"Ummm, Ed..." I groaned, trying one more time to get the stupid thread to go through the damned eye of the damned needle (not that I thought it would work this time when it hadn't the last twenty or so times I tried before that), "remind me again exactly why we are doing embroidery in the middle of what's supposed to be a biology lecture?"
Ed looked up from his piece, which seemed to be coming along quite nicely. Unlike me, he had managed to thread his needle on the first try (it had to be practice, though I could swear that he had said that it was his first time doing embroidery too). The pattern he had chosen to put on his little square of white fabric was simple, but even that seemed to be light years beyond anything that I could do. Of course, I hadn't managed to get anything done yet, because I couldn't thread the needle. I swear, the thread I was supposed to be sticking through the eye of the needle was thicker than the hole I was supposed to be pushing it into, but apparently it would work if I did it right...
I had already decided that I would believe that when I saw it, and not a moment sooner.
"What's wrong with embroidery?"
"I thought we were supposed to be studying elementary genetics right now?" I asked. "You know, breeding fruit flies to see how many have red eyes and stuff like that? I've never touched a needle before in my entire life!"
"No time to learn like the present, don't you think?" he said cheerfully, putting a few more stitches into his work. By that point, I could see that his pattern was actually a set of letters, spelling out "Adai" in clumsy block letters, though I then tried to ignore that to avoid causing problems. Instead, I groaned and ended up stabbing my needle into my backpack (a temporary measure to keep from losing it on the floor, since I was sure that it would roll off the table if I just put it down) and reaching for the scissors.
"This is stupid," I said, cutting the end of my thread, which had come partially unraveled, so that I could go back to trying to thread the needle again. "And you know it."
"But I'm the teacher," Ed said, smiling as he finished off the last bit of the "I." "Look, I'm done!" He held up the scrap of fabric for me to look at his work, and I had to bit my tongue to keep from making a comment.
"Adai is not going to like that, you know," I pointed out, and he pouted. "And this is still stupid." I swore a bit under my breath as another attempt at threading the needle ended up with the needle using my finger as a pincushion.
"Do you want me to get that for you?" he asked, looking at the thread. But I just growled at him as a sucked on my sore finger a bit before trying again.