The true medical condition of a classmate was always a topic for rampant speculation.

A classmate's health was always something we were curious about. If one of our classmates fell ill or had an accident, we were certain that they were going to die.

I can remember being in the fourth grade when one of our classmates was absent for an extended period of time due to illness. Somehow the rumor got around that she had Hepatitis. Whatever that was, she was dying from it and it was highly contagious. Our always reliable kids' source had seen the janitors come in after school, take out her desk with everything in it and burn it out in the far corner of the schoolgrounds. The friend of a friend of a friend had actually seen the ashes!

A serious injury was something all of us dreaded. When it happened to a classmate, we were mortified, but extremely curious. One girl whom I will call Betty fell off her bicycle and seriously injured her ankle. She didn't break it, but she scraped massive amounts of skin off it, or so we had heard from our source. She wore a gauze dressing on her ankle for what seemed like many, many weeks. We watched the progress of her healing like birdwatchers scoping out a rare bird. If we were lucky, Betty would give us the privilege of peeking under her gauze for a quick look at the gross, bloody, scabby wound. This was enough to convince us that Betty would soon succumb to a deadly infection of some sort. But, Betty never did. As far as I know, she is alive and well somewhere teaching her own kids or grandkids how to ride a bike.

We had a kid that would visit our fourth grade class once a month. He was home-schooled and he was in a wheelchair. Our friend of a friend of a friend whose parents knew for sure had explained to us that he had some illness that was causing his legs to become hard like rocks. We actually believed that this young boy, this boy our own age, had legs under his jeans that were actual rocks. When he moved in his chair, all eyes were upon his feet in the expectation that his jeans cuffs would slip up and we could see those hard gray rocks that were his legs. Some people had actually seen them!

The girl with the Hepatitis and Betty with her ankle got better and lived on. The young boy in the wheelchair had many hours of physical therapy and walked. He joined us in public school by the start of the fifth grade. The first time he appeared in his gym shorts, all eyes were on those legs. They looked just like anybody else's legs!