The scene is a fourth-grade classroom. A young girl is plunked in the very front row of the class because her last name is toward the beginning of the alphabet and elementary school teachers love alphabetical seating arrangments. Beside her is The Boy–her love-interest, her heartthrob, her true love (at least for that week; it is elementary school, after all).
The Boy is actually talking to The Girl, being nice and friendly, and of course, The Girl is very excited about this. The Boy is quite popular, and The Girl… well, she’s really smart and beats everyone on the spelling tests, so popularity is automatically excluded. This is the interim time between recess and class re-starting, when the teacher is getting the lesson plan together, and the students are still chatting while sitting at their desks.
In the midst of her puppy-love hazed conversation, The Girl, who has been afflicted with allergies since birth, feels a sneeze approaching. She can tell that it’s going to be a doozy; she did, after all, just get back inside from recess and all its pollen-filled air. The Boy is still chattering happily to her, and The Girl is still thrilled about that.
Then it happens. The sneeze erupts. But it didn’t come to the party alone; it brought along a guest, who also decides to make its presence known at that same moment. The sneeze isn’t the only eruption that takes place; at that same, exact, precise moment that The Girl sneezes, she also, well, whoopie-cushions without the cushion, you know?
The sheer force from this dual-bodily-function event literally thrusts The Girl from her desk chair, and she lands in a mortified heap in front of The Boy, who has ceased his chattering and is staring at The Girl, absolutely appalled at the spectacle before him.
The entire class has gone silent, 25 sets of eyes glued to one positively, excruciatingly humiliated Girl. The Girl picks herself up off the ground and repositions herself in her slightly askew desk chair, and scoots the chair back under the desk. Foregoing any hope of resuming conversation with The Boy, The Girl simply sits, red-faced and shaking with embarassment, staring at the blackboard in front of the classroom.
It is at that moment that the teacher, possibly being possessed by some force of evil, deigns it appropriate for The Girl to help pass out papers for the class’ forthcoming spelling test. The Girl, being a staunch believer in the ultimate power of all authority figures, resolutely begins passing out the papers. Of course, the other students embrace this opportunity to laugh at and mock The Girl, many of them even making crosses with their two index fingers, as if some demonic force might lunge out of The Girl and at them in the form of a sneeze or a… well, you know, the other thing.
To this day, whenever The Girl (who is much older now and has since discovered The Boy very much loves other Boys so her puppy love is all the more humorous in hindsight) feels a sneeze coming on in class, or in any public locale, she says a silent prayer that the sneeze will come alone, and that, in the event that it brings its friend, she may simply disappear into thin air and not be forced to distribute papers to the bystanding witnesses.
Take care, and check 6.
Labels: -FAVORITES-, all about me, anecdotes and opinions, humor
I’m Marissa, can-do-ologist, perpetual Curious George, and daily adventurer. 
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