Chapter Text
Jackson sighed as he paced back and forth in the tiny upstairs bathroom, fists clenched at his sides, muttering to himself under his breath the speech he had been practicing and preparing for for weeks.
He had gotten distracted from getting himself ready for school that Monday morning when he had remembered that it was his turn to make the speech today that would determine whether he moved up a grade, or if he stayed in the same one.
In Jackson’s school, they each took turns saying their speeches, and everyone has their day, which means the ones who said their speeches later in the season had more time to prepare. If the speeches represented the material learned in the grade well enough, showing that the student understood, they would be able to move up to the next grade.
It was done during the spring, and each student had their day. In a class of thirty kids, it took six weeks to get through all of the speeches, which made the speech days the last six weeks of school. After school was out, they would get their results. You normally did move up unless you screwed up really badly, or didn’t learn your speech, which was also part of the assessment.
Jackson was one of the last ones to do his speech, and he had forgotten that he was speech number twenty-six for that Monday until just that morning. He had been practicing and preparing long before then; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he suddenly forgot his whole speech the second he remembered he was supposed to do it.
So he paced, trying to recite his speech to himself, but failing miserably. What came after that part… and then that part… Jackson found it suddenly almost impossible to remember.
He really didn’t want to fail 8th grade, which meant he had to remember that speech. How did it start… it started with… no, actually it started with…
He had to calm down. He was stressing out about it. He just had to calm down. Jackson stopped his pacing and, closing his eyes, took a few deep breaths trying to slow his rapidly pounding heart. He could do this. He just had to clear his head so he could actually think about his speech.
Breathe in… breathe out. Deep breaths. That’s all he needed. He opened his eyes again and looked at himself in the mirror, then started in on his speech, now that he could finally actually remember.
He recited it to himself in the mirror, feeling much more calm. His head felt clear, and the words flowed easily out of his lips.
He started to feel much better about his speech, when he suddenly realized that his voice sounded a little hoarse. He immediately stopped talking, startled by this fact, and reached up to put the tips of his fingers gently on his neck.
Now that he thought about it, his throat felt a little sore and scratchy. He stood there in bewilderment for a second, trying to understand why his throat felt like this. He couldn’t make much sense of it, unless he had been talking for too long, and he knew it couldn’t have been that since he had been muttering before and he was only talking out loud for a maximum of thirty seconds before he had stopped.
Then, suddenly, Jackson realized what could possibly be the problem. He wasn’t getting sick was he?? No, he couldn’t be sick… he just couldn’t! His speech was today! Jackson didn’t know what happened if someone wasn’t available to give their speech on their day as it had never happened before to anyone else. It had never been a problem. Maybe they would just switch him out with a different person who still had to do their speech, but those people were few and far between now, and Jackson might not have enough time to recover before he had to give his speech anyway because it would still be that week, no matter what they did.
And what if it was too late to switch him out with anyone else, and if he didn’t show up for his speech, instead of rescheduling it, what if they decided that they wouldn’t be able to count his speech since he hadn’t been available to give it on the appointed day, and therefore Jackson wouldn’t be able to pass his current grade!?
That had never happened to Jackson before, and even though his grades were less than average, he had always managed to squeak by, he had never failed anything. Now he would fail the 8th grade because he was sick and couldn’t give his grade-passing speech?
It sounded ridiculous when he thought about it, but maybe it wasn’t so ridiculous after all. The teachers could be strict. Would they do that to him? The odds were no more than fifty, but he felt he couldn’t take the chance.
No, he couldn’t be sick today… he could not be sick. He wouldn’t be sick. It was probably nothing anyway. It was just a sore throat, and if he drank plenty of water, his throat should be fine for his speech. He didn’t have to stay home from school. It was nothing like that. It wasn’t bad. He could and he would go to school and do his speech. He couldn’t risk potentially failing the 8th grade.
It was probably just a cold or something anyway. Nobody stayed home for colds, and if he was going to have a runny nose later, it would be after his speech, so he only had to worry about his sore throat for the speech, and then it would be just fine.
Nobody had to know. He didn’t need to tell his mother. She would probably insist he stay home, and he couldn’t… he just couldn’t… do that. No matter the odds, he was going to pass the 8th grade, and a silly little sore throat couldn’t stop him.
He’s got this. No big deal.