An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Summary: What seems to be a completely ordinary class on an early Tuesday quickly turns for the weirdest option possible. Two students can't tell their teacher what to do despite how bad he's doing. It's not polite, it's not correct. Or we just ignore the rules and play nurses anyway.
Word count: 2K words.
Originally written: October 2016, translated Sept 2017.
It seemed like it was going to be an ordinary Tuesday morning. My roommates were as late as ever, I had eaten a bowl of cornflakes with my yogurts and my glass of apple juice yet again, there were still people taking a shower at half past six and I was right on time. Long story short, everything was fine.
I take my usual seat in our good old CC002 classroom. Benoît, my fellow neighbour in like three quarters of our classes, sits next to me and we start to bet on the class that's about to happen. I bet he will have forgotten his papers, him that he will be fifteen minutes late for some lame-sauce reason. He owes me a cookie and I owe him a caricature of the geo teacher.
Five past eight rings at school. Class is about to begin and, usually, our teacher would be there, but nobody has arrived to teach us yet. Theories pop here and there: someone may have thrown themselves under his train's wheels, just like what happened last week to the Philo and Latin teachers, but Benoît and I know perfectly that he came to school on foot.
I cannot get over how strange everything is. Minutes fly by, our class is getting upset and we are still both wondering what the hell is up. To keep myself busy, I get out my English stuff to polish my oral in the afternoon when suddenly...
Red as a poppy, breathless, hair messed up by the wind, shirt collar bended backwards and glasses on the edge of his nose, there he is. Our French teacher, Mr. Bannaire, has arrived. He installs himself at the desk while apologizing for being late.
The same pinch I felt the week was before back. His voice, drier than usual, cracks as soon as his vocal cords move. He rubs the bottom of his jaw and puts his glasses back in their place. His eyes are a bit red: there is not even the slightest smell of weed in the classroom. He gets out from his worn-out backpack his “Initiation to the Latin Language” textbook for a reason I cannot get.
“Huh... It's one of your Latin books, right?” Benoît asks me, blinking furiously.
“It is!” I reply, as doubtful as he is. “It's the book we use on Wednesday mornings. Don't tell me that this idiot thought today was Wednesday...”
I look at the teacher again. His face is pale, almost corpse-like compared to the reddish parts barely hidden by his beard and what we can see of his chest between his scarf and his sweater. Combined to his cheeks seemingly reddened by the cold, there is a “little girl with the matches” aesthetic to him. Well, that would be more believable… If we were not in a rather warm month of October.
“Dude, he hasn't cured himself since Thursday. We'll end up with a mute teacher.” I whisper to my neighbour.
“Yeah, he looks like a zombie!”
He stares at me before clearing his throat. He must remember my inappropriate remark from last week, when I told him to be careful to his voice. In one blow, I do not regret not having respected him. But a hypokhâgne kid isn't going to play the doctor with her doctorate teacher.
Bad memories come back to me. I see my former History teacher, her reddened nose, her voice tarnished by the illness she doesn't even know about. To her, it is just a cold. To him, it is probably just a bad cold too.
He requests us to get our lesson out. His voice breaks already and he coughs. While Benoît grunts at the idea of two hours of class cut by coughing and while the teacher is still finding a way how to say two sentences in a row without his throat getting clawed, I get worried.
The class does not notice anything, they’re asleep. I confess to my neighbour my thoughts, he seems to feel the same way too. I'm not alone, at least: I see my roommate, Déborah, look at me with worry on her face. I know what she's thinking about: her French oral from yesterday. It's getting worse and worse.
He gives us two papers, of which the first line reads “Latin Test N°1”. Benoît huffs in amusement: he attends Ancient Greek classes, he doesn't give a single damn about the Latin test. I then call him out even if he's already two rows in his distribution.
“Yes, what is it Justine?”
“It's... It's French class right now, sir. The test is on tomorrow...”
He stares at Benoît then at me then at his papers. His eyes grow wide and he suddenly screams: it's not Wednesday?! His breathing is shallow, something does not sound right between his heavy breathes in. No response comes from the class as he keeps his cough in. This class, for sure, starts off the worst way possible.
He takes back the given out papers with a confused and embarrassed look on his face. As he melts into apologies, Benoît wants us to write down this awkward moment for our dumb comic, but I refuse. Today isn't funny. He's clearly getting devoured by fever. My neighbour looks at me and his smile, that I know guess forced, fades out. We're two on the same boat.
The class is starting to realize what's happening. The teacher is scratching his head and, embarrassed, tells us that he got mistaken and that we're going back to last week's lesson: Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme. I remember how my roommate described him to me: choking, apologizing for a yes or for a no, probably trying to ignore his headache, crying after a coughing fit.
Benoît looks at me with eyes I've never seen from him. I don't think I could even describe what feeling he was conveying to me, but it should be on the worry spectrum. I'm tense and I know that if I wasn't crossing my arms my hands would shake. I don't want to be a nurse again.
Mr. Bannaire turns to me, chokes back a cough and requests me to explain the main idea of the first part of the extract. Shit, I didn't pay attention to what he was talking about because I was so much in my thoughts... I read the text again quickly as best as I can and try to read between the lines what Stendhal could have meant dozens of years before this.
“You haven't read the text,” he says to me with the strictest voice he can have, “Juliette?”
“Yeah, but... Huh... Eh... I-I...”
Before I can even finish my sentence, if you can call incoherent babbling such a thing, he clutches his scarf and puts a hand on his mouth. His coughing fit surprises the class by its intensity, when the ones from before were just normal. Something tells me we overcame the angina there.
“Wait,” Benoît yells, “he called you Juliette?!”
“He did, yeah... ” I whisper back. “Fuck, there's no way around it, the fever is getting to his head.”
“Julia”, he screams out of nowhere, “stop chatting with your neighbour!”
I stare at him. How can he get my name wrong two times in a row, and with two different names?! I clench my fists, but Raphaëlle was the one calling the teacher out on their bullshit all those years ago. I need to do something, but a hypokhâgne kid isn't going to play doctor with her doctorate teacher...
He continues his speech on La Chartreuse but what he's saying doesn't make sense anymore. It is commentary shards here and there, literary concepts with massacred names whose definition do not match with the sentence bits he is speaking about, with a lot of coughing. It is words lost in a sea of cough.
His eyes tear up as Benoît has to tell me I'm thinking out loud. Nobody is writing down the class: everybody knows we're getting taught nonsense. He whipes them while taking off his glasses: he looks even sicker when his face is bare.
I turn back to my neighbour who was already fixated on me. He asks me what is frustrating me. Surprised but not having the possibility of explaining myself, I tell him that I want to end this class. This is nothing more than a gambled mess of disorganized and incoherent words that we're trying to put together so we can pretend we're still in shape to make class.
“But... But you're sure we can?” Benoît hesitates.
“No, we don’t.” I reply to him with my eyes set on our French teacher. “But do you really think he’s gonna tell himself ‘oh, wait, maybe I should go back home and sleep!’? He’s not gonna do that, it’s up to us.”
“You're not wrong...”
When he finishes his sentence, we both see Mr. Bannaire falls back just to catch himself up by grapping the desk. I clench my teeth: it's unbearable to stay there and watch such a... Show. The class is buzzing like a hive as the teacher's cough is overlapping with it.
But a hypokhâgne kid is not going to play doctor with her doctorate teacher.
It is too much for me and I get up.
“Sit down, Justine...” He coughes. “You caused enough trouble...!”
“You can talk, I’m not the one who almost chokes every second he speaks! Please, end that class! You know you’re not gonna last!”
“I do not see, what you are talking about. Sit down, be quiet, or I kick you from the class...”
“You’re not going to last!!”
His frowned eyebrows lift and the entire class turns in my direction. He blinks and, after coughing again for a bit, looks at me, a surprised look on his face.
“You... You're not like the others...’
“What? Sir? You’re sure fever isn't getting to your head to spew such things out?”
“You are something different, Justine...” He continues to stutter. “I’ve never seen a student so involved in... Huh...”
“Benoît, go behind him, I think he's gonna faint soon...”
I step back in the alley. The teacher is facing me, completely out of it, eyes staring directly in the void behind my neck. He staggers to me as he lets go of his Chartreuse which falls to the ground in a barely-heard sound.
“W-what's wrong all of a sudden?! Y-you're scaring me sir!!”
“I knew something was wrong with you...”
“I don't see what you mean...”
His eyes wet without him almost choking beforehand. It is conformed, the fever is making him do some random nonsense. Back stuck on the wall of the room, I have no way to escape and he ends up catching up to me, Benoît right behind him. The two of them look at me, one with tears flowing down, the other with a worried and anxious look on his face.
My teacher falls right in front of me and I barely catch him back. I am split between embarrassment and worry and, tempted to see what face he could be displaying, I hear him sob, choke on tears and coughs.
The hypokhâgne kid is going to play doctor with her doctorate teacher.
Mechanically, I embrace him. It’s a human reflex. I currently don’t give a damn about deontology. Why caring about some pile of laws when someone that sick takes shelter in your arms? The class is looking at me, probably drawn by the noise of their teacher's cries. This class is really bizarre.
“You knew this was going to happen, no...?” he whispers behind my ear.
“Huh,” I stutter, “I had a small idea because of your condition from yesterday but... Sir?! Sir?!”
In my arms lays my unconscious French teacher.
I fall forward, carried by his body, heavier than my small, thin almost-adult muscles. Benoît, a bit lost, catches our unconscious teacher, but I have to get back on my feet with a table. He looks up from our own Sleeping Beauty and, almos without thinking, puts his hand on his forehead.
“Ju', he’s fucking burning!”
“Can't say I didn't expect that,” I reply, “but it's still super worrisome... Let's get him to the infirmary.”
And such thing we do.