit shocked: This was the first time he could recall being given a handkerchief, without having expressly asked for one, and from a near-stranger no less. Maybe just having been offered it was permission to use it, but he was nonetheless hesitant.
Mr. O'Hearn picked up a pen from a coffee mug on his desk and began writing out a letter in his long, precise hand, keeping his eyes on the notepad while observing Cory obliquely in his peripheral vision. "So? Turn your head and sneeze. It's good for you."
His words finally had their intended effect, as the slightly gangly blond boy standing next to his desk turned a polite angle away from him, gathered the hanky up around his face and let fly a long, ragged bunch of sneezes. "Hih-ihchhh! Ishhh! Ishhh!"
They came in triplets, short "chhh,chhh,chhh!" hisses, followed occasionally by a deeper, extended indrawn breath and a softer, gentler "Huhhh-ubtshh-ooo." There was even a span of thirty seconds or so of complete silence, save for the soft scratching of pen tip on paper, which allowed Cory enough time to swipe at his streaming nose and reposition the cloth to find a dry portion he could continue sneezing into.
It was not, Patrick assured himself, as he split his attention between the letter and his student without seeming intrusive, anywhere near as bad as last year's medical crisis, when Jillian Tedesco had started to hyperventilate, then outright wheeze and gasp for air while she'd been at the chalkboard trying to solve a math equation. That time, he'd had to dash to the student cubbies, paw through Jillian's possessions, and come up, hand shaking, with an inhaler he then forced between her teeth and activated for her. She'd pinked up relatively quickly, all the gods and goddesses be thanked, but it had alarmed the entire class, their teacher perhaps most of all.
Now, he determined, signing off on the letter and reaching into a lower, side drawer for an envelope to place the paper in, was simply a waiting game, As he listened, again trying to seem as if he was not listening at all, busying himself with the mundane tasks of sealing the envelope (ugh, but the school district used cheap glue!) and dropping the pen back into its mug, Cory's once-energetic fit trailed off into a widely-spaced series of almost-relaxed sounding "Huh-tshhh" noises and prolonged, watery sniffles, the former finally yielding entirely to the latter.
"Well?" Mr. O'Hearn took off his glasses, tilted them up toward the ceiling, and looked through the lenses, placing them back on once he was satisfied that they were not overly dusty or smudged. It was another delaying tactic, on his part, designed to give his student the time and space necessary to recover and, he hoped, correct the interminable sniffling noises.
"Yezzir?" Snff! Snnnff!
Patrick O'Hearn sighed, then reached under the backs of Cory's hands to tap them with a long, thin forefinger. "I gave you my handkerchief. Use it."
Cory snorted inadvertently, startled at the command, but resigned himself to blowing into the thick, soft cloth in short puffs, until he was reasonably sure he wouldn't have to sniffle again. He crumpled the square up one last time, using a corner of it to rub under his nose and an opposite corner to press at his eyes.
"Now, if you're through?" O'Hearn waited until Cory had dropped both hands down at his sides, the wadded and damp handkerchief held squeamishly in his right fist.
"You wadt this back?" Cory was repulsed at the notion, yet he knew he didn't really want to take it home with him and have to try to explain it to Arlene Marshall when she did his weekly load of laundry. "But it's all-"
"Here." The teacher gestured by curling the tips of his fingers toward himself, his hand palm-up on the desktop, and Cory let the cloth tumble out of his hand into Mr. O'Hearn's much larger one.
"Okay." Cory rubbed at his ears, which he knew must be bright red – they felt hot, at any rate – then recalled his manners. "Thag you for letting be borrow it."
`You're welcome. I'll wash it and put it back in my desk tomorrow morning – let me know if you need it again."
Cory nodded at the offer, vowing silently to not take his teacher up on it. "Okay."
"Now." O'Hearn picked up the envelope, waved it at Cory. "I wrote that letter to your guardians, and I hope you'll give it to them once you get home this afternoon." He noticed the sudden tightness of his student's expression, tried for a reassuring smile. "I was writing to tell them that you got perfect marks on your math quiz today." He dug the quiz up from the stack and handed Cory's over, 100% slashed on the top of the page in bright red ink. "If it's okay with them, and with you, I'd like to place you in the accelerated math group here at school. It would require taking a few more tests to determine exactly which level to start you at, but I think you'd do well with more challenging lessons."
"Wow." Cory stared at the 100% score, unsure of what else to say.
"I'm also recommending that your moth – sorry, guardian – take you to see a doctor. As you say, it's likely you're simply allergic to something, but if it's a cold, perhaps you should stay home for a few days, get some rest."
Mr. O'Hearn pushed his chair, which was on wheels, back from his desk and stood up, forcing Cory to strain his neck upward to meet his gaze. "I have to get going – my wife is expecting me to pick her up from work, since our other car is in the shop for repairs." The teacher frowned briefly, as if recalling something vaguely troublesome. "You didn't miss your bus, did you, since I kept you here after school? You need a ride home?"
"Huh-uh, dough. I just live a few blocks frub here – the busses doad pick you up or drop you off udless you live half a bile away. I cad walk hobe."
"If you're sure?" The congested quality of his student's voice was somewhat worrying, but he'd noticed the same blurring of n's and m's increase and retreat over the course of the past few days, not simply in the last five minutes, and decided to not make a case of it.
"Yeah." Cory hoisted his backpack up by one strap, letting it hang diagonally across his back. "Uhb, thags agaid, Bister O'Heard."
"You're welcome, Mr. Svendsen." Patrick O'Hearn picked up his own briefcase, a hard-sided black rectangle, and tapped briefly on the top of the box of tissues on his desk. "Take some with you, if you'd like."
"Okay." Cory complied out of a dual sense of obligation and, if he were honest with himself, possible need, pulling no fewer than eight tissues from the box and shoving them deep into a front jeans pocket. The gesture appeared to satisfy his teacher, who nodded approvingly.
"Feel better," he called, as Cory plodded toward the front door of the classroom. Cory paused to turn and wave a thanks, then pushed open the door and walked out into the overcast, misty northwest afternoon.
As the media sneeze-trivia collector I am, I've tossed in a few bits for fun: the first is two sentences from an interview from the Dupont-sponsored radio series "The Sounds of Science", in which a sneeze researcher discusses the science and social norms surrounding sneezing. ["Turn your head and sneeze. It's good for you"] The other is two sentences I may have used before, from Cornelius Ryan and Kathryn Morgan Ryan's auto/biography A Private Battle. [Originally, "What the hell is wrong with you? I gave you my handkerchief. Use it." For this story, I cut out the first sentence.] "Connie" Ryan was as irascible an Irishman as Patrick O'Hearn is in this story, so I thought I'd use that connection as well. Also, the character of "Mr. O'Hearn" here is based in broad strokes on my sixth-grade teacher, who intimidated and confused the bejeebus out of me when I was a kid. Looking back, of course, I adore the guy – one of the best teachers of writing I ever had.
Feedback: Oh, you so know I'm a feedback ho, people! ;)