Cee Worthy (tag Cee)

When Mr. Cohen's whole form leapt like he'd been electrocuted, Ferris's hand came off his shoulder like it was on fire and he stood quickly, hissing through his teeth when head connected with table. He leaned in again to look for blood or bruise. This wasn't the first time he'd seen this happen. Or the third. Or the fifth.

“Ow. Damnation, that hurt! Now what’s that?”

Standing again when he didn't see anything untoward, Ferris just waited till the teacher got his bearings. He wasn't offended at all, never was. He knew Cee didn't mean it.

“Oh. Hello Ferris. I sincerely apologize—I didn’t recognize you in that cap. What can I help you with?”

Grinning, Ferris held a hand out to help him up. "A certain computer teacher has to eat the dinner on his desk," he said. And in case that was too vague, he added, "You."

Adjusting his backpack, he said, "It's meatloaf tonight." Did he dare ask? It probably didn't concern those topics that were off-limits.

Well hell there was about a 30% chance it did but he was going to ask anyway.

"What were you doing under there?"

“You brought me food. That is incredibly kindly of you. Thank you.”

"You're very welcome."

As he helped the man up, Ferris looked carefully at his head without being too obvious about it, though he probably could have been obvious about it without too much trouble. There was one factoid that tended to run through Ferris's head every time he saw Cee Cohen - that head injuries were cumulative. He noted the unsteady feet and the blinking. He made a note to call the nurse when he left, unless something happened that made him call earlier. Upon reflection, he didn't know what that something would be, as Cee more or less acted like he had a head injury all the time.

“Ah, meatloaf. And you make it so delicious. Don’t you? I can’t seem to recall.”

There were usually several places during conversation with Mr. Cohen that Ferris was rendered speechless, but he wasn't used to them happening so early on. He didn't know if laughing would be seen as offensive or not, but he couldn't help himself as a snort or two escaped.

"I like to think it's adequate," he said.

“Would you join me? I have some soda we could drink, and I do detest eating on my own.”

"I brought you a carton of milk," Ferris replied, pointing. "Nutrition first, Mr. Cohen."

The explanation made Ferris look back to see there was indeed a Gordian Knot of cords that he himself would have to solve with wire cutters. But he was concerned enough with the earlier behavior that he sat down with Cee and leaned back, unshouldering his bag. He hadn't eaten, he'd eat later at home, but he did enjoy the odd man's company.

"Don't feel bad. You're doing important work, teaching kids. And dealing with the effects," he said, pointing to the cord monster. "It's nice to stretch the legs after standing in one place so much."

Digging in his backpack, he found his metal water bottle and unscrewed it. Still had some flat Coke in it. "Please, eat. It's still hot."

Pushing his hat up a little, he waited till Cee had started eating when he asked, "Do you have plans for the break?"

“Oh, are you all right?”

Ferris turned his last snort into a cough. "Yes, thank you."

“I’m sorry. Around finals I always lose my head. I’m sure it’s delicious. All of the staff enjoys your food, you know. You should take more credit for it.”

This time he did laugh. "It's fine, Cee. I know finals makes everyone a little crazy. And thank you, but I can't take credit for what comes out of the kitchens. It's a group effort. But I'm glad you like it."

The taller man's reaction to milk was normally the sort of thing Ferris saw on the Discovery Channel, scientists puzzling over new fossils or debating taxonomic classification.

“Mm. Thank you again. I greatly appreciate the… nutrition.”

Ferris almost started laughing again but held it. "It's just milk. You could probably use the calcium and vitamin D."

Most people got enough calcium via greens and fruit, and D with sun, but with Cee Cohen, Ferris had his doubts. He listened to the man speak, nodding thoughtfully. Ferris thought that if it was easy, Cee wouldn't still be trying to fix it as late as dinner service, but he didn't say anything. He had no idea what sort of schedule Mr. Cohen had or what extra work his job entailed - and if it was anything like that knot of cords, it was probably considerable, considering everything that could go wrong with children given time on computers. But he smiled a little, too. "I try to put up a menu that pleases most. It's all you can do, given a budget and a large group. And there's enough choice that kids who don't like the main course can still fill up on other things."

He hid his smirk at Cee noticing his food behind a swig of Coke from his bottle.

“It’s uncertain. I’ve been invited to present at a conference, but I haven’t attended one in almost two years now and I doubt my information is of-date. I might visit my family, however. And yourself?”

Ferris shrugged with a smile. "I stay here. There's a lot of kids around during the vacations and they still have to eat. Not as many, of course, but enough. Even if there was one, I'd still have to feed them. But my hours are reduced, which will be nice. I have a friend in town who owns a restaurant. I thought I might offer some help a few nights a week if he wants or needs it."

Otherwise, Ferris was going to catch up on his gaming. He was going to hook up all his consoles properly and maybe see if he couldn't find Dr. Roman and entice him over with cookies to introduce him to Final Fantasy.

"What sort of convention? The only type I ever attended had to do with cooking."

There were leftover bars from the staff lounge in Ferris's backpack. He was debating whether or not to offer them to Cee. He was thinking... maybe.

“Yes, but you hold everyone together. And it wasn’t that good before you arrived.”

There was no way for Ferris to judge that, so he just smiled a little and gave a tilt of the head that acknowledged the statement. Institutional food had a reputation for being uniformly bad; he didn't suppose his efforts were any better or worse than whoever had preceded him. Perhaps not as vegetable-based, but Ferris had spent too much time at Kocher not to inflict a better sense of nutrition on their American counterparts.

Like milk.

What Ferris had mostly been thinking was that Cee was probably deficient in most of his vitamins, but that D in particular would help due to its effects on bone density. What with all the bonking of the head.

“...I haven’t heard many complaints about the food, so well done.”

Laughing, he pushed his hat back further and then took it off, rubbing his forehead. "I hear them all the time." He shrugged, still grinning. "I could serve pizza every day and there'd be complaints."

When the computer teacher began to scan the milk's nutrition information, Ferris leaned over to read it too, wondering what the man was seeing.

“I’m sorry to hear that you are required to stay.”

"I'd rather keep busy," he admitted.

“...And you’d cook? In your free time? I don’t know how you do it. Does your friend give you free food, at least?”

"Think of it more as returning to my roots," Ferris said, smiling again. "It's what I know, more than this." As for free food, he didn't know. Some restaurants gave their line cooks comp meals (that were usually pretty crappy), and some just gave breaks. A few restaurants even had a rule about not eating there while you worked, meaning if you were employed by the place they didn't want to see you in any shape or form in the dining room, even on your off-days. But he said, "I wouldn't require it. I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm used to bringing my own lunch."

“Oh, hacking. It’s a computer security convention. I used to be very good. I would headhunt there, actually, for anyone who thought of trying the more legal methods.”

At the first admittance, Ferris burst out laughing. For a man to be so skeptical of milk not have any qualms about hacking... he laughed.

“What are cooking conventions like?”

"Like any other convention, probably," Ferris said, "there's booths with new gadgets or the latest models in mixers or other machinery, seminars on new techniques, and always something about the benefits of buying local. Usually other cultures are spotlighted, the more obscure ones like Ethiopian or Filipino, or the more traditional and less acceptably Western dishes of better known countries... like blood soup. I remember the last convention I went to there was a thing about raw milk." He smiled and nodded at Cee's carton. "You're better off drinking that."

Thinking of his Nexus in his backpack, he asked, "So what do you think of tablets?

Scratching his head, he put his cap back on. "I have a computer at home, but I'm still too old fashioned. Paper everything. My grandmother knows more about how to use the PC than I do."

She had in fact helped her grandson over the phone several times already. Luckily, Ferris's PC had Windows 7 instead of 8 and it wasn't too difficult.

“Not among the students, perhaps, but around the staff, yes! I’ve had enough pizza in my life that even I’d notice if you started serving pizza every day. And for every meal? Ew.”

For some reason, hearing Cee Cohen say 'ew' made the entire conversation worth it. He laughed, albeit quietly. "You might change your mind if I made the real stuff I learned in Italy, but for the most part I agree with you."

Whatever Cee did or didn't see on the nutrition information, he still drank, and Ferris was relieved. It was one thing to force healthy eating habits on the kids, it was another to mess with the sensibilities of a colleague. What the computer teacher did or didn't eat wasn't Ferris's business, but from the man's lanky frame and head-in-the-clouds-ness, Ferris was still glad when he drank his milk without protest.

“What are you laughing at now?”

It wasn't often he was called on things like this, with the other person really not knowing, so Ferris had to use some careful phrasing. He didn't want to offend, after all. "Worry over some things and not over others sort of amuses me, in the whole scheme of humanity thing." He smiled at Cee. "I'd never poison you, you know."

“You mean, you actually made… blood soup? How? With… uh. With what, exactly?”

Even knowing Cee's proclivities, Ferris didn't pick up on the reason for the hesitance. But then, zombies had never featured anywhere in his logic or world view. "I didn't make it. I had some at a convention. I didn't really care for it, myself, but it's an acquired taste. Cow or pig blood is the most common, but there's a smattering of goat and chicken and ox." Ferris shrugged, thinking that this hadn't been the greatest thing to bring up as dinner conversation (though not for the same reasons), but that it was too late now. "A lot of cultures use it either in soup or in sausage. The Brits have black pudding, it's all over Asia, some of the Eastern Europeans have it, and the Swedes have a soup that uses goose."

As a supporter of the nose-to-tail movement, Ferris gave props to those who had a taste for things like blood or organs. He didn't mind organs so much when they were done with skill, but he didn't think blood soup was ever going to be something he tried making himself, and not just because he had no idea where to get culinary blood in Vermont.

Cee brightened when he spoke up about tablets, and Ferris smiled back. "If I remember right, it's not going to be processor power that holds us back, but battery technology? I dunno. I watched something about that once."

And as to why he preferred paper, "I spent ten years biking Europe and being a line chef. There was no need for a laptop, or even a lot of spare time to use one. Computer skills weren't essential, though I did pick up a Nintendo DS to fiddle with." He chuckled. "So... it's what I'm used to. I never really got into the whole spending hours online thing. Maybe someday I will, but I like... doing things too much and computer stuff feels more like sitting."