cuddy_fest prompt submission (almost a week early!)
Title: Blue Book
Author: katernater
Rating: PG
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Summary: cuddy_fest prompt # 205: Cuddy/House. U-Mich fic. Their endocrinology class, "I cheated off you in the mid-term"
Disclaimer: Not mine. Just borrowing.
Unlike the rest of the architecture on campus (which played, in gothic detail, to the pockets of visiting tour groups) the lecture halls at the University of Michigan had not so much been "designed" as they had been "thrown together from WWII bunker blueprints." No thought had been given to continuity of design. No thought had been given at all, apparently, to student comfort or aesthetic. The only thought that had seemed to puncture the architect’s brain was how he or she was going pack as many undergraduate science students into one room as possible.
In this, the architect had achieved a room worthy of a golden T-square.
The lecture hall was filled to occupancy this morning, with backpacks and coats bunched up in the seats next to their sweaty owners. ‘Not even nine o’clock and the room was already sweltering. The best maintenance had come up with was a couple of old box fans, placed on opposite ends of the room, that weren’t much good at passing the fetid air around. They were good for shredding long strips of notebook paper, apparently, a pelt of which littered either side of the room like a dirty snowfall. Apart from the heat, the students had another reason to sweat: a midterm. College campuses swarmed with stories of tough professors who designed tests with built-in failure rates. H.P. Moore, Distinguished Professor of Physiology, was one of these academic Lokis. He engineered his exams to ensure failure. This morning, panic slunk around the floor like an anaconda in a pet store.
Lisa Cuddy, veteran of the carefully planned semester, slid into a chair in the second row and braced her sneakers against the seat in front of her. She was auditing Moore’s Endocrinology class, which meant that she wouldn’t get formal credit for it, but that she was welcome to participate in the lecture. It was common for undergraduates to audit classes before deciding on a specialty, sort of like test-driving a car before putting down a deposit. Cuddy enjoyed endocrinology-wasn’t sure she could make a career out of it-but she did the work, and she made the work look easy.
She was half a semester into her second year of undergraduate work, had classes stacked back-to-back from eight o'clock in the morning until eleven, a break for a lab colloquium at noon, and a straight drive to the finish line from two o'clock to four o'clock. In the hustle of academia, she found little time for lunch or for hanging out with friends, but she was pushing hard for A’s across the board, and her academic adviser seemed content to fill her days with Gross Anatomy, Ethics, and a host of other sanctioned classes.
She had done well her first year. Her classes had called for analytical thinking and she had pursued, with dogged determination, a perfect grade point average. She had very nearly achieved it, save for a snafu regarding the distribution of a perfect "A" in her Institutional Administrations course -- she had taken the "A-", but grudgingly.
The flood of students in the back of the room had slowed to a trickle. Hardly anyone was late for a midterm, especially one of Moore’s. There was an unspoken superstition that the guy might actually bar and chain the door if you didn’t show up on time. Cuddy glanced toward the front of the room and, sure enough, Moore was standing at the pulpit with his finger half buried in his shirtsleeve, hawk-eyeing the time down to the last second.
He rattled something archaic from the bottom of his esophagus and squared a stack of test booklets on the corner of the pulpit. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, settle, settle. Mr. Pilfry, please close the door. If you’re not already here, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
The student got up to secure the door - and just about got a door to the face as a long, bare elbow jammed itself around the side of the frame. “Hey, hold on, what’re you trying to do? Roll the stone away from the tomb, Poindexter, I’m not late yet.”
Cuddy hooked her arm over the back of her seat and watched as the owner of the elbow slid the rest of the way into the room and started to descend the narrow stairs toward the floor. There was no mistaking Gregory House. The tall, pompous, academic pariah was as much a fixture on campus as the big stone ‘M’ in the middle of the quad. Personally, Cuddy thought a lot of the stories about him were overblown. No one could be that reckless and still be enrolled, ‘still hope to have a career after medical school. She shoved her feet toward the bottom of the aisle and turned around.
On stage, Moore looked like he had sat in something wet. He glared at House from over the rims of horned spectacles. "So glad that you decided to finally join us, Mr. House --" he tapped a white fingernail against the face of his watch "-- mind the test booklets, if you please."
House mashed his palm against his face to remove his sunglasses, slipping the temple into the collar of his shirt. "With the sincerest pleasure, professor," he replied.
Cuddy heard him coming down the stairs behind her, loudly, like he had marionette kneecaps. She pulled her elbows toward the inside of the aisle. He passed her without a glance and piled a stack of blue examination books in the crook of his arm, gave Moore a billion-watt grin (which was not returned) and started up the center aisle, flicking booklets at students.
"The great examination, ladies and gentlemen!" Moore had rallied his reedy Oxford vocals and begun to project with typical bravado. "Like Alexander leading his great army to the summit of Tel Gomel, I will wager that some of you poor, plebeian soldiers will not make it past this mid-year incursion. Such is the way of progress. The great torch that keeps vigil, eternal and constant, over each of our lives and gives us --" a pause "-- I can see your face from here, Mr. House. I assure you: mockery is the penultimate in bad taste. Continue to dispense the test booklets."
A rumble of behind-the-hand-laughter rippled through the lecture hall.
While Moore soliloquized, Cuddy watched House out of the corner of her eye. Most of the students in the room were watching House, too. It was hard not to. More than a showman, Gregory House had the kind of physical bearing geneticists called “a happy accident.” Tall, lean and blue-eyed, he looked like the kind of guy you’d find in advertisements for English polo leagues - if guys like House ever played polo. He was good-looking and, what was worse, he was absolutely aware of it.
Cuddy’s roommate had known about him before Cuddy had, and she wasn’t even in the pre-med program. The two women had little in common except for a few quirks - they both liked David Bowie and agreed that his Ziggy Stardust period was by far the best and weirdest thing he’d ever done -- and they were pleasant to one another and comfortable enough to know that they wouldn’t ever really be close. But somehow, Michelle had heard of House before Cuddy had. She’d also formed a pretty strong opinion about him and wasn’t afraid to share it. Last year, Cuddy had signed up for a few classes but had been shocked to find she’d been bumped out of the ones she’d wanted. She’d slapped the print-off onto the desk and demanded to know why she had been put in Lynch's Practical Anatomy seminar instead of that of Matthias Reed, M.D., her first choice. Her roommate screwed up her nose at the misdeed, drew a long red fingernail across the paper and then let out a low whistle --
"Greg House is the T.A."
"Who?"
"Lisa, don't tell me you haven't -- oh, hon. He's just about the only guy in the graduate program worth knowing. Guy's got an ego out to here," and she had demonstrated with her hands spread two feet apart, "and, from what I hear from some of the other girls in Lynch's seminar?" She had pushed her tongue to the inside of her cheek and made her eyebrows two blond mountain peaks. Her hands went to a span of three feet.
"Oh, please."
"Seriously, Lisa. Watch yourself around this guy. And watch this guy. If I ever do anything for you -- ever -- it'll be to see you spout some of that three-point-nine-nine GPA stuff at him. Seriously. You won't remember you complained about not getting in Reed's good graces after you meet Greg House. Buh-leeve me."
A blue test booklet landed on her desk and suddenly, the seat next to Cuddy filled up with all six-feet-three-inches of Gregory House. At some point when she hadn’t been looking, he’d slipped his sunglasses back on his face. His ginger-brown hair looked like it had been licked in five different directions. He was the only guy Cuddy had ever seen who could make sitting seem like physical exercise.
She opened her test book and bent back the spine, writing her name at the top of the first sheet. The lump beside her shifted, goading one of those door-splitting elbows into her side. Annoyed, Cuddy pulled the rest of her body toward the far side of her cubicle seat. The elbow stayed where it was. Well, that was just rude.
“Do you mind?” she asked, dipping her chin toward House’s arm.
“Mind what?” He peered at her from over the tops of his sunglasses, then looked at his elbow. The briefest of smirks appeared at the corners of his mouth. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding like he meant it at all, “didn’t know you had boundary issues.” He pulled his arm onto the top of his desk and hooked his shoulder blades over the back of the seat.
Cuddy’s brows narrowed slightly. “I don’t. And, anyway, my issues are none of your business.”
“Now it sounds like you have issues with being defensive.”
“Why did you sit next to me?”
House peeled himself off the back of the chair and raised one shoulder. “It was the only open seat,” he said. Cuddy turned around and surveyed the rest of the room. “There are, like, fifty open seats. Try again.”
“Fine. It was the only open seat I wanted to sit in.”
Cuddy eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”
Another shrug, and this one had some forward momentum to go with it. House pulled his body in the seat, hunched over the desk, and indicated Moore with a bob of his chin. “Because it’s a mid-term,” he said, slanting a look in her direction. “And because, even though I didn’t study for it, I’m pretty sure that you did.”
Cuddy’s mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding?” A couple of heads turned in the next row over. She dropped her voice and leaned in, glaring at his smug profile. “You sat next to me because you wanted to cheat off me?”
“That’s the idea.”
“What in the hell makes you think I’m going to let you do that?”
House scowled, but on him, it was almost amiable. Like he was only putting on a front because it jollied him to take the piss out of her. He mashed his hand to his face and peeled off his sunglasses. “Look,” he said, “you should be flattered. Plenty of people wait their entire college careers for this kind of experience. And in case you think I’m playing favourites, you should know that you were way down on the list of potential seatmates. That guy back there -“ he aimed a thumb over his shoulder at a kid a few rows up, who was pushing his septum with the eraser on his pencil “-he was actually my first choice.”
‘So why didn’t you sit by him?” Cuddy asked hotly.
House grinned. “Because I would have had to ask him if I could borrow a pencil.”
Cuddy leaned down and hooked her bag with her finger, yanking it onto the desk. “Here,” she said, pulling a pen out of a side pocket, “I wouldn’t want you to have to settle for your second choice.” She slapped the pen onto House’s desk and jammed the bag back underneath her feet. Adrenaline whooshed up her spine in an awesome wave. Somewhere in the back of her brain, logic was telling her that he was just playing with her. Well, who said she couldn’t play right back? It was worth it to see the brief, out-of-place look on his face.
But if he was sweating anything, House didn’t let it last for long. He pulled the pen between his fingers and raised the tip to the corner of his mouth, shoving a shoulder into the jamb of the seat, where desk met chair. His grasshopper knees stuck up at two different angles. “I lied,” he said. “I think I like the scenery here much better.”
Cuddy closed her test booklet and folded her elbows on top of the desk, frowning. “Look,” she said, “I know who you are and I know what you think you’re doing. You think that just because you have a reputation on this campus, you can get away with whatever you want. Well, it’s not going to work on me. I’m not intimidated by you, and I’m not impressed by how many cadavers you’ve stolen out of the university medical center -“
“-- Allegedly stolen,” House interjected, “and it was four, according to the last rumour I heard.”
“Give it up, House. I’m not going to let you cheat off me.”
To Cuddy’s immense pleasure, House actually looked a little surprised that she’d called him by name.
That’s two for me, she thought.
“There is no way you have that much academic integrity,” House said after an organizational pause. Cuddy could practically see the gears and cogs grinding in his head, trying to file and categorize her like he filed and categorized everyone else. She almost laughed when he squinted at her down the line of his long wolf’s nose, like he had just about got her pegged.
“The only reason to say that you’re not impressed by someone is to cover up the fact that you are impressed by them, but think that it’s a shot to your character if you don’t lie about it.” He raised his eyebrows as if to say, Am I right?
Except for a calmly superior smile, Cuddy’s face gave nothing away.
“You can keep the pen,” she said.
House opened his mouth to rebut, but a thunderclap of authoritarian English took away the chance. “Mister House -“ Moore had advanced to the front of the stage and was eyeing him like a cartoon villain “-are you having trouble finding your seat? We’d like to begin the examination, if it’s not too taxing for you.”
A few dozen heads swiveled to watch House remain absolutely stone still, like he hadn’t even heard. He simply sat there, volleying Cuddy’s prairie-level gaze, until he slowly started to smile. “It’s House,” he said quietly.
Moore leaned forward on the balls of his feet, cupping a hand to his ear. “What’s that?” he asked.
“I said, it’s just ‘House.'” He leaned back, slipping the pen behind one ear. With another sideways glance at Cuddy, he peeled his long legs from underneath the desk and stood up, leaning over to swap test booklets with her. He wagged the book next to his face. “Now I know who you are,” he said. He took a seat a couple of rows over. It was all Cuddy could do to keep from snickering.
Moore took his place at the pulpit, folded his parchment-coloured hands, and addressed the room:
“Is everybody ready? You may begin.”
Author: katernater
Rating: PG
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Summary: cuddy_fest prompt # 205: Cuddy/House. U-Mich fic. Their endocrinology class, "I cheated off you in the mid-term"
Disclaimer: Not mine. Just borrowing.
Unlike the rest of the architecture on campus (which played, in gothic detail, to the pockets of visiting tour groups) the lecture halls at the University of Michigan had not so much been "designed" as they had been "thrown together from WWII bunker blueprints." No thought had been given to continuity of design. No thought had been given at all, apparently, to student comfort or aesthetic. The only thought that had seemed to puncture the architect’s brain was how he or she was going pack as many undergraduate science students into one room as possible.
In this, the architect had achieved a room worthy of a golden T-square.
The lecture hall was filled to occupancy this morning, with backpacks and coats bunched up in the seats next to their sweaty owners. ‘Not even nine o’clock and the room was already sweltering. The best maintenance had come up with was a couple of old box fans, placed on opposite ends of the room, that weren’t much good at passing the fetid air around. They were good for shredding long strips of notebook paper, apparently, a pelt of which littered either side of the room like a dirty snowfall. Apart from the heat, the students had another reason to sweat: a midterm. College campuses swarmed with stories of tough professors who designed tests with built-in failure rates. H.P. Moore, Distinguished Professor of Physiology, was one of these academic Lokis. He engineered his exams to ensure failure. This morning, panic slunk around the floor like an anaconda in a pet store.
Lisa Cuddy, veteran of the carefully planned semester, slid into a chair in the second row and braced her sneakers against the seat in front of her. She was auditing Moore’s Endocrinology class, which meant that she wouldn’t get formal credit for it, but that she was welcome to participate in the lecture. It was common for undergraduates to audit classes before deciding on a specialty, sort of like test-driving a car before putting down a deposit. Cuddy enjoyed endocrinology-wasn’t sure she could make a career out of it-but she did the work, and she made the work look easy.
She was half a semester into her second year of undergraduate work, had classes stacked back-to-back from eight o'clock in the morning until eleven, a break for a lab colloquium at noon, and a straight drive to the finish line from two o'clock to four o'clock. In the hustle of academia, she found little time for lunch or for hanging out with friends, but she was pushing hard for A’s across the board, and her academic adviser seemed content to fill her days with Gross Anatomy, Ethics, and a host of other sanctioned classes.
She had done well her first year. Her classes had called for analytical thinking and she had pursued, with dogged determination, a perfect grade point average. She had very nearly achieved it, save for a snafu regarding the distribution of a perfect "A" in her Institutional Administrations course -- she had taken the "A-", but grudgingly.
The flood of students in the back of the room had slowed to a trickle. Hardly anyone was late for a midterm, especially one of Moore’s. There was an unspoken superstition that the guy might actually bar and chain the door if you didn’t show up on time. Cuddy glanced toward the front of the room and, sure enough, Moore was standing at the pulpit with his finger half buried in his shirtsleeve, hawk-eyeing the time down to the last second.
He rattled something archaic from the bottom of his esophagus and squared a stack of test booklets on the corner of the pulpit. “All right, ladies and gentlemen, settle, settle. Mr. Pilfry, please close the door. If you’re not already here, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
The student got up to secure the door - and just about got a door to the face as a long, bare elbow jammed itself around the side of the frame. “Hey, hold on, what’re you trying to do? Roll the stone away from the tomb, Poindexter, I’m not late yet.”
Cuddy hooked her arm over the back of her seat and watched as the owner of the elbow slid the rest of the way into the room and started to descend the narrow stairs toward the floor. There was no mistaking Gregory House. The tall, pompous, academic pariah was as much a fixture on campus as the big stone ‘M’ in the middle of the quad. Personally, Cuddy thought a lot of the stories about him were overblown. No one could be that reckless and still be enrolled, ‘still hope to have a career after medical school. She shoved her feet toward the bottom of the aisle and turned around.
On stage, Moore looked like he had sat in something wet. He glared at House from over the rims of horned spectacles. "So glad that you decided to finally join us, Mr. House --" he tapped a white fingernail against the face of his watch "-- mind the test booklets, if you please."
House mashed his palm against his face to remove his sunglasses, slipping the temple into the collar of his shirt. "With the sincerest pleasure, professor," he replied.
Cuddy heard him coming down the stairs behind her, loudly, like he had marionette kneecaps. She pulled her elbows toward the inside of the aisle. He passed her without a glance and piled a stack of blue examination books in the crook of his arm, gave Moore a billion-watt grin (which was not returned) and started up the center aisle, flicking booklets at students.
"The great examination, ladies and gentlemen!" Moore had rallied his reedy Oxford vocals and begun to project with typical bravado. "Like Alexander leading his great army to the summit of Tel Gomel, I will wager that some of you poor, plebeian soldiers will not make it past this mid-year incursion. Such is the way of progress. The great torch that keeps vigil, eternal and constant, over each of our lives and gives us --" a pause "-- I can see your face from here, Mr. House. I assure you: mockery is the penultimate in bad taste. Continue to dispense the test booklets."
A rumble of behind-the-hand-laughter rippled through the lecture hall.
While Moore soliloquized, Cuddy watched House out of the corner of her eye. Most of the students in the room were watching House, too. It was hard not to. More than a showman, Gregory House had the kind of physical bearing geneticists called “a happy accident.” Tall, lean and blue-eyed, he looked like the kind of guy you’d find in advertisements for English polo leagues - if guys like House ever played polo. He was good-looking and, what was worse, he was absolutely aware of it.
Cuddy’s roommate had known about him before Cuddy had, and she wasn’t even in the pre-med program. The two women had little in common except for a few quirks - they both liked David Bowie and agreed that his Ziggy Stardust period was by far the best and weirdest thing he’d ever done -- and they were pleasant to one another and comfortable enough to know that they wouldn’t ever really be close. But somehow, Michelle had heard of House before Cuddy had. She’d also formed a pretty strong opinion about him and wasn’t afraid to share it. Last year, Cuddy had signed up for a few classes but had been shocked to find she’d been bumped out of the ones she’d wanted. She’d slapped the print-off onto the desk and demanded to know why she had been put in Lynch's Practical Anatomy seminar instead of that of Matthias Reed, M.D., her first choice. Her roommate screwed up her nose at the misdeed, drew a long red fingernail across the paper and then let out a low whistle --
"Greg House is the T.A."
"Who?"
"Lisa, don't tell me you haven't -- oh, hon. He's just about the only guy in the graduate program worth knowing. Guy's got an ego out to here," and she had demonstrated with her hands spread two feet apart, "and, from what I hear from some of the other girls in Lynch's seminar?" She had pushed her tongue to the inside of her cheek and made her eyebrows two blond mountain peaks. Her hands went to a span of three feet.
"Oh, please."
"Seriously, Lisa. Watch yourself around this guy. And watch this guy. If I ever do anything for you -- ever -- it'll be to see you spout some of that three-point-nine-nine GPA stuff at him. Seriously. You won't remember you complained about not getting in Reed's good graces after you meet Greg House. Buh-leeve me."
A blue test booklet landed on her desk and suddenly, the seat next to Cuddy filled up with all six-feet-three-inches of Gregory House. At some point when she hadn’t been looking, he’d slipped his sunglasses back on his face. His ginger-brown hair looked like it had been licked in five different directions. He was the only guy Cuddy had ever seen who could make sitting seem like physical exercise.
She opened her test book and bent back the spine, writing her name at the top of the first sheet. The lump beside her shifted, goading one of those door-splitting elbows into her side. Annoyed, Cuddy pulled the rest of her body toward the far side of her cubicle seat. The elbow stayed where it was. Well, that was just rude.
“Do you mind?” she asked, dipping her chin toward House’s arm.
“Mind what?” He peered at her from over the tops of his sunglasses, then looked at his elbow. The briefest of smirks appeared at the corners of his mouth. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding like he meant it at all, “didn’t know you had boundary issues.” He pulled his arm onto the top of his desk and hooked his shoulder blades over the back of the seat.
Cuddy’s brows narrowed slightly. “I don’t. And, anyway, my issues are none of your business.”
“Now it sounds like you have issues with being defensive.”
“Why did you sit next to me?”
House peeled himself off the back of the chair and raised one shoulder. “It was the only open seat,” he said. Cuddy turned around and surveyed the rest of the room. “There are, like, fifty open seats. Try again.”
“Fine. It was the only open seat I wanted to sit in.”
Cuddy eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”
Another shrug, and this one had some forward momentum to go with it. House pulled his body in the seat, hunched over the desk, and indicated Moore with a bob of his chin. “Because it’s a mid-term,” he said, slanting a look in her direction. “And because, even though I didn’t study for it, I’m pretty sure that you did.”
Cuddy’s mouth dropped open. “Are you kidding?” A couple of heads turned in the next row over. She dropped her voice and leaned in, glaring at his smug profile. “You sat next to me because you wanted to cheat off me?”
“That’s the idea.”
“What in the hell makes you think I’m going to let you do that?”
House scowled, but on him, it was almost amiable. Like he was only putting on a front because it jollied him to take the piss out of her. He mashed his hand to his face and peeled off his sunglasses. “Look,” he said, “you should be flattered. Plenty of people wait their entire college careers for this kind of experience. And in case you think I’m playing favourites, you should know that you were way down on the list of potential seatmates. That guy back there -“ he aimed a thumb over his shoulder at a kid a few rows up, who was pushing his septum with the eraser on his pencil “-he was actually my first choice.”
‘So why didn’t you sit by him?” Cuddy asked hotly.
House grinned. “Because I would have had to ask him if I could borrow a pencil.”
Cuddy leaned down and hooked her bag with her finger, yanking it onto the desk. “Here,” she said, pulling a pen out of a side pocket, “I wouldn’t want you to have to settle for your second choice.” She slapped the pen onto House’s desk and jammed the bag back underneath her feet. Adrenaline whooshed up her spine in an awesome wave. Somewhere in the back of her brain, logic was telling her that he was just playing with her. Well, who said she couldn’t play right back? It was worth it to see the brief, out-of-place look on his face.
But if he was sweating anything, House didn’t let it last for long. He pulled the pen between his fingers and raised the tip to the corner of his mouth, shoving a shoulder into the jamb of the seat, where desk met chair. His grasshopper knees stuck up at two different angles. “I lied,” he said. “I think I like the scenery here much better.”
Cuddy closed her test booklet and folded her elbows on top of the desk, frowning. “Look,” she said, “I know who you are and I know what you think you’re doing. You think that just because you have a reputation on this campus, you can get away with whatever you want. Well, it’s not going to work on me. I’m not intimidated by you, and I’m not impressed by how many cadavers you’ve stolen out of the university medical center -“
“-- Allegedly stolen,” House interjected, “and it was four, according to the last rumour I heard.”
“Give it up, House. I’m not going to let you cheat off me.”
To Cuddy’s immense pleasure, House actually looked a little surprised that she’d called him by name.
That’s two for me, she thought.
“There is no way you have that much academic integrity,” House said after an organizational pause. Cuddy could practically see the gears and cogs grinding in his head, trying to file and categorize her like he filed and categorized everyone else. She almost laughed when he squinted at her down the line of his long wolf’s nose, like he had just about got her pegged.
“The only reason to say that you’re not impressed by someone is to cover up the fact that you are impressed by them, but think that it’s a shot to your character if you don’t lie about it.” He raised his eyebrows as if to say, Am I right?
Except for a calmly superior smile, Cuddy’s face gave nothing away.
“You can keep the pen,” she said.
House opened his mouth to rebut, but a thunderclap of authoritarian English took away the chance. “Mister House -“ Moore had advanced to the front of the stage and was eyeing him like a cartoon villain “-are you having trouble finding your seat? We’d like to begin the examination, if it’s not too taxing for you.”
A few dozen heads swiveled to watch House remain absolutely stone still, like he hadn’t even heard. He simply sat there, volleying Cuddy’s prairie-level gaze, until he slowly started to smile. “It’s House,” he said quietly.
Moore leaned forward on the balls of his feet, cupping a hand to his ear. “What’s that?” he asked.
“I said, it’s just ‘House.'” He leaned back, slipping the pen behind one ear. With another sideways glance at Cuddy, he peeled his long legs from underneath the desk and stood up, leaning over to swap test booklets with her. He wagged the book next to his face. “Now I know who you are,” he said. He took a seat a couple of rows over. It was all Cuddy could do to keep from snickering.
Moore took his place at the pulpit, folded his parchment-coloured hands, and addressed the room:
“Is everybody ready? You may begin.”