Kaitlyn's Classroom Bomb

ISARA BARRETT '21

SECONDHAND SMOKE, GRACE SUN '23

Kaitlyn’s Classroom Bomb

Isara Barrett '24

The smell of crisp paper, paired with the scratching of hurried pencils. Twenty two fourth graders bent over their erasable, triangle shaped desks, racing to finish the math packet. I jotted down the answer to problem 15, on page two. Kaitlyn, my tablemate, struggled to finish page one. Thank God I was so smart. I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like to not understand simple math. You could hear the drone of soft breathing, pierced by the occasional heavy sigh. The merciless sun refused to allow a wisp of wind or cloud in the sky. If you dropped a feather, it would float down and land directly beneath your hand. Summer had swept in with blazing days.

Without permission, I felt an unexpected muttering coming from the depths of my stomach. The wave rose up, up, into my nose, building into a grenade, which I held back with trembling nose hairs. I focused all my energy into restraining that dreaded, boisterous sneeze; small breath in, tiny breath out, when--ACHHPLOOMPH! Air and water sprayed in a great cloud, and like dominoes, the whole class turned.

But that was not what had caught their attention. For, hitching a ride on my sneeze, came the largest, rumbliest, noise shattering, earth quaking fart this world had ever experienced. Buildings came crumbling down. The FBI looked to see if North Korea had tested nukes again. Nope, just me. And the cloud of gas behind me. The fart echoed around the silent classroom, seeping into the round ears of young, pure 9 and 10 year olds, absorbing into expo markers and amplifying their toxicity. Knowing this was a matter of life or death, I exhaled and raised my eyes, seeing white rings where eyelids were supposed to be in everyone else’s. If anyone had marshmallows, they could’ve roasted them on my blazing campfire cheeks. Papery frown wrinkles twitching, my teacher, Ms. Campbell, pulled down her glasses to glare at me. No way she could smell my putrid vapor from the other side of the classroom. I whirled to see if Kaitlyn had noticed. Perhaps I could pretend that she had done it.

In the corners of my widened eyes and ears, I registered complete, unbroken silence, scrunched noses, and hands frozen with pencils in the air. Her pink glasses appeared in my vision first. Then, her mouth appeared, auditioning for the part of the letter O. I snapped my head back down. I counted my blinks. Three so far. No one breathed. I guess they didn’t want to burn their nostrils.

“Issie,” someone whispered, startling me and Kaitlyn. “Issie!” I knew if I had any chance of convincing everyone it wasn’t me, I had to start now. I glanced to my left. Wyatt and his tableates were staring at me in shock. Was it my shaking fingers, cherry red cheeks, or widened eyes that made him nod his head in confirmation? The blanket of anticipation and silence settled like a mother’s stare over us.

I blinked, and as the echoes of my nuclear bomb rang around the room, the class exploded into laughter, just like the explosion that just rang through and out of me. I tried to laugh, but my body still needed to recover from the trauma it had been through. I was the only one who seemed to do this, though, as everyone else snorted and giggled. The sounds of my classmates’ laughter surrounded me, and in that moment, I deeply empathized with the warthogs at the zoo. Abruptly, the bell for recess rang, and the laughter died faster than it had started.

Shoving the math packet into the Classwork bin, everyone grabbed their bags, and within moments, all the students had disappeared from the room. The smell still lingered as everyone headed to recess as fast as they could.

“Do you know who farted? It came from around where you were”, Brooke asked as we pulled out our lunchboxes.

“It was Kaitlyn, I think. I was sitting right next to her, and it came from her side of the table.” We both nodded, and turned back to our snacks. Brooke munched on a cheese stick, deep in thought, while I nibbled on my apple slices, torn between relief that Brooke believed me and guilt at lying to my best friend.

“Poor Kaitlyn”, Brooke mused, “that must have been so embarrassing.”

Throughout the day, two more people asked me who had done it, and each time, I cleverly observed that it must have been Kaitlyn who had planted the bomb. The child in question stood across the playground shaking her head and pointing at me. I guess she wasn’t going to let everyone believe it was her, but how else was I supposed to forget this incident? I should’ve known even then that this was one experience I would come to remember forever.