Stats!

'Saving Professor' is currently thirty-seven pages long!
Which means that if it's a book it would be about 49 pages... only! Oh, writing is such a long process!
Well, I'm not planning to get this published, anyway, so it doesn't really even matter.

Saving Professor (Part 18)

Collier was two minutes late to Alexander’s house. Professor had dropped him off at the front door.
Collier walked through the familiar doors and into the blank room. He started down the staircase and entered the cluttered office.
Alexander was nowhere to be found.
I’ll just wait until he gets here, Collier thought. He sat in a swivel chair and spun around and around.
Then he had an idea. He eyed the chair that Alexander always sat in.
“This is my chair. My chair. Mine, not yours. That means that you can’t sit in it. Understand?” Alexander had once said. He had enforced that rule more than once.
Making sure no one was around, he crept up to the chair.
“Why am I tiptoeing?” he whispered. “Why am I even whispering? There’s no one even around.”
He stood above the blue leather office chair. Then, in one swift motion, he sat down. Air swished out of the seams under him.
“Ha. See that, Alexander? So much for your rules. If you ever find out what I’m doing—“
“I would kill you.”
Collier spun around. Alexander rose out of an empty tin trash can, a slow grin spreading across his face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Collier, did I scare you?”
Collier didn’t answer.
“Yes, on a regular basis I would probably do something to you. But I plan to share something very important with you today. And, besides, if I did kill you, then there wouldn’t be anyone to carry on my plan, now would there?”
Collier shook his head, but he was thinking about Petra. She would be there. But Alexander wouldn’t know that.
“Anyway, we can’t waste any time. Let’s get on with my plan.” Alexander peered curiously at Collier.
“Haven’t said anything yet today, have you? Cat got your tongue?” Alexander laughed hysterically. Finally, when the humor apparently faded, he was left gasping for air. “Anyways—that was so funny, wasn’t it? Oh, but you wouldn’t know why. The reason why that was funny is because…”
Alexander ran across the room and hovered over a box. He turned around, put a hand up to signal Collier to wait, and then turned back around with his hands cupped.
He ran over to Collier, hands still cupped, with his grin larger than ever. Slowly, he uncapped his hands. In his hands lay a kitten. It had soft, white fur with a bushy tail. It stirred and twisted its head upside down against Alexander’s thumb. It lifted its eyelids and revealed the purest blue eyes.
“His name is Frisky,” Alexander whispered softly.
Frisky attempted to stand up, so Alexander gently lay him on the table. Frisky stood up, arched his back, and began to purr. He rubbed his head against a nearby chair in pure delight. Then he looked straight up at Collier and meowed a soft, high-pitched meow.
“He’s so cute!” Collier exclaimed.
Alexander smiled.
“You finally said something!”
Collier ignored him and scooped the kitten up.
“Why’s he so small?” he asked.
“He’s a kitten. Why else would he be so small?”
“Well, kittens aren’t usually this small.”
“Then he’s a baby kitten.”
Collier was about to point out that a ‘baby kitten’ didn’t make any sense, but he decided against it.
“Why’d you get him?” he asked, instead.
“I found him on the side of the road. He was a lot dirtier. I washed him up nice and clean.” Then he took Frisky back up and walked him over to the box. “You stay in there, little Frisky. I’ll get you back out later.” Then he turned back to Collier. “Time to get to work,” he announced.
“What was the important thing you had to tell me?” Collier asked.
Alexander’s face turned a lighter shade of red.
“Oh. That was the cat. There’s really nothing that much more important.” Then his face lit up again. “I did figure out more on the project, though!”
Collier nodded.
“Let’s see it, then!”
Alexander dug through a large stack of paper, and then pulled out blueprints, which he excitedly began showing to Collier.
He pointed to a basket of lemons scrawled on the graphed paper.
“See? Here are the balloons.”
He showed Collier a sketch of some sort of a stick with half a lemon at the end.
“This is the air pump.”
He traced an arrow that led to a drawing of a cup piled high with lemons.
“So I’ll put the balloons in here, and—“
Then Alexander seemed to notice his drawings for the first time. He lowered them and started scrutinizing them.
“Huh. This is the wrong paper. This is my diagram of how to make lemonade. Why didn’t you tell me, Collier?”
Collier was speechless.
What would I tell him? he thought. That he’s crazy?
But Alexander was already busy looking for the right diagram. Finally, he held it up and proudly handed it to Collier.
Apparently, Alexander was going to use a swimming pool cleaning machine to blow up the millions of balloons.
“It’s a reasonable choice,” Alexander was saying.
“But… how would that work? Do you even know what one of these machines does?”
“Well, I can at least find out, can’t I?” Alexander snapped back. Then he regained his calmness. “It will do as I say.”
“It’s a machine.”
“And I’m Alexander!”
Collier raised his eyebrows.
Alexander picked a piece of kitten fur off his vest.
“Alexander the Great, if you please,” he added. Then, still intrigued with the fur, he said, “Go home.”
“Go…”
“You heard me. Go home. You have a big day tomorrow.”
Knowing better than to argue or question, Collier made his way to the old-fashioned telephone in the corner of the room to call Alexander.

Saving Professor (Part 17)

Collier pushed the glass doors open and rushed into the building.
“Where is she?” he asked Professor, who was trying to catch up.
“She’s still in the doctor’s room. She fell asleep, and hasn’t woken up since.”
Collier started into the hall.
“She isn’t in a coma, is she?”
Professor ran a hand through his hair.
“No,” he finally responded. “I don’t think so.” Then, after a pause, he turned to a door and said, “It’s this room.”
Collier turned around and ran to the door. He knocked Professor’s hand off the knob and twisted it open.
The room was small, and looked just like a doctor’s office. There was a sink with a light teal cabinet. On the wall hung a photograph of a herd of elephants, and the air trailed a light scent of rubber gloves.
Almost immediately after he walked in, Collier stopped in front of the bed. It had a leather covering, the same shade of teal as the cabinet. Over the leather was a sheet of what looked like wax paper, something for the doctor to change every time a new patient came in.
On the bed was Petra, propped up on pillows. Her hand was up near her mouth, and she seemed to be sucking on her forefinger. On her forehead was a band-aid. Other than that, she looked perfectly fine, like she was just in a comfortable sleep.
Collier dropped down next to the bed, and whispered, “Petra.”
Professor rolled his eyes; Collier was taking this way too seriously.
Petra blinked and opened her eyes. Her eyes glanced across the ceiling, confused, before looking down and spotting Collier.
“Hey, Collier. How was Alexander?” she asked.
“How was Alexander? How are you?”
“I’m fine. My forehead doesn’t even hurt that much anymore.” She sat up even higher. “Did I sleep through the night or is it still today?”
“It’s still today,” Professor answered. “Speaking of today, it was Collier’s turn. Tomorrow’s supposed to be your turn. Can you go or do you think you need Collier to go for you?”
Petra looked over at Collier.
“I’ll go for her,” Collier offered.
“Are you sure?” Petra asked thankfully.
“Yeah. I’m sure. It’s fine, really.” Then, with a spreading grin, Collier joked, “But whenever you get better, you’re going twice in a row for me!”
“Sure,” Petra answered, shrugging. “That seems fair enough.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m hungry. Is it dinnertime?”
With that, Petra jumped off the doctor bed and walked out the door.

As the three sat down for dinner last night, Collier asked Petra what exactly had happened.
“Collier, I already told you what happened,” Professor scolded. “She probably doesn’t even know.”
Collier threw a hopeful glance at Petra.
“Well, actually,” Petra started slowly, “Professor’s right—I don’t even really know what happened.”
Then, after watching Collier’s face fall, she offered, “But I can tell you what I do remember!
“So I got done with my studies with Mr. Murphy—“
“How’d that go?”
“Um… good, I guess. But, anyways, I asked Mrs. Sheralton where Professor was, and she told me he was out back loading stuff away. Then she asked if I was a snack, so she got some lime sorbet—“
“We have lime sorbet?”
“Well… yeah… So anyways she got some for me and put it in a glass cup, and I went out the back door to find him. I watched him for awhile then he asked if I wanted to help, so I said yes. I finished my lime sorbet—“
“I can’t even believe you didn’t tell me we had that!”
“Okay, okay, well now you now! As I was saying, I helped load cardboard into the recycle bin, then when that was done, I was throwing away those long light bulbs when they hit the side and exploded everywhere. One piece landed on my forehead, so that’s how I got a cut.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah, that’s all. And I had a heat stroke, but I’m over that now.”
“I thought there was more.”
“No. Who told you that?”
Petra’s gaze slid over to Professor, who put his hands up and said, “Hey, I told you, Collier, I told you all that happened.”
Collier, looking disappointed, raised his eyebrows, nodded, and shoved another forkful of green bean casserole into his mouth.
The rest of the table conversation was just small talk. They didn’t mention the ‘accident’ anymore that night.