• The following story is slightly modified from my journal entry for Monday, 4/27/09:

    Today I went to the school nurse to get Advil for my headache. I turned right off the meticulously clean athletic wing, curved my fingers over the unblemished reflective doorknob, smudging the metal, pulled open the heavy wooden door, and walked inside the office of the school nurse. The room was roughly five feet wide and seven feet long, with a door-less entrance located on the right wall, leading into a small hallway containing beds, was located.

    Scanning the small waiting room entrance to her office, I immediately noticed the obsessive cleanliness of the room. In the north center of the room was a gray couch, perfectly parallel to the wall. Standing with my back to the door, I observed the two smaller couches on either side of the large gray one, infuriatingly symmetrical to each other. I looked to the window the nurse typically could be seen through. The blinds were drawn, and a small paper proclaimed in printed computer font: "I am with a student. Please wait and I will get to you shortly." The sign was centered on the invisible line of symmetry dividing the room. These obsessively clean conditions were relatively recent, beginning somewhere around the time of the outbreak of swine flu, as if inhuman perfection would make a difference in the "highly dangerous" "pandemic."

    Rebelliously, I chose to sit not in the large gray couch, on the line of symmetry, but on the smaller couch to the left of the gray one. I shifted the couch a few inches back and smirked, lifting only one corner of my lips up, mocking the now broken perfection of the room. Tired, but not from lack of sleep, I relaxed on the small couch, crouching my back and resting my arm over the side of the couch into empty space. Looking back at the door, I noticed a small paper, meticulously centered between the sides of the door. Lazily shifting the couch forward a foot or so, I noticed it was a print-out of a web article explaining the serious danger of swine flu, symptoms, and listing precautionary steps to assure that one would remain healthy. The printed article was held on the door by two single pins. By this time approximately five minutes had passed since I had entered the room.

    Highly annoyed at this point, I stood and walked the few feet to the wooden door. Removing the pin holding the right corner of the article up, I momentarily paused to let gravity do its work. A few seconds later, I pierced the article with the sharp metal, placing the pin a short distance to the right of the first minuscule hole, pinning the warning of death at a funny looking angle. Ignorant of anything but my annoyance and satisfaction, I sat back in my seat. Forgetting that I had walked about a foot away from the couch, I fell backwards through space. My arms flew frantically behind me and I was able to catch myself on the couch, bruising my arms and back on the semi-hard rounded edge of the couch seat. By now approximately seven or eight minutes had passed.

    Pulling myself back up on the couch, I laughed vigorously at the hilarity of the situation. It felt good to let out the frustration and other emotions that had been collecting inside for the past few weeks. I laughed at my horrible incoordination; I laughed at the general stupidity of people, including myself; I laughed because swine flu was a joke; I laughed because it felt good and because I needed to laugh. Looking around the room at the disorder I had created and remembering the obsessive order of not even ten minutes before, I laughed some more.

    I don't remember for how long I laughed before the nurse irritatedly opened the blinds and slowly looked around the room. As I noticed her face changing almost imperceptibly from annoyance to anger, she looked at me in disbelief, as if I had committed a deadly sin. Listening carefully to her voice asking me why I had come down, I noticed it was trembling slightly. I told her I had a headache and asked for some Advil. Feeling dizzy and lightheaded from the laughter, I added that I was also feeling a little dizzy. Pointing a long fingernail at the displaced printout on the door, she told me that she was required to send home anybody who exhibited flu symptoms.

    I was ordered to give her my parents' contact information, and smirking, I reluctantly spoke my mother's cell phone number. Before dialing the number on the office telephone to force my mother to leave work early to drive me home, the nurse applied an antiseptic spray on the handle and speakers of the phone. I entertained myself with the mental image of a caricature of the present situation:

    The nurse, her black, beady eyes glancing over her snout, extends her plump, too pink arm, reaching for the antiseptic spray. Keeping the same emotionless countenance, she sprays the handle of the phone. Not satisfied, she sprays it again. She brushes away some invisible dust speck, and grunts. She glances from the antiseptic spray bottle to her piggy fingers and fat palms, comes to the conclusion that some dirt may have transferred from it to her hands, picks up the bottle and sprays her hands. She sits there with a blank face, momentarily satisfied, before glancing again at the antiseptic spray and her hands, and again picks up the spray to clean her hands. She grunts again, attempts to bend the plastic container at an angle which will allow her to sanitize the unsanitary bottle of sanitary spray, fails, predictably tries again, fails again, grunts, and angrily beats her head with her hands. The pressure builds up inside her and she actually expands, her eyes bulging outward, her fingers becoming more plump, the pressure pushing out against her skin. She explodes, contaminating the immaculate office with her insides. Hot crimson liquid splatters the walls, making a funny squelching noise. Organs and muscles shoot out like fireworks, exploding on contact, creating an awesome display of brilliant crimson. It is ironic.

    I transitioned back into reality to find her unsure hand hovering awkwardly over my shoulder, unsure of whether or not to rest it on my shoulder, trying too hard to be reassuring. It annoyed me. The nurse told me that my mother is coming from her work to pick me up and take me home. I noticed the radical contrast between the questioning yet irritated look of before and the worried, almost scared look she was using at the moment. I tried to remember when the change occured, and realized that it had been when she learned of my symptoms and jumped to the conclusion that I was going to contaminate the rest of the world with my deadly swine flu if not sent home immediately. I was not allowed to leave her office for the next hour and a half, during which she failed at getting paperwork done, primarily staring at me and drumming her pudgy fingers arhythmically against the wooden table.

    Time passed very slowly.

    Time passed very slowly, and I was quickly becoming more and more irritated at her unability to grasp the facts. I wasn't happy I was going to miss school. I guess I should have been.

    I went home and had a boring day, as usual.

    The End.