Ms. Bixby's Last Day: List 1

“There are some who can carry the infection for years and never present symptoms. But awesome people are highly susceptible.”

Rebecca nods way too thoughtfully for someone with a debilitating imaginary disease.

Steve is floundering, wiping his face with his shirt, as if that will help.

I look at Steve and Brand convulsing on the ground, faces scrunched in disgust.

They see me coming, trailing Rebecca behind me, and take off as well, all three of us charging blindly through the middle of a pickup kickball game. Turning a sharp corner around the redbrick facade of the school.

The teacher masquerading as a part-time circus performer nodded.

“Playing tag,” I say, turning and giving Rebecca an imploring look, begging her to go along.

Ms. Bixby sighs the Teacher Sigh. The one they must give you as you walk out the door with your teaching degree. Equal parts exasperation, disappointment, and longing for summer vacation.

“Cooties don’t exist,” she says, her voice tinged with fake relief.

“They did, once,” Ms. Bixby says, “but scientists eradicated them back in 1994, thanks to a vaccine discovered by three smart girls who were hoping it might help keep boys from acting like total doofs all the time.”

Rebecca glares at me.
Ms. Bixby glares at me.
I want to glare at somebody, but Steve and Brand are looking down at their feet. So I glare at Rebecca, who glares back at me harder, if that’s even possible.

She is staring out over the slides and swings to the stretch of fields and the sky beyond and the three clouds reaching out for each other with wispy fingers but not quite there yet.

It was also the same day my mother forgot to cut my sandwich diagonally, instead hacking it straight down the middle, which, as anyone can tell you, makes it harder to avoid the crust.

It’s a type of cancer that attacks the pancreas.

The award was a red ribbon with gold embossed letters that said Holy Cross Christian Fellowship 13th Annual Talent Show.

Honorable mention because I wasn’t one of the three most talented kids to take the stage that night, though it wasn’t actually a stage, just the pulpit decorated with tufts of white flowers.

...I told her I was just helping Steve get a booger out, which apparently was not the thing to say as it caused everyone in class to groan and make faces and prompted Ms. Bixby to say that, from here on out, everyone was responsible for picking their own boogers, thank you, and disposing of them in a discreet and sanitary manner, which did not include flicking them in other people’s hair, sliming them across the bottoms of desks, or rolling them into doughy balls to be played with...

It’s not exactly as if I picked Steve and Topher to be friends with. And it’s not like they picked me. It’s more like I just glommed onto them somehow. And got stuck there over time, like dried snot.

The other sixth-grade teacher was Mr. Mackelroy: a balding, fortysomething Dungeon Master (according to the Topher Taxonomy) who smelled like stale cigarette smoke and vanilla air freshener and scowled at everyone who walked by.

And for having a python as a class pet, because, as she put it in a devious whisper, “Our class pet could eat Mr. Mackelroy’s class pet for breakfast.”

Which was true: Mr. Mack had a warty, bulbous brown lump named Jabba the Toad.

It was Principal McNair, wearing a navy business suit, black hair corralled into a bun, purple bags under her eyes.

Even with the principal in the room, the class soon dissolved into a muddle, twenty uncertain voices burbling at once.

The convoy is dropping off load after load: platoons of half-dead zombies marching in line, filing through the blue double doors in a shuffle step.

She was in the hospital, earlier than expected, undergoing a “rigorous course of treatment,” whatever that meant.

I sometimes call Brand Shakespeare because of the making-up-words thing. We had to learn a little bit about the Bard this year. Namely that he made up words, wrote poems, and was in desperate need of a comb-over.

It didn’t feel like enough to me either. It felt like a shortcut. Just something you do because you feel compelled to do something.

Ms. Bixby had us write in our journals at least once a week for fifteen or twenty minutes. Sometimes we got to write about whatever we wanted, but most of the time she scrawled a prompt on the board for us to respond to.

“So now what?” he asked, reinstating me to my rightful place as the Games Maker of our little group.

Steve usually goes along with whatever scene’s playing in my head. He’s been a paralyzed soldier, a stranded astronaut, a captured sidekick, a flaxen-haired princess, a zombie shoe salesman, and a raging Wookie.

There is something wrapped up inside it, something small and delicate, judging by the care he takes in the unfolding.

With a magician’s flourish, he pulls it free.

The last stragglers shuffle inside for seven hours of menial-worksheet completing and sweaty-gym-sock smelling.

They used one of my drawings once as the front of our Christmas card—a sketch of the three of us entrenched in a free-for-all snowball fight.

We’re on a top secret mission for our teacher. Go about your mundane little lives.

He’s passing right by us. Completely oblivious. We are in stealth mode. Under the radar.

We fumble and spin and press together, merging like conjoined triplets as Mr. Mackelroy casts his ample shadow across us, one hand on his forehead like he’s just developed a headache, the other pointing his phone at us like a pistol.

Thinking that there is no other recourse, I’m about to just make a run for it when Brand steps forward.

Worse still, we will have to call our parents and explain that we were caught trying to skip school. Likely there will be detention. Two hours in the brig. No snacks. No phones. No drawing. Just torturous silence and evil teacher eyes burrowing into you.

I give Brand a high five. “Did you see the look on his face?”
He’s smiling smugly.