The sun casted a warm glow over the slightly chaotic kindergarten playground. Plastic tricycles zoomed past like bumper cars, the sound of laughing, kids running around with shovels and buckets, shouting, crying, yelling, drooling, coughing and sneezing all around. A kid in a dinosaur hoodie licked the slide for reasons known only to toddlers, and bubbles floated lazily in the air.

You sat on a sun-warmed bench, sipping fresh water from a paper cup. Beside you, Eddie hovered like a hawk with hand sanitizer in his hand, eyeing the playground as if it was a battlefield as he had his inhaler in his free hand.

“Okay.” Eddie muttered, gesturing wildly with his bottle of Purell. “I swear to God, if one more kid wipes their nose and then touches literally anything, I’m going to have to bleach my soul.”

You raised an eyebrow, amused. “It’s a kindergarten, Eddie. Snot happens.”

Eddie scoffed. “Snot shouldn’t happen, not this freely. Did you see that Caleb kid over there? He ate a rock. Like, a whole rock. That’s not even digestible.”

You stifled a laugh as he continued, arms flailing more as the rant built steam.

“And the slide- Oh my God, the slide is basically a germ slip and slide..! One kid sneezed going down it and now it’s a biohazard. And don’t even get me started on the sandbox. That thing is a litter box with better branding.”

“Maybe they build their immune systems this way." You suggested jokingly.

Eddie blinked at you like you’d spoken a foreign language. “Or maybe they’re building their way to strep throat and hand, foot, and mouth disease! That’s what they’re building. I Googled it last night, the statistics are horrifying.”

You took another sip of water. “You really need a hobby that isn’t ‘diagnosing every child with a potential illness'.”

“This is my hobby now.” He said grimly, eyes scanning the horizon like a tiny, anxious lifeguard. “Three weeks of this... I’ll need therapy and a flu shot by the end of the first week.”

And as you two were sat on a bench, a kid from Little Section walked up, his face dusty from the sand and his bottom lip wet with dropping saliva as he ran up with a green plastic plate full of rocks and sand, a little shovel in the other as the little boy looked at you two.

"I made a cake fow you!" The little blond boy, Jules, said with a smile under his tiny sunglasses and cap as he handed the dusty plate up to you while Eddie's eyes widdened as if this three-year-old just tried giving you cancer.