Szabi and I figured out pretty fast that chalk doesn’t give you a fever at all, that it’s just a legend, because we each ate one and a half pieces of chalk and nothing happened to us, we even tried the colored chalk, Szabi ate a green one and I ate a red one, but it did us no good waiting under the bridge by the school for an hour and a half, nothing happened to us except we peed in color, my pee was on the reddish side and Szabi’s was greenish, and as for the thermometer trick, we didn’t dare try that, either, no, Mother caught me red-handed the other day sticking the end of the thermometer to the cast-iron radiator, and two weeks earlier, before the math exam, Szabi had even worse luck, for he held a thermometer up against the bulb of his little lamp and the mercury got so hot that it exploded, and his father gave him a whipping with the buckle end of a belt, so the thermometer trick was out of the question, but we had to come up with something all the same.

If we didn’t manage to g…