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“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Theo muttered.
Auggie flopped onto his back. “What?”
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“I’m literally looking up TikTok challenges. Do you know how stupid these are? One of them is the Tide Pod one, which is just horrible. But then there’s this one where all you do is slap your friend as hard as you can in the face. Big surprise, it’s all boys, of course, and it’s just so stupid. I mean how immature can you be? When I was their age—” Auggie cut off. Horror swam into his face. “Oh my God.”
Theo cracked a grin.
“Theo, did you hear me?”
“I heard something.”
“But did you hear me? Did you hear the words coming out of my mouth?”
“It’s ok, Auggie. It happens to the best of us.”
Arm over his eyes, Auggie somehow managed to give the impression of flopping even though he was pretty much already totally flopped. “I’m dead. I’m old and ancient and dying and dead.”
Laughing, Theo rubbed his leg and turned back to his computer.
“Ok, no, I’m sorry,” Auggie said. “Before I shriveled up and became an ancient stick-in-the-mud, you were going to tell me something. What happened? Did that racist old sub show up again? Oh God, it’s not another of Emery’s white papers, is it?”
“No, I gave him a dummy email address, and I only check it once a month. It’s the other Language Arts teachers; they’re still going to see the play.”
“What? What play?Much Ado about Nothing?”
“That’s the one.”
“But Dalton’s in jail! And it’s a crime scene!”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Theo, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s fine—it’ll be a rush to get through the play before we go see it, but the kids will have a good time.”
“Because it’s a field trip and they get out of school.”
Theo laughed. “Well, yes, that’s probably the main reason. But they’ll enjoy the play more than they expect, the ones who actually watch it. And they’ll understand more of it than they expect too. They always think it’s the language that’s going to trip them up.”
“Oh my God, I’m having flashbacks from the war.”
When Theo tried to pinch his leg, Auggie giggled and squirmed away.
Smiling in spite of himself, Theo said, “I’ll stop. You can go back to work.”
“No, tell me. I mean, the language is hard, especially for the ones who struggle with reading. But that’s not the real problem?”
“Well, that’s the immediate problem, especially when we’re reading it. But like I said: once they see the play staged, they’ll understand a lot more than they expect. What’s actually harder, in my opinion—”
“It’s like freshman year all over again.”
“Never mind.”
Propping his chin on his fist, Auggie grinned. “Are you kidding? This is literally my fantasy. Do you still have that button-up?”
Theo grabbed a pillow to put between them, but, of course, Auggie bulldozed through it the way he’d bulldozed through, well, pretty much everything else that had stood in his way.
