They Were Dolphins Part III

After recess, the students and the boy settled back in class and discovered without much surprise that a different adult was substituting for their usual teacher. This teacher as an older kind man the kids had met before. The children knew that he was fond of children and would let them do as they pleased. As such, they were extremely well behaved because they liked and approved of him.

Without any explanation, the class continued as if nothing had happened earlier in the morning. The substitute teacher was not academically rigorous, and so he set about getting the students involved in a painting project. Each child donned a cheap smock to protect their clothing and the class were divided into groups of five to paint on a team easel. As the newspaper tarps were laid out over the desk surfaces and the paints were poured out into jars, the boy dolphin was bored and distracted. He wandered between teams, pouring extra paints into each jar surreptitiously in order to change the colours.

The arts and crafts corner of the classroom contained all sorts of knick-knacks like cotton balls, fuzzy pipe cleaners and sugar cubes. The last of these were grabbed by the boy and he began dropping the cubes into the paint jars of the various teams while they were being stirred. As the paints were stirred, the cubes would break apart and the paint would thicken and become gritty.

The boy wouldn’t have been caught except that he was emboldened by not being caught. Finally on the tenth or eleventh cube that was stirred into the paint jars, the children, and eventually the substitute teacher, noticed that the paint was lumpy and coarse.

Several of the children knew who was doing this, and some of them tried to protect the boy by pulling him away and pretending to be preoccupied by painting on the easel. The boy would have none of it, though, as he was still covered in armour from the morning’s excitements. He stood defiantly refusing to paint and even held several cubes of sugar in his hands.

The boy was eventually given up or discovered, or perhaps had just reached the limits of what the lenient substitute teacher could tolerate. He was given a hall pass and told to go to the library to read so as not to be a disruption for the class.

The boy once again found himself in the breezeways, wondering what to do. He was about to dart across the lawn to go to the forest when he was caught by an adult wandering the school grounds. The adult apparently knew of his summons to the principal in the morning, and possibly was even on his way to get the boy when the adult discovered him.

He was taken into the administrative offices outside the principal’s imposing office and told to sit. A nice woman noticed him sitting and asked him how he felt. He guessed she was the school nurse but she did not have a nurse uniform on. He replied in monosyllables that he felt feverish and light headed. She asked if he had any trouble breathing and he stated he did not. She asked if he had any cuts or bruises and he nodded and pulled up his trouser legs to the knee. There was a large white and red boil on the inside of his thigh just above the knee.

Immediately, he was rushed into a small examination room with a cot covered with crinkly exam paper. The boy doesn’t feel particularly sick, only a little feverish and is confused by the concern being expressed over him. He doesn’t know how the boil got there, but he remembers it bothering him the night before when he went to bed. He says so and the nurse woman without the uniform assures him he will be fine.

Being told he will be fine makes him fearful. As he is left alone on the cot with his leg raised up on a pillow, trouser leg pulled back to his thigh uncomfortably, he begins to envision how he will die and what it will feel like to do so. He imagines that it will not be worse than being so far from the sea these years as a human, and he is prepared for his death since he feels that his best years as a dolphin are behind him.

Resting his arms behind his head, he decides that it will be better to die from a white boil on his leg than to continue living out of the sea.

He is left alone until the wait is unbearable and he rings a buzzer on the wall to call the nurse. He says that he needs to use the restroom and she tells him he can go down the hall. The boy walks to the boys’ restroom and enters a stall. He strips off all his clothes and tries to inspect his  human body for any other defects other than the boil. He is unable to check his back, but assumes it is fine by patting himself with his hands.

Then he sits on the toilet with his elbows on his knees, fists jutted under his jaw. He sits there for a long time until the nurse comes in and calls his name from the door several times. He scowls in his safe stall zone and ignores her. His name is Usagi, the rabbit. He is not called by the name she uses.

The nurse calls him several more times and checks his feet beneath the stall. She calls him again, more urgently each time. He wishes she would leave him alone to think. Finally, the nurse enters the stall next to his and stands on the toilet seat to look over the partition at the boy. She asks him what is wrong and he mumbles something about the horse crossing a bridge and rabbits writing poetry. He can barely hear the nurses voice because she seems to be receding along with everything else in the restroom.

The noises that echo off the tile walls grow into a deafening thunder as he covers his ears and screams to drown out the noise. He can see the shock and concern on the nice woman’s face, and so he stops screaming and drops his arms. Fortunately, the walls of the stall retract from their distant position far out there and the noise subsides.

He gets dressed and opens the stall door, then follows the nurse back to the examination room. He is disheartened to see his mother in the office. He knows that her look of concern is only a thin veneer over her hatred for having been bothered to come to school on his account. He doesn’t know what adults do during the day, he assumed that they go to school like other kids, and he wonders what subject they were studying when her principal sent someone to get her.