fic: common childhood maladies
Title: Common Childhood Maladies
Fandom: The History Boys (play, though largely unspecific)
Characters: The Boys, Irwin, Hector
Word Count: 2424
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Being a teenage boy demands getting knocked about a bit. They help each other out, though.
Warnings: A fair bit of swearing. Some blood. Mostly play-canon, so references to Posner getting hit by his uncle, if that triggers you. Unbeta'd.
Notes: I'm such a sucker for the hc_bingo, but am way too lazy to do an entire one myself... so this happened! My very first foray into the History Boys fandom, though I've loved it for years.
A cut.
“Shit.”
Lockwood was all but hopping down the hall, trying to keep his pant leg hiked up above his scraped and bloody knee. Crowther walked at his side, eyeing him uncertainly, unsure whether or not to offer physical support or continue to let him manage on his own. When they reached the washroom, Crowther strode forward and held the door open for Lockwood to stumble through.
“Out of the bloody way!” Lockwood bellowed, sending a knot of first-formers scurrying in a panic. He swung his leg up onto the edge of the sink and started splashing water onto his knee, trying to wash the worst of the blood and grit away. Crowther wet a paper towel and, after an instant’s hesitation, began wiping at the scrape. Lockwood looked up at him for an instant, startled, then let him continue.
“Ought to find a bandage somewhere,” Crowther said, tossing aside the first towel when it got too dirty and reaching for a second. “It could get infected.”
“Fuck infected,” Lockwood said, watching Crowther’s long, dark hands as they dabbed away the blood. “Just don’t let it get on my trousers. They’re my only ones.”
A bruise.
“Dare I ask what happened?” Irwin asked dryly as Dakin ducked into class late, hunching his shoulders and bowing his head in hopes of hiding his fast-swelling blackened eye.
“Nothing, sir,” Dakin said, his usual drawling arrogance made clipped and terse, whether with embarrassment or physical pain, Irwin wasn’t entirely sure. The other boys sniggered-Posner excepted, naturally-and Rudge, too, he noticed. He turned to that corner of the room (a side he rarely faced, his attentions more generally fixed on-well, Dakin’s side).
“Rudge?” he asked. The boy started, unused to being noticed, much less called upon.
“Me, sir?” Rudge asked. He wasn’t trying to play innocent, Irwin didn’t think-too guileless, that boy. Or maybe that was too generous. Could be he just was too thick.
“Yes, you. What happened? A bit of schoolyard roughhousing?”
Rudge shrugged and cast a glance at Dakin, who was glowering at his desk and did not raise his head.
“Rugger, sir. Everybody gets knocked about a bit.”
“Quite,” Irwin said, amused, and turned back to his desk to fetch his notes. He should have figured, he thought, a bruise between two singularly uncomplicated boys would have an uncomplicated answer.
(“Would you stop with the bloody fucking notes?” Dakin snapped. Rudge looked up from his notebook, where he’d been reading out yesterday’s notes from Irwin’s class, to make sure he’d got down all the points. Everyone looked up, looked over at Dakin, startled. “The man’s not Jesus fucking Christ, you don’t have to document every word he says.”
“Stuff it, Dakin, it’s not Rudge’s fault Irwin’s the only teacher to give you bad marks,” Akthar said.
“You’ll wish you had these come exam time,” Rudge said calmly, closing the notebook and stuffing it back into his bag.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Dakin said, voice dripping with sarcasm. Rudge glared.
“Then you can have a wank to them after. We all know you want to.”
Dakin’s face went scarlet, and before anyone knew what was happening or could move to stop it, he’d taken a swing at Rudge. He missed. Rudge didn’t.)
A cough.
Two desks had been pushed together at the front of the room, and Timms was sprawled dramatically across them. Crowther knelt at his side.
“Nanine! Get the doctor, quickly!” Crowther said in his best attempt at an American accent. Timms simpered and coughed and draped, sending Dakin into gales of laughter in the back of the room.
“The doctor?” Timms said in a wheezy falsetto. “Why, if you can’t make me live, how can he?”
“Don’t say such things, Marguerite! You’ll live, you must live!”
“Perhaps it’s better if I live in your heart… where the world can’t see me.” Timms was apparently attempting some form of accent as well, not that anyone had any hope of identifying ir. “If I’m dead… there’ll be no stain on our love.”
“Shh… don’t say such things, Marguerite.” Crowther and Timms pressed cheek to cheek in a dramatic embrace, which won a cheer from Akthar. “Even if we can’t go to the country today, think of how happy we were once. How happy we shall be again. Think of the day you found the four-leaf clover, of all the good luck it’s going to bring us…”
“What is this shit?” Rudge muttered to no one in particular. Posner shushed him-Lockwood laughed.
“Think of the vows that we’re going to make to each other,” Crowther continued after only an instant’s pause to glare at Rudge. “Ah, Marguerite…”
Timms let out a final dainty cough, then flopped dramatically backwards onto the desk.
“No! Don’t leave me!” Crowther buried his face in Timms’s shirt. Dakin, by this point, was all but crying from laughter, and as soon as he finished pounding out the dramatic final refrain on the piano, Scripps cracked up as well.
Crowther flipped Dakin off, then turned to Hector with great dignity.
“Well, sir?”
“Why, it has to be Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo in Camille. Though Timms, I can’t say I recall Ms. Garbo’s accent sounding quite like that. Ah well. Fifty p., s’il vous plait.”
Another bruise.
“Posner.”
The passed outside the Headmaster’s office, Posner no doubt on the way to class, Hector just leaving a brief and inexplicably tense meeting which consisted of nothing more than Felix informing him tersely that he and Irwin would no longer be sharing lessons. He’d been turning a hand written letter over and over in his hands, but Hector hadn’t been able to get a look at what it said.
Posner stopped and looked up when he heard his name, confirming the suspicion upon which Hector had seen fit to stop him.
“What happened to your lip?”
Posner reached to it self-consciously, his fingers not quite touching the bruised and swollen skin.
“Oh, I-it’s-my uncle, sir. He-didn’t much like some of the things I said about our discussion in class yesterday.” His tone is even, frank, though his eyes are fixed on the floor.
“Discussion? Of-”
“The Holocaust, sir, yes, sir,” Posner interrupted. “Excuse me, sir. I’ll be late…”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Hector said, because what else could he say? He wished to stop him, to offer some quotation, some comfort-but all that came to his mind in that instant was Hardy, God knows why, completely irrelevant as far as he could see-(and why uprose to nightly view/strange stars amid the gloam)--and by the time he could think of something better, Posner had already disappeared out of sight down the hall.
A bully.
Thirteen years old, smaller by half than the boys of his own form, much less the form above (and always would be, as it happened), Akthar’s eyes still flashed fire when the sixth form boys shoved him up against the wall as they passed, laughing and boisterous, their small cruelties performed thoughtlessly.
“Oi!” Akthar called, his unbroken voice high with anger. One or two of the boys turned.
“Is there a problem?” one of them asked, a predatory gleam in his eyes and at the edges of his smirk.
“No problem at all!” And Akthar hadn’t even noticed the presence of the chubby boy from his maths class-Timms, he thought?-until he interjected. “He was just talking to me.”
“Alright, then. That’s what I thought.” And they turn, and go, though one gives them a lingering, thoughtful glance, and a raised eyebrow as reassurance that he will remember them for future torment.
“Are you mental?” Timms demanded, wheeling on Akthar. “You want to get beat to a pulp? Not worth it, I say.”
“They pushed me!” Akthar protested, still furious, glowering down the hall at the older boys’ retreating backs.
“Not worth it,” Timms said again, swinging his arm around Akthar’s shoulders and tugging him down the hall in the opposite direction. “Trust me on that, yeah?”
A broken bone.
Frankly, Dakin had not thought Scripps capable of such a lengthy stream of profanity. Though it was, perhaps, not the time to say so out loud, he was quite impressed.
It was the end of term, all in high spirits, someone had proposed a football match to celebrate their collective completion of the fifth form. Their football games were never the gentlest of matches, true, but perhaps their extra boisterousness today had set them all running a little faster, pushing a little harder, fouling a bit more flagrantly. Dakin didn’t even see what happened-he was racing back towards the goal because Rudge was threatening to break through, and so had his back to the action when he heard the distinctive sound of body hitting body, body hitting the ground-then the far less familiar tones of Scripps cursing a blue streak.
Not that the others weren’t contributing their fair share-though their cursing was more hushed, more awed, more flat out fucking terrified. As Dakin booked it closer, they all backed away, leaving Scripps curled in on himself on the ground. Dakin knelt down next to him and fuck but was there blood. Scripps had his arm clutched to his chest, and Dakin thought he could see the glint of bone. Someone behind him made a choked noise, and Dakin looked up to see Posner looking about to puke.
“Well, go on, the lot of you!” Dakin said, doing his best to keep all panic from his voice. He was almost sure he had succeeded. “Go-go find somebody! Get some help, for Christ’s sake, don’t just stand there gaping.”
They did stand there gaping for a moment longer, then Crowther peeled off from the knot of boys and took off running for the school; within an instant, the rest had followed.
“Right then,” Dakin said, and realized he had no fucking clue what to do. “Scripps. Don. D’you think you can sit up?”
“Let’s give it a go,” Scripps said, voice tight. At least he’d laid off the cursing, Dakin thought, though he started right in again as Dakin helped him get seated upright. More like propped upright, really-as soon as he was up, he started to slump down again until Dakin scooted in so that Scripps could lean against him.
“Right,” Dakin said again. “Not my best idea, maybe, but here we are. The other’s’ll be just a moment, nothing to worry about.”
He felt, rather than saw Scripps’s nod-frankly, Dakin’s eyes were firmly fixed on his trainers, where he would not have to see the mess of blood or, what was more disturbing, the pale pain of his best friend’s face.
“Alright there, Scrippsy?” he asked after the silence had gone on too long. Scripps laughed, tight and breathy.
“Been better. Fuck,” he added suddenly, more a gasp than a word. “It fucking hurts, Stu.”
“Steady on, they’ll be here soon,” Dakin said, fumbling for and then grabbing hold of Scripps’s uninjured hand. Scripps clasped his hand around Dakin’s and held on tight.
Only when he heard the shouts of the other boys approaching did Dakin hastily pull away.
A cold.
The steady, dismal rain had persisted for a solid week, and the very air felt clammy and close and filled with fog. The exam approached; anxiety was high and morale was low, and some fucking knob (in the boys’ words) had given everyone a cold.
He knew the boys thought him incorrigibly distractible, but Hector kept a close eye on the mood of his boys. And, well, who could see that miserable, sniffling lot and think there was any chance of getting work done?
(Irwin, apparently-or perhaps he just didn’t care. “If they’re well enough to come to class, they’re well enough to do their lessons,” he said irritably in the staff room later that day.)
Crowther and Rudge were the stoic ones, sitting poker-faced in their seats at the back-but leave it, Hector thought, to the actor and the athlete to try and appear unfazed by mere illness.
Timms, by contrast, was as melodramatic as one would expect, the first to complain about Irwin’s insistence on trying to teach them today, and about the plague, no less, was it some kind of cruel joke, do you think, sir? Lockwood did not provide his usual counterpoint of complains, looking pale and pinched, drawn into himself in a way that emphasized his long limbs and the fact that he was-always was, really-a bit too thin.
“Well, boys,” Hector said. “I admire your dedication to your education.”
“Dedication?” Akthar groaned. “Begging your pardon, sir, but don’t flatter yourself, sir. My mum all but threw me out-said she’d rather have me get my classmates sick than my sisters.”
“Thanks for that, by the by.” Dakin was slumped, arms crossed, looking peevish, as if nothing so much as frustrated by his body’s insistence on reminding him that he was really only human.
“Of course, blame the Moslem. I daresay we’re used to it,” Akthar said, while Scripps muttered, “Stuff it, Dakin,” without raising his head from his hands, where he had dropped it immediately upon sitting down and had not moved since, save the shuddering of his shoulders when he coughed.
“Boys, boys,” Hector said in his most placating tone. He continued gamely as Lockwood broke out in a violent coughing fit: “I thought today might be a good day for a bit of independent reading. You’ve all brought something, I presume? Wonderful. Have at it, then.”
They all dutifully dug out their books, but soon (as Hector had hoped and expected), each and every boy let fall first his book, then his head, and went to sleep.
Well, every boy but one. Posner, up at the front, kept his gaze fixed, brow furrowed, on his book. He had an oversized men’s handkerchief bunched into one fist, and every few seconds he would turn aside from his book to sneeze into it.
Hector had been leaning against the front of his own desk to observe the boys-now he straightened, reached forward, and grabbed hold of the top of Posner’s book. Posner looked up at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. Hector tugged the book of Posner’s hands, then put a hand ever so gently on the back of the boy’s head and pushed it down, so it was resting against the desk. Posner shifted, sniffled, and within seconds was asleep.
Fandom: The History Boys (play, though largely unspecific)
Characters: The Boys, Irwin, Hector
Word Count: 2424
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Being a teenage boy demands getting knocked about a bit. They help each other out, though.
Warnings: A fair bit of swearing. Some blood. Mostly play-canon, so references to Posner getting hit by his uncle, if that triggers you. Unbeta'd.
Notes: I'm such a sucker for the hc_bingo, but am way too lazy to do an entire one myself... so this happened! My very first foray into the History Boys fandom, though I've loved it for years.
A cut.
“Shit.”
Lockwood was all but hopping down the hall, trying to keep his pant leg hiked up above his scraped and bloody knee. Crowther walked at his side, eyeing him uncertainly, unsure whether or not to offer physical support or continue to let him manage on his own. When they reached the washroom, Crowther strode forward and held the door open for Lockwood to stumble through.
“Out of the bloody way!” Lockwood bellowed, sending a knot of first-formers scurrying in a panic. He swung his leg up onto the edge of the sink and started splashing water onto his knee, trying to wash the worst of the blood and grit away. Crowther wet a paper towel and, after an instant’s hesitation, began wiping at the scrape. Lockwood looked up at him for an instant, startled, then let him continue.
“Ought to find a bandage somewhere,” Crowther said, tossing aside the first towel when it got too dirty and reaching for a second. “It could get infected.”
“Fuck infected,” Lockwood said, watching Crowther’s long, dark hands as they dabbed away the blood. “Just don’t let it get on my trousers. They’re my only ones.”
A bruise.
“Dare I ask what happened?” Irwin asked dryly as Dakin ducked into class late, hunching his shoulders and bowing his head in hopes of hiding his fast-swelling blackened eye.
“Nothing, sir,” Dakin said, his usual drawling arrogance made clipped and terse, whether with embarrassment or physical pain, Irwin wasn’t entirely sure. The other boys sniggered-Posner excepted, naturally-and Rudge, too, he noticed. He turned to that corner of the room (a side he rarely faced, his attentions more generally fixed on-well, Dakin’s side).
“Rudge?” he asked. The boy started, unused to being noticed, much less called upon.
“Me, sir?” Rudge asked. He wasn’t trying to play innocent, Irwin didn’t think-too guileless, that boy. Or maybe that was too generous. Could be he just was too thick.
“Yes, you. What happened? A bit of schoolyard roughhousing?”
Rudge shrugged and cast a glance at Dakin, who was glowering at his desk and did not raise his head.
“Rugger, sir. Everybody gets knocked about a bit.”
“Quite,” Irwin said, amused, and turned back to his desk to fetch his notes. He should have figured, he thought, a bruise between two singularly uncomplicated boys would have an uncomplicated answer.
(“Would you stop with the bloody fucking notes?” Dakin snapped. Rudge looked up from his notebook, where he’d been reading out yesterday’s notes from Irwin’s class, to make sure he’d got down all the points. Everyone looked up, looked over at Dakin, startled. “The man’s not Jesus fucking Christ, you don’t have to document every word he says.”
“Stuff it, Dakin, it’s not Rudge’s fault Irwin’s the only teacher to give you bad marks,” Akthar said.
“You’ll wish you had these come exam time,” Rudge said calmly, closing the notebook and stuffing it back into his bag.
“Oh, I’m sure,” Dakin said, voice dripping with sarcasm. Rudge glared.
“Then you can have a wank to them after. We all know you want to.”
Dakin’s face went scarlet, and before anyone knew what was happening or could move to stop it, he’d taken a swing at Rudge. He missed. Rudge didn’t.)
A cough.
Two desks had been pushed together at the front of the room, and Timms was sprawled dramatically across them. Crowther knelt at his side.
“Nanine! Get the doctor, quickly!” Crowther said in his best attempt at an American accent. Timms simpered and coughed and draped, sending Dakin into gales of laughter in the back of the room.
“The doctor?” Timms said in a wheezy falsetto. “Why, if you can’t make me live, how can he?”
“Don’t say such things, Marguerite! You’ll live, you must live!”
“Perhaps it’s better if I live in your heart… where the world can’t see me.” Timms was apparently attempting some form of accent as well, not that anyone had any hope of identifying ir. “If I’m dead… there’ll be no stain on our love.”
“Shh… don’t say such things, Marguerite.” Crowther and Timms pressed cheek to cheek in a dramatic embrace, which won a cheer from Akthar. “Even if we can’t go to the country today, think of how happy we were once. How happy we shall be again. Think of the day you found the four-leaf clover, of all the good luck it’s going to bring us…”
“What is this shit?” Rudge muttered to no one in particular. Posner shushed him-Lockwood laughed.
“Think of the vows that we’re going to make to each other,” Crowther continued after only an instant’s pause to glare at Rudge. “Ah, Marguerite…”
Timms let out a final dainty cough, then flopped dramatically backwards onto the desk.
“No! Don’t leave me!” Crowther buried his face in Timms’s shirt. Dakin, by this point, was all but crying from laughter, and as soon as he finished pounding out the dramatic final refrain on the piano, Scripps cracked up as well.
Crowther flipped Dakin off, then turned to Hector with great dignity.
“Well, sir?”
“Why, it has to be Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo in Camille. Though Timms, I can’t say I recall Ms. Garbo’s accent sounding quite like that. Ah well. Fifty p., s’il vous plait.”
Another bruise.
“Posner.”
The passed outside the Headmaster’s office, Posner no doubt on the way to class, Hector just leaving a brief and inexplicably tense meeting which consisted of nothing more than Felix informing him tersely that he and Irwin would no longer be sharing lessons. He’d been turning a hand written letter over and over in his hands, but Hector hadn’t been able to get a look at what it said.
Posner stopped and looked up when he heard his name, confirming the suspicion upon which Hector had seen fit to stop him.
“What happened to your lip?”
Posner reached to it self-consciously, his fingers not quite touching the bruised and swollen skin.
“Oh, I-it’s-my uncle, sir. He-didn’t much like some of the things I said about our discussion in class yesterday.” His tone is even, frank, though his eyes are fixed on the floor.
“Discussion? Of-”
“The Holocaust, sir, yes, sir,” Posner interrupted. “Excuse me, sir. I’ll be late…”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Hector said, because what else could he say? He wished to stop him, to offer some quotation, some comfort-but all that came to his mind in that instant was Hardy, God knows why, completely irrelevant as far as he could see-(and why uprose to nightly view/strange stars amid the gloam)--and by the time he could think of something better, Posner had already disappeared out of sight down the hall.
A bully.
Thirteen years old, smaller by half than the boys of his own form, much less the form above (and always would be, as it happened), Akthar’s eyes still flashed fire when the sixth form boys shoved him up against the wall as they passed, laughing and boisterous, their small cruelties performed thoughtlessly.
“Oi!” Akthar called, his unbroken voice high with anger. One or two of the boys turned.
“Is there a problem?” one of them asked, a predatory gleam in his eyes and at the edges of his smirk.
“No problem at all!” And Akthar hadn’t even noticed the presence of the chubby boy from his maths class-Timms, he thought?-until he interjected. “He was just talking to me.”
“Alright, then. That’s what I thought.” And they turn, and go, though one gives them a lingering, thoughtful glance, and a raised eyebrow as reassurance that he will remember them for future torment.
“Are you mental?” Timms demanded, wheeling on Akthar. “You want to get beat to a pulp? Not worth it, I say.”
“They pushed me!” Akthar protested, still furious, glowering down the hall at the older boys’ retreating backs.
“Not worth it,” Timms said again, swinging his arm around Akthar’s shoulders and tugging him down the hall in the opposite direction. “Trust me on that, yeah?”
A broken bone.
Frankly, Dakin had not thought Scripps capable of such a lengthy stream of profanity. Though it was, perhaps, not the time to say so out loud, he was quite impressed.
It was the end of term, all in high spirits, someone had proposed a football match to celebrate their collective completion of the fifth form. Their football games were never the gentlest of matches, true, but perhaps their extra boisterousness today had set them all running a little faster, pushing a little harder, fouling a bit more flagrantly. Dakin didn’t even see what happened-he was racing back towards the goal because Rudge was threatening to break through, and so had his back to the action when he heard the distinctive sound of body hitting body, body hitting the ground-then the far less familiar tones of Scripps cursing a blue streak.
Not that the others weren’t contributing their fair share-though their cursing was more hushed, more awed, more flat out fucking terrified. As Dakin booked it closer, they all backed away, leaving Scripps curled in on himself on the ground. Dakin knelt down next to him and fuck but was there blood. Scripps had his arm clutched to his chest, and Dakin thought he could see the glint of bone. Someone behind him made a choked noise, and Dakin looked up to see Posner looking about to puke.
“Well, go on, the lot of you!” Dakin said, doing his best to keep all panic from his voice. He was almost sure he had succeeded. “Go-go find somebody! Get some help, for Christ’s sake, don’t just stand there gaping.”
They did stand there gaping for a moment longer, then Crowther peeled off from the knot of boys and took off running for the school; within an instant, the rest had followed.
“Right then,” Dakin said, and realized he had no fucking clue what to do. “Scripps. Don. D’you think you can sit up?”
“Let’s give it a go,” Scripps said, voice tight. At least he’d laid off the cursing, Dakin thought, though he started right in again as Dakin helped him get seated upright. More like propped upright, really-as soon as he was up, he started to slump down again until Dakin scooted in so that Scripps could lean against him.
“Right,” Dakin said again. “Not my best idea, maybe, but here we are. The other’s’ll be just a moment, nothing to worry about.”
He felt, rather than saw Scripps’s nod-frankly, Dakin’s eyes were firmly fixed on his trainers, where he would not have to see the mess of blood or, what was more disturbing, the pale pain of his best friend’s face.
“Alright there, Scrippsy?” he asked after the silence had gone on too long. Scripps laughed, tight and breathy.
“Been better. Fuck,” he added suddenly, more a gasp than a word. “It fucking hurts, Stu.”
“Steady on, they’ll be here soon,” Dakin said, fumbling for and then grabbing hold of Scripps’s uninjured hand. Scripps clasped his hand around Dakin’s and held on tight.
Only when he heard the shouts of the other boys approaching did Dakin hastily pull away.
A cold.
The steady, dismal rain had persisted for a solid week, and the very air felt clammy and close and filled with fog. The exam approached; anxiety was high and morale was low, and some fucking knob (in the boys’ words) had given everyone a cold.
He knew the boys thought him incorrigibly distractible, but Hector kept a close eye on the mood of his boys. And, well, who could see that miserable, sniffling lot and think there was any chance of getting work done?
(Irwin, apparently-or perhaps he just didn’t care. “If they’re well enough to come to class, they’re well enough to do their lessons,” he said irritably in the staff room later that day.)
Crowther and Rudge were the stoic ones, sitting poker-faced in their seats at the back-but leave it, Hector thought, to the actor and the athlete to try and appear unfazed by mere illness.
Timms, by contrast, was as melodramatic as one would expect, the first to complain about Irwin’s insistence on trying to teach them today, and about the plague, no less, was it some kind of cruel joke, do you think, sir? Lockwood did not provide his usual counterpoint of complains, looking pale and pinched, drawn into himself in a way that emphasized his long limbs and the fact that he was-always was, really-a bit too thin.
“Well, boys,” Hector said. “I admire your dedication to your education.”
“Dedication?” Akthar groaned. “Begging your pardon, sir, but don’t flatter yourself, sir. My mum all but threw me out-said she’d rather have me get my classmates sick than my sisters.”
“Thanks for that, by the by.” Dakin was slumped, arms crossed, looking peevish, as if nothing so much as frustrated by his body’s insistence on reminding him that he was really only human.
“Of course, blame the Moslem. I daresay we’re used to it,” Akthar said, while Scripps muttered, “Stuff it, Dakin,” without raising his head from his hands, where he had dropped it immediately upon sitting down and had not moved since, save the shuddering of his shoulders when he coughed.
“Boys, boys,” Hector said in his most placating tone. He continued gamely as Lockwood broke out in a violent coughing fit: “I thought today might be a good day for a bit of independent reading. You’ve all brought something, I presume? Wonderful. Have at it, then.”
They all dutifully dug out their books, but soon (as Hector had hoped and expected), each and every boy let fall first his book, then his head, and went to sleep.
Well, every boy but one. Posner, up at the front, kept his gaze fixed, brow furrowed, on his book. He had an oversized men’s handkerchief bunched into one fist, and every few seconds he would turn aside from his book to sneeze into it.
Hector had been leaning against the front of his own desk to observe the boys-now he straightened, reached forward, and grabbed hold of the top of Posner’s book. Posner looked up at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes. Hector tugged the book of Posner’s hands, then put a hand ever so gently on the back of the boy’s head and pushed it down, so it was resting against the desk. Posner shifted, sniffled, and within seconds was asleep.