Boy-sick

Well, the snap must have done it, and now I’ve got a cold. Leaden legs and swollen eyelids; tissueburn around my nostrils. There are little balls of soggy paper scattered all through my jacket and trouser pockets and all over the flat like a giant’s dandruff, along the bedhead, in the front seat of the car.

 

Yesterday, leaning over a student’s work, time went into slow motion. Not the slow motion of a car crash—the slow motion of impending social death. I watched a globule of my snot fall through the air and onto the student’s page, where it splashed. She looked up at me just as I grabbed my nose and mumbled “Shorry”. Every fourteen-year-old in the room watched as I dashed to the desk and grabbed a tissue and blew, then still sealing my leaking tap with my right hand, dashed back and tried to soak up the snot with the tissues in my left. The work smeared. I tried to look suave and unconcerned.

 

Maybe it was the fever—later in the day I told a year seven student to pretend he was on acid. This is not the done thing.

 

And he did.