#14

Okay – uh . . . Carl got really sick after that one incident. Like, really, really sick. He was confined to the hospital. And you’d think I’d be relieved, since you know, I’d be off the hook for a while, but honestly . . . I’m dying.

What if Carl dies? What if I never see him again? I hate thinking these thoughts, but every time I see his empty seats, I think of the possibilities.

And I know I sound all emo, but this has been eating me from the inside out. Carl’s suffering in the hospital and it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have taken his clothes from him. It was immature and mean of me. And it doesn’t justify the fact that we ran over my bike last summer.

But I guess you’re not really interested in my emotional state. So, today we played a game called “Grothoff Says.” The objective of the game is to do something, like an action, whenever Miss Grothoff says or does something. We started with coughing whenever Miss Grothoff says, “uhh.” And believe me, she says it a lot, especially when she teaches Biology.

So we coughed alphabetically. We started with Sue Aarons and went down the list. Abad, Aquino, Astorga, Brion, etc. It didn’t really seem out of place, because it was cold and people were getting sick left and right. The loser is the one who forgets to cough – so everyone was super alert. We listened closely to everything that came out of Miss Grothoff’s mouth. And we got pretty far. Out of the 26 students, 15 were able to cough on time.

We played a few rounds of this (I’m telling you, Miss Grothoff says “uhh” a looot). And we were all in pretty good spirits by the end of the day.

Sometime after lunch a visitor came. Well, not really a visitor – a citizen of the class. That’s right, Carl came back. He was still a little under the weather, but we was back . . . much to my chagrin. He sat back down in his seat and was exactly the same as he was before. Then he turned around, stared directly into my eyes.

Oh gosh . . . Now I wish he was back in the hospital.