This is one of very first works I wrote on the topic. It's probably more than 15 years old. Unfortunately, I used to write in my mother language at that time, so the story had to undergo the translation quite recently and it has probably lost a part of its "early-works" scent. Anyway, I hope you will like it nonetheless :)
Me and the teacher
by StarDust
I had finished my oral exams. The classroom went silent, it was only me and our biology teacher there. I waited for the evaluation patiently. Outside, it had got dark already, as I could see through windows, and I guessed it might have been past six o'clock. We were surely last persons in the biology department of the school by now, and we were perhaps last ones in the whole school too. I was still waiting for the teacher's conclusion, and I hoped she would let me go home soon.
I watched her with anxiety. She was sitting in the wheelchair behind the desk, and was looking into her notes. Standing in front of the blackboard, I saw her from the profile. She wore a long white lab-coat and I was wondering why. It had even been buttoned up completely. Perhaps she considered it to be a kind of an official dress for every biologist, something like a professional uniform. The coat ended just above the knees and thus revealed their pointy joints and slim calves in a black opaque pantyhose. She must have had a skirt under the lab-coat, I thought to myself. She wore shiny-black, elegant, high heel shoes with a thin strap running above the ankle, complemented with a tiny black buckle on the outer side of it.
About a half a year ago or so, she had returned from a long-term therapy. As far as I knew, she suffered from a kind of neurological disease, which had resulted in the loss of control over muscles in her legs. She coped with her physical limitations and with the fact the school was not wheelchair accessible (except for the biology ward that had been modified just before her return), in a strange way. To move across different parts of the school and for going home and back to the work, she would use full-length leg braces that kept her legs rigid and bore the weight of her slim body instead of them. When walking with braces, she had to use forearm crutches and propel herself around using her strong arms.
Occasionally I saw her going up and down the stairs, which was the action that caused big troubles to her and must costed her a lot of energy. She had quickly built up a sort of routine of it, but it was still obvious how much she had to struggle. Besides that, a wheelchair was always ready in her office, and she would transfer in it each morning after having removed her leg braces. Then she would push herself in the wheelchair along the biology ward for the rest of the day.
Eventually the teacher looked at me and said: "Alright. It's getting late already, I'm not going to torture you any longer. I classify you with an A-degree."
I smiled at her with relief and thanked.
"So, we can go home," she said in an informal tone and started to gather her stuff on the desk. "Don't you live somewhere near by my place?"
I knew exactly where she lived and, indeed, it was very close to our house. So I answered: "Yes. I live just two streets away from you."
"I can drive you home then," she offered. "That is, if you would be so kind to help me change, so we don't lose more time now. Deal?"
"Perfect!" I agreed on the proposal.
"Let's go then," she exclaimed, and grabbing the rims of wheels, she backed her wheelchair from the desk.
I went to my place and packed books and notes in my bag. The teacher had reached the door in the meantime, and I rushed to open it for her. She pushed herself through the door, out to the corridor. She had stacked her belongings on the lap, as she used both arms to propel wheels of the wheelchair.
"May I?" I asked and pointed to handles at the back of the chair.
"Would be nice of you," she agreed happily. "I'm getting tired of having to push myself around the whole day."
"Yeah, I guess so," I answered with empathy. I grabbed handles of the wheelchair and started to push. The wheelchair glided along smoothly, but I could feel the mass of it and the teacher's body in it. It must be hard to have to fight with it the whole day.
I pushed my teacher up to the door to her office. She reached forward, unlocked the door and opened it. The wing swung inside the room. I pushed the wheelchair through the doorframe. The office was reasonably big and there was not much of a furniture in it. It must have made manoeuvring of the wheelchair easier for her, I guessed.
On the other side of the room, right opposite to the main door, was a single, large window. Under it stood a big desk, positioned in a way to let the sunlight come from the left-hand side of it. There was no chair standing behind the desk, but there were two chairs located by the small table aside, used probably by visitors. Behind the table was a simple, although large, couch that filled the space up to the wall. At the end of the couch I saw two braces, which she used to put on her legs, standing on their own and two crutches leaned against the wall.
To the right of the couch, there was a door that led directly to the classroom where I had been doing my exams just recently. But the teacher didn't use the door because the classroom was organized in stages, so she would have to climb up and down several steps to get to her place, and that was something she could not manage in the wheelchair.
Close to the main door, on the right side of it, was the wash-hand basin. The wall to the left was occupied by big closets and shelves full of books. Some of them were placed so high that she surely could not reach them from the wheelchair.
While I was closing the door behind us, she had pushed herself to the desk, where she removed the stuff that she had been carrying on her lap. I stood in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do. Eventually, the teacher backed the wheelchair from behind the desk and turned around. Then she rolled towards me.