“Why is it in my right arm?” Isaac asked. He wasn’t quite whining, but he sounded annoyed. “I finally get both hands free and then. . .”
“Honey, we can’t put it in your left arm because it’s still swollen from where the needle went through the vein,” the nurse, whose name was Hillary, told him. “I’m sorry, but this is what we have to do.”
Isaac sighed. “What’s the central line for?” he asked. The IV that was taped against his chest was, by far, the most uncomfortable of all of them. He’d learned from Nora that they were running saline through it, and the only reason they were doing that was to keep the line open. Saline didn’t do anything.
“We’re giving you meds through that,” Hillary explained. “And the one I’m putting in now is for antibiotics. And this one is the parentaral nutrition line, which, young man, is still in place because you aren’t eating enough to take it out.”
Isaac sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Hillary taped the IV down as tightly as the nurses always did; Isaac knew they did that to keep the needle from slipping around. Even so, the pressure of the tape left bruises on your arm, which he didn’t want to move any more than necessary. Which was probably the point, he decided. The more they taped it, the less you wanted to move it, the less you did move it, the less likely the chances were that something would go wrong with the needle. Originally, he’d had IVs in both arms, but he hadn’t minded because his hands had been bandaged anyway. Now, he had an IV in the only arm he could write with, and he had to do his homework. And he wanted to do his homework. Isaac sighed. Every time one thing went wrong, something else would.
And he guessed something was going wrong now. They told him he had an ulcer, caused, they said, by the trauma of the surgery and the resulting infection. They wanted to put a camera down his throat to see if they could see what was wrong. They wanted to do a laparotomy, too, whatever that was. And they said they would definitely have to do more surgery than that. Maybe not now, but definitely later.
Isaac clenched his jaw and blinked hard, pretending not to notice the fact that his eyes had suddenly misted.
Dan ambled through the doorway that evening to find Isaac ready for him. “I have to do my homework,” he said. “And I tried to write with the IV in my arm, but it started to hurt. And if it comes out again, the nurse said she was going to stick it in a place that wasn’t so pleasant. And I didn’t know what she meant by that. So I had to stop.”
Dan paused for a moment, taking this in, then nodded. “I brought you a milkshake,” he told Isaac, sitting down. “I got me one, too.” He grinned.
“Dan,” Isaac took a deep breath, wondering exasperatedly if Dan had listened to a single thing he’d said. “Would you -” he stopped, blinked, and started again, with a smile. “-thanks for the milkshake, by the way- Would you write it down, if I told you what to say?”
“Sure.” Dan nodded. “What do you have to do?”
“Answer these questions,” Isaac said, and handed him the paper. “I already know all my answers, I just have to tell you them.”
Dan scanned the list of questions and nodded. “Sure,” he said. “My handwriting’s pretty awful, though.”
Isaac laughed.
“What?” Dan asked with a smile, wondering whether or not to be insulted.
“Have you ever seen my handwriting?” Isaac asked him.
Dan paused for a moment, then remembered, grinning. “Okay,” he agreed. “You have worse handwriting than me.”
“Yeah.” Isaac nodded. “Usually not even I can read it.”
“What would I change about school, if I could change anything. . . and as many things. . . as I wanted?” Isaac reread the question and bit his lip. He would change a lot of things. Finally, he took a deep breath and looked up at Dan.
“I would have longer weekends,” he began, then scratched it out. “I would make it start later and get out earlier, and there would be longer weekends. And not so much things that are boring. And the teachers wouldn’t be mad at you if you didn’t always have your homework. And you wouldn’t have to sit in your desk and listen to them all day, if you got to do more projects and stuff. And you never had to talk in front of the class if you didn’t want to, or do group work.” He was gathering steam, more and more ideas occurring to him at once.
“Slow down!” Dan laughed, writing as fast as he could. “Let me get this all written.
Isaac sighed impatiently, waiting for Dan to be finished. “And you could go to the library more. And more science experiments. The teachers wouldn’t make you sit out in the hallway or move your desk up next to theirs if they thought you weren’t paying attention. And all the mean kids had to go to a special classroom by themselves in the basement. And teachers got grades on how good they were at teaching, and some of them got Fs. And if you weren‘t good at something, you didn‘t have to do it.”
“Here,” Dan said, handing Isaac the sheet of paper. “Do you want anything else?”
Isaac reread his answer, smiling as he imagined what the school would be like if he ran it. “I would do more stuff, too, but I can’t remember all of it.”
The next question was harder, because it seemed as if it might be a trick. “What is my definition of a good teacher? What is my definition of a bad teacher? Give examples.”
“A good teacher,” Isaac told Dan, “isn’t mean. And they aren’t boring. And they don’t get mad and yell. They’re fair. If they say they’ll do something, they do it, and they don’t have favorites. And they don’t make you feel stupid if you ask a question and they know that sometimes you are paying attention even if you don’t look like you are trying to be funny. And bad teachers are the opposite of that. They never say if they make a mistake. They yell all the time and send you out in the hallway. An example of a bad teacher is pretty much every teacher.”
Dan suppressed laughter. “That seems like an unfair indictment,” he managed.
Isaac sighed, knowingly. “It’s true.”