Work Text:
I'm sat at work looking out unto the main stairwell. A young child walks up the stairs. He's about 8 years old. He is on his way to an end of year celebration before school's out for the holidays. As he reaches the top of the stairs he see his teacher and his teacher sees him.
"Hey", says the child.
"Hey, glad you could make it", replies the teacher.
"Am I late?"
"Yeah, a little, about half an hour", jokingly the teacher adds, "we already sang and all the best cake is eaten up."
"You sang?" The child now stand at the top of the stairs and itsn't moving. He is staring to seem upset and the teacher picks up on it.
"Why don't you go inside and get some cake and cookies."
"But I thought", starts the kid, "it was suppose to start at 5 and I...", he trails off.
I make eye contact with the kid, smile at him and turn away so he doesn't feel more pressure.
The teacher aproches him and tells him to take of his outer clothes and join the others.
"But you already sang." I can tell he is getting upset. The teacher tries again to tell him to just go inside to the others and have some cake. The teacher leaves and I don't think anymore of it.
That is until I exit my office and hear a mother in the stairwell talking to the same kid whom I had already thought went inside to his classmates. He is crying in the stairwell and all i can make out from their conversation is, "but you already sang." The random mother tries to console the boy, but I am unsure if it works. At this point the mother of the boy come out to the stairwell from the classrooms claiming to have been looking for her child. I leave at this point abd when I return I hear the mother and the kid having a heated argument while walking toward the classrooms.
This is where this story ends.