I’m watching him without meaning to. I’m aware that my attention keeps going back to him. I force myself to look at the others, one by one, when I’m talking and they’re listening, or when they’re hunched over their Monday-morning quiz. It was Monday in fact when I saw him come into class, his face even paler than usual. He looked like a kid who hadn’t had a minute’s sleep all weekend. His actions were the same as everyone else’s—taking off his jacket, pulling out his chair, putting his backpack on the table, unzipping it and taking out his notebook—I can’t even say that it struck me as slower than usual, nor more jittery, and yet I could tell he was exhausted. At the start of the class, I thought he was going to fall asleep, because he’s already done that a couple of times since the beginning of the year.
Later, when I was talking about Théo in the staffroom, Frédéric pointed out, without irony, that that hardly made him unique.
Given the time they waste staring at their screens, if we worried about every student who looked tired, we’d spend all our time producing reports. Dark rings around their eyes don’t prove anything.
It’s irrational, I know.
I’ve got nothing. Nothing at all. No facts and no proof. Frédéric is trying to stop me from worrying so much. And being so impatient. The nurse has said she’ll ask to see him and I believe her.
The other evening I tried to explain this oppressive feeling of a countdown I’ve had for a few days, as if a timer had been activated without our knowledge and precious time was draining away without us being able to hear it, leading us in silent procession toward something ridiculous whose impact we’re incapable of imagining.
Frédéric told me again that I looked tired.
He said, “You’re the one who should be resting.”
This morning I went on with the lesson about the digestive system. Théo suddenly sat up, listening with more focused attention than normal. I drew a diagram on the board showing how liquids are absorbed and he copied it down in his notebook with unusual patience.
At the end of class, I couldn’t stop myself from keeping him behind. I don’t know what had gotten into me, but I put my hand on his shoulder to get his attention and said, “Théo, will you stay behind for a minute, please?” Immediately an indignant murmur rippled through the class: what right did I have to detain a student without an explicit reason when nothing had happened during the lesson to justify my request? I waited till everyone had gone. Théo still had his head down. I didn’t know what to say, but I couldn’t back off, so I had to come up with something, a pretext, a question, anything at all. What had I been thinking? When the door finally closed behind the last student (Mathis Guillaume, of course), I still had nothing. The silence went on for a few seconds, Théo kept staring at his Nikes. And then he looked up. I think it was the first time he’d looked at me properly, without his eyes darting away. He stared at me but said nothing. I’d never seen such an intense stare from a boy of his age. He didn’t look surprised or impatient. It wasn’t a questioning look. It was as though it was completely normal that we should have ended up like this, as though it were all preordained, a foregone conclusion. Equally obvious was the impasse we were in, the impossibility of taking another step forward, of venturing anything. He looked at me as though he’d understood the instinct that made me keep him back, as though he also understood that I couldn’t take it any further. He realized exactly what I was feeling.
He knew that I knew, and that I could do nothing for him.
That’s what I thought. And that suddenly choked me up.
I don’t know how long this went on. The words were scrambled in my head—parents, home, tiredness, sadness, everything OK?—but none of them produced a question I would have allowed myself to ask.
In the end I smiled, I think, and in a voice I didn’t recognize, an uncertain voice that didn’t belong to me, I heard myself ask, “Are you with your father or your mother this week?”
He hesitated before answering.
“My father. Well, until this evening.”
He picked up his bag to put over his shoulder, the signal that he was about to go, which I should have let him do some time ago. He headed toward the door.
Just before he left, he turned to me and said, “But if you want to speak to my parents, it’ll be my mother who comes.”