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“He’s here, he’s here!” an anxious voice echoed to him from the other end of the hall as he dragged himself to the classroom, clunk, clack, step, and repeat. A little like the Sphinx’s riddle actually. Once he finally made it to the classroom he could see if any of them could get the answer. He would also, at some point, complain of how this utterly handicap inaccessible building, clearly did not meet ADA restrictions. And why on God’s green Earth did they have only one elevator on the far side of the building? He’d thought he was fairly in shape until now.
He could hear the noise as he approached, voices hissing, “Billy, where is he? You said he’d be here already!” quite frequent among them. And then silence. They’d heard him coming then.
The classroom was eerily quiet for one full of fourth graders.
“Good morning class. I’m Mr. Cole your teacher for the year.”
“What’s wrong with you?” one of the boys blurted out, to their teacher’s amusement, but much to the annoyance of another student.
“Steve don’t say that!” a girl, (his sister?), groaned, her face heating up rapidly, as some other classmates glared and others grinned.
The heavier-set, brunet boy— Steve, it could be presumed—folded his arms across his chest and glared right back, “Why not?”
Another voice, a girl’s, chimed in, “Because it’s rude.” The know-it-all of the group their teacher quickly assumed.
“Is not!” Steve again.
“She’s right; it is too.” The boy glanced over to the pretty little red-head whose approval he obviously expected but never received as much as a glance, poor kid. She was much too absorbed, or at least too busy pretending to be absorbed, in a book she was holding, upside-down, in front of her. Quite a group all right.
He quickly waved it all off, now that he had a better feel for the group. Certainly a decent bunch overall, but he needed to regain control before a fistfight ensued. A few coughs failed to do the trick but then he just managed to lightly bang (an oxymoron if he’d ever heard one) the crutch against the table.
“Thank you for the question Steve is it?” The boy nodded. “In the future you may not want to put it quite like that though.”
“Why?”
“I know what you meant but it can come off as rather rude. I have a leg brace on right now from a surgery over the summer so I’ll still be like this for at least a few days.”
And then the barrage began. “Does it hurt?” “A surgery, really?! What for?” “My dad had one of those one but he’s way cooler than you!” “Was it an accident?” “Are you okay?” “Don’t they give you pain meds? You don’t seem loopy.”
“I promise that if we can save the questions for later, I’ll still answer them. But to answer some of them: it doesn’t hurt and I won’t be like this for long. It does mean I may be late sometimes. More importantly I’d like to see whose here and learn everyone’s names.” He promptly picked up and then dropped the roll book. Damn there was no way he was going to be getting that of his own volition. He picked a student from the front, Will, who grabbed it for him.
“Great, now that I’ve called roll I have a riddle for you guys: what goes on four…”