Divers

Young Tommy carefully stepped out of his dad’s Chevy and picked up the pace without saying goodbye, not minding even the largest puddles. To reach the classroom in time, the new sneakers were going to take a wet beating, and they were from the far-away mall after all. He crossed the foyer, then started running toward the familiar corridors.

There was water on his soles, and water on the floor left by his classmates’ soles. The sneaker slid and the leg slipped, towing the entire boy upward but also downward. Tommy fell on the left side of his face, learning instantly of the intense one-sided redness of a cheek that would haunt him for at least a week. Still slipping around, he stood back up and walked, crying quietly so the cleaning lady wouldn’t hear.

Having approached the classroom and wiped the tears vigorously, already late, he opened the door. Before he could say his apology, he saw someone else lying on the floor and trying to get up. Jeremy must have fallen also.

Giggles and murmurs were filling the stuffy, no-good-smell classroom, though Ms. Nelly had already begun her attempts at silencing the kids. This teacher would get struck by the slightest sight of harm, and was in a state of progressing unease. Simultaneously speaking to the class and reaching for the phone, she circled round the podium with her faux leather bag in hand. She dialed the number of the nurse. As she recited Jeremy’s fall-from-a-chair incident, she stepped onto the metal corner of the podium, which propelled her into the uneven floor.

A line of blood was running down her pantyhosed leg. Ms. Nelly was audibly aching, lying near a cracked phone with the nurse still on the line. The once-giddy class was flabbergasted, and emotions ran awkward.

The nurse stepped into the heavily stunk room. With no hello, she walked up to the half-sat teacher and had a look. Then she walked up to Jeremy and looked at him too. She opened her kit and slowly laid out a series of white and silvery items. As she turned to Jeremy, she stepped on the leg of his table, squishing her little toe. The nurse hummed a high note and slightly jumped, hitting the tabletop with a knee and falling backward. In the process, she hit the back of her blonde head on the table behind her, and went out.

The class was rightfully screaming, and the teacher began dialing for an ambulance with her broken phone.

A passing social worker had heard the commotion from the corridors and found himself knocking and entering the classroom. Stunned by the view, he fainted and began falling onto a front-row table, hitting a student’s arm with his head and sliding down toward the floor.

The class was beginning to gain immunity to the happenings at that point, and simply stared.

Ms. Nelly ran to each disabled public servant, pulled them, and sat them with their backs against the wall. The blood from her leg touched and colored the surrounding tables. Upon noticing the scene she’d made, she turned to the nurse’s laid-out kit and grabbed it to patch the leg.

“It’s good now. Everything is good. It’s okay. Let’s just keep still for a bit,” she murmured to the silent class.

Three emergency responders burst through the door and all fell at the doorstep, taking their stretchers and tools down with them.

“Uuuugh!” one said, having hit his arm on the podium’s edge.

The other two were lying on top of each other, navigating their next moves.

The bell rang, and the still-open classroom door welcomed the sounds of other, louder bursts of student crowds through the neighboring doors. Sections of the passing crowds were stopping to see the commotion, as scattered ER equipment is rarely boring.

Principal Abernethy was one of the passers-by, and with him, the Advanced Evaluation Commission foursome from the capital. Some of those people had connections at the Senate. The quick-to-anger principal quivered at the sight of that equipment, and had no response prepared. The man pushed himself through the stream of students toward the doorstep of classroom 138, but was obstructed and hit by a sum of inertias he could not foresee. He was turned around by the stream, flinched twice, and flopped face-first onto the floor. The principal, in turn, pushed a passing biology teacher, who also fell.

The corners of the corridor began to blur, the blur tangling in the light and the greenery off the windows. In a moment or two, the back of the corridor was gone. The flopped-down faces and the faces of the passing students twisted and turned, into and from the surrounding color. The benches were no more, and there was a dimming, before a full dark. From the dark, a blurry, though clearing, circle spun larger.

A sink full of bubbly water stood there, with a pair of hands squishing something in it.

“Yes! Coming!” blurted the cleaning lady.