Archive for the “cooties” Category

Stephanie Yuhas
First Grade

One morning in first grade, the principal made an important announcement. “There is a severe head lice epidemic,” he grumbled through the loudspeaker. “The nurse will call classrooms in one at a time tomorrow to check for head lice.”

Kelly, the pig-tailed girl that hated my guts from the moment she saw me in kindergarten, turned and gave me an evil smile, “Maybe when they’re checking for lice, the nurse will also see that Stephanie has the COOOTIES!” she snarled.

The entire class laughed. The teacher shushed everyone to listen to the rest of the morning announcements.

I looked over at my friend, Alia, who glanced at me sympathetically. Alia and I knew each other from our special ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. Kelly frequently picked on Alia as well for wearing a religious head covering to school, so we bonded through the shared torment.

“Alia,” I whispered. “Do you tink I have dah cooties?”

She shrugged, “I heard Jimmy B. got dah cooties so dey sent him away.”

“Do you know vhat cooties are?” I asked.

“I dunno,” she replied. “But dey sound yucky!”

Samantha, a girl that claimed to know everything about a whole lot of nothing, couldn’t resist chiming in. “You have the cooties if you wear all the same clothes all time like Stephanie does.”

I looked down at my clothes. I just wore what my mom gave me; I didn’t know there was a problem.

Patrick, the kid that was always picked first during gym class, chimed in. “You have the cooties when you have ugly brown spots on your skin like THIS!” he said, as he pointed to a small mole on my face.

“Ew, you touched her, now YOU have the cooties!” yelled Kelly.

“Nu-uh!” Patrick protested. “Last summer, my doctor gave me the ‘Circle-Circle Dot-Dot Cootie Shot’. Now I can’t catch cooties, EVER!” He stuck his tongue out at her.

“QUIET DOWN CLASS!” the teacher ordered. The morning announcements still droned on. I looked down and nervously scribbled on a piece of paper with an orange colored pencil.

“Alia probably has the cooties, too. I can tell because you and Stephanie can’t say words right.”

“I think Kelly’s dah one with dah cooties,” Alia muttered under her breath.

I kept to myself for the rest of the day and tried not to cry. By the time Anyu came to pick me up from school, my face was flooded with tears.

“Everyone says I have the cooties and I don’t want to go away like Jimmy B*!” I blubbered. “I need a shot from the doctor!” I thrust a piece of paper into my mother’s hands. It’s a bit faded today, so here is the transcription of what I wrote:

KUTYS
Brown spots and if you wear the same clothes all the time. If you can not say words right. Patrick Chan can’t get it he had dot shot in his arms.

This was a prescription for disaster. My mother launched into a complete panic attack.

“Oh, my GOD! Did you put your mouth on da vaterfountain?”

“No!”

“Did you use somevon else’s sippycup?

“No!”

“Did you shit down on dah toilet?”

“Um…”

“DON’T shit down on dah toilet, Stephie! You’ll catch DISEASE!”

I continued to bawl.

“I can’t handle it!” she screamed. She immediately called the school and hollered into the phone to anyone who would listen. “Do I need to take her to the Emergency Room? We don’t have insurance!”

The person on the other end of the line must have thought my mother was taking about the head lice epidemic, so they explained the lice checking procedure. As soon she hung up, she called Nagymama into the room, and sat me down underneath the hottest floor lamp on the planet. They hovered above me with a magnifying glass, pulling and poking at my head for what seemed like hours. If they even found so much as a piece of lint, they put it on a piece of paper at watched it for ten minutes at a time. Eventually, they gave up and Nagymama made me dinner. Instead of explaining The Truth about Cooties or even how to avoid head lice, she immediately called her sister to complain about how difficult it is to be a mother.

I went into school the next day and got my head checked – no lice, no cooties, nothing! Ironically, after the visit to the nurse, Patrick was immediately pulled out of class and was mysteriously absent from school for the next few days.

I guess his cootie shot didn’t work after all.

[*The truth is, Jimmy B’s parents got a divorce, so he moved to Florida with his mom. He does not nor did he ever have the cooties.]

This tale originally appeared on American Goulash, which is a story-sharing project much like Can I Sit With You?, and which we encourage you to visit and support. -Eds

by Beatrice M. Hogg
Age 5 to 11

When I was in grade school, I had the cooties. No one ever explained to me what “cooties” were, or how I caught them. Unlike the measles, they lasted all six years of elementary school, following me through three schools. But over the years, I have been able to determine a few things about cooties. Apparently, only girls got cooties. Girls who developed cooties were different in some way — they were either plain-looking or overweight, dressed funny, or had a strange family. Unfortunately, I fit all of those categories.

I grew up in a small coal-mining town in western Pennsylvania called Hills Station. I was adopted at three weeks old and brought to Hills from North Carolina. My adopted parents were in their late fifties/early sixties when they adopted me, a generation older than the parents of my peers. I grew up an only child in a town of mostly large Catholic and Baptist families. When I was around four, my father retired from the mine and bought his first Cadillac, staying with that brand for the rest of his life. Only one other father in town drove a Cadillac. I was embarrassed to be seen in the car.

And there were my personal cootie credentials. I was left-handed. When I used pencils, I smeared the page as I wrote, leaving a gray smudge on one side of my left hand. My right-handed parents tried to teach me to tie my shoes, but by following their example, I learned to tie backwards. The laces always came apart, and other kids laughed as I struggled to make my strange-looking bows. Maybe my left-handedness also caused me to be uncoordinated. I could not hit a ball, kick a ball, throw a ball, or run. Gym class was my personal Hell. And I was smart. All of the black kids accused me of trying to be white because I did well on tests. I was chubby and dark-skinned, with short nappy hair and big feet. I got a new outfit for the first day of school and new dresses for Christmas and Easter, but that was it. Most of my clothes were ill-fitting hand-me-downs from my neighbor Holly, who was older and bigger than me.

Six years of cootie-ness. I started first grade at five, because of some law related to my birth month and the fact we had no kindergarten. I was a year younger than most of my classmates. My first school was Hills School, a two-room schoolhouse across the street from my house. During my first week of school, I fell when the recess bell rang and was trampled by the other kids. I still have a scar on my leg from the rock that was embedded in my knee that day. In gym class, no one wanted me on their team. No one wanted to drink from the water fountain after me, as cooties were contagious. Since my last name was Hogg, every morning’s roll call was punctuated by oinks and snorts.

For fourth grade, I had to go to Canonsburg, the nearest big town. By then, a new elementary school was being built outside of Hills. But until it was finished, I had to catch a bus every morning to First Ward School. Riding the bus was stressful. If I was first in line, I got a seat all to myself, as no one wanted to sit next to me. If had to share a seat, the other kid tried to move as far away from me as possible, so no cooties could jump on them. The boys in the back of the bus made jokes. One of the worse insults imaginable was, “You like Marvella Hogg.” Everyone on the bus would laugh, as no one could imagine someone liking me. I pretended not to hear

One month after the start of my fifth year of school, Hills Hendersonville Elementary School opened. I no longer had to ride the bus, but now my father drove me to school in the dreaded Cadillac. Kids snickered as I got out of the car, either because of the car or because of my gray-haired father. At ten, I wore the same shoe size as my mother, seven and a half. My mother thought that a sturdy, brown brogan would be the best shoe for school. The big, heavy shoes made me look like a cartoon character. In fifth and sixth grade, I hated test days. Kids sitting near me would try to copy my papers. I had to be a contortionist, trying to cover my work while answering the next question. Even my cousin, and girls I grew up with made jokes about me behind my back. At Hills-Hendersonville, we had a cafeteria. Neither the black kids nor the white kids wanted me to sit with them, so I sat at the end of a table by myself. Finally, the two years of torture were over, and I was in Junior High.

I wish I could say that Cecil Junior High was better, but it was more of the same. I started wearing glasses at twelve and my mother died the summer after seventh grade, when I was thirteen. And don’t get me started about puberty. But I survived.

I am now over fifty and I still don’t fit in. But what was once weird is now just eccentric. I have friends who are just as unique as I am, and I don’t have to ever kick a ball if I don’t want to. I shop at thrift stores, buying the discarded clothes of strangers, but I get to pick them. And now, I like my unusual name. Growing up as a Cootie Girl has made me more sensitive, a quality I use in my writing. They may have been laughing at me then, but as a writer, I can have the last word — in print. Cootie Girls Rule! (Stick tongue out here.)

by Laura Eleanor Holloway
Age nine or ten at the time

I think the worry was cooties.

Of course I didn’t have them, but it was common knowledge that boys thought girls had cooties.  Just shows how dumb boys were; I mean, they thought we were the ones with cooties, and didn’t even seem to know that they were the infected gender.

So I think it was fear of the ubiquitous cooties that inspired Ricky to scream, “Don’t touch it!” when his soccer ball came rolling right up to me.

Whatever. I was a nice kid. I figured I’d save him the trouble of running all the way over to where I was … so I kicked it back.

“I said, ‘Don’t touch it!’”  Ricky screamed as he ignored the ball and ran straight for me.

Oh, no. Ricky didn’t really have a problem with hitting a little girl. He wasn’t even a full year older than me, so, technically, I wasn’t little. And there was the cootie clause, which allowed you to give a good pummeling to anyone you suspected of transmitting the dread affliction.

I took evasive action–a quick step to the right–as Ricky ran past.

Only he didn’t run past. He tripped over my left foot, which hadn’t moved with the rest of me. And as I turned to see him pass, I somehow pushed his torso in a sort of perfect, divinely-inspired karate move, flipping Ricky and leaving him lying flat on his back at my feet! How the heck did that happen??

Oh, NO. He was really going to pummel me now!

I stood there, stunned, staring down at Ricky. He lay there, blinking up at the sun, equally stunned.

No only had he been flipped by a girl, but by me! By the girl they always picked second-to-last in gym, right after the heavy girl and right before the girl with the thick glasses. Poor Ricky might someday write about the scarring effects of that kind of social stigma.

But me? Ricky never bothered me again. It could have been because his family moved away soon after … but I think it was the flip.