“All right,” my mother said in a conspiring whisper, “The first one of you girls to get chicken pox, wins.”

She said it with concentrated motivation, the determined air of a coach who will give everything she has to see her dream realized. My mother wanted us to get chicken pox. Badly. She was always very worried about germs and disease and had heard, no doubt, that children who were not exposed to chicken pox at an early enough age would suffer dire consequences—extreme facial scarring, perhaps, or sterilization, or rejection by all reputable graduate schools. The three of us were facing her attentively in a line, our ages accentuated by whether we were taller or shorter than the pockmarked chair-rail surrounding the kitchen table.




“Wins what?” Pam asked. “What do we win?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “Something. I’ll make it good.”

“Money?”

“Maybe a little bit of money,” my mother said.

She had explained to us earlier that chicken pox was something that happened to everyone. “You’ll all get it sooner or later,” she said, “and it’s better for you to get it while you’re young. It’s dangerous to get chicken pox when you’re older.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Complications,” she said, and I nodded knowingly as if she had answered my question in great detail. “Ah yes,” I thought, “Complications. Of course.”

“How do we get it?” I asked.

“Being around someone who has it,” she said. “If you’re around their blisters it can spread, if you touch them or get their germs. The same way you’d catch a cold from someone.
It’s going around,” she added, “so it should be fairly easy to catch it.”

I nodded to myself. Obtaining chicken pox didn’t seem difficult at all. The main difficulty seemed to be obtaining it before either of my sisters, though a brief glance at their placid faces showed no outward sign of competition.

“All right,” I thought, sashaying out of the kitchen, hands on my small hips. “Let’s get this thing.”

* * *


The next day at school I scanned my classmates, zeroing in on each with the crosshairs of my bionic third-grade eye. I was looking for spots—raised blisters on the skin. Or itchiness. Or someone getting sent home because of chicken pox, in which case I had only a limited amount of time before their parents showed up and would have to work quickly. Scanning the desks I saw nothing. A boy named Michael scratched his head, but he was always scratching his head. He scratched it particularly often when he had trouble with a lesson, as if the answers were lodged under a thin layer of dead skin on his scalp and would be unearthed by the raking of his fingernails through his thin, blonde hair. I pulled back and continued scanning. A girl named Jessica had a mole on her face but I was fairly sure she had always had a mole on her face.

“Raquel?” Mrs. Schweitzer’s voice brought me back to reality. “Do you want to complete the eight times table on the board?”

No, I thought, I had little or no interest in doing that, but walked reluctantly up to the front of the classroom. I wrapped my hand around the chalk, hoping that perhaps one of the other children to complete a times table had left a festering chicken pox infection on its dusty surface. My back to the crowd I completed the table and then turned and stood at the front of the class as they chanted my answers, realizing that I had an excellent view of my classmates and that Janice* in the back left corner was scratching her stomach through her shirt.

“Raquel, you can sit down,” she said, and I walked back to my seat, narrowing my gaze in on my target.

I watched her intently. She did not yet seem aware of the fact that she was scratching, but did it absentmindedly, grabbing fistfuls of her belly and letting her nails sink into it, hoping to ease the discomfort. I looked at her skin and found no other outward signs, but still—in the early stages there are only one or two blisters. I needed to make physical body contact with her before the end of the day. Pam and Karen might already be happily body surfing through scores of viral first graders and pre-schoolers, playfully assaulting their immune system while I sat, staring inertly at a potential carrier. I locked eyes on her stomach, which she was still rubbing violently, and the teacher asked us to line up for lunch—a boys line and a girls line. I stood directly behind her, staring at the hair on the back of her neck, pulled tight in a ponytail, with a few dark curls escaping the elastic. Janice almost definitely had chicken pox, I thought, and it would be so much easier for me to get them if we had something regarded as even a mild friendship.

“Can I cut you?” I asked. The infection had started on her stomach, I thought, so best to be nearest to that part.

“I don’t care,” she said. “We’re just walking to the lunchroom.”

I nodded and slyly took my place in front of her. “Are you buying lunch?” I asked.

“No,” she said, aloof. “It’s pizza nuggets today. I don’t like them.” I leaned in to hear this, hoping the germs inherent in her breath would waft happily into my mucus membranes. I turned back around in line, before slowly backing up into her, as if pushed. My back lightly grazed her protruding stomach.

“Hey,” she said. “Be careful!”

“Sorry,” I said. “The line was backing up.” She seemed to accept this fairly obvious lie, despite the fact that the other girls in line were standing perfectly still. Stealthily reaching behind me, I rubbed my hand on the part of my back that had made contact. “Closer!” I thought. “I am getting closer!”

We sat through lunch at separate tables, the period’s uneventfulness marred only by my insistence on finishing the liquid in her Capri Sun.

“Can I have the rest of your drink?” I asked, wandering by her table, allegedly on my way to the garbage can.

“I’m throwing it away,” she said, confused. “It’s empty.”

“Oh,” I said, picking it up and sucking the damp, fruity air from the silver package until the bag was vacuum-sealed flat. “I always wanted to try these,” I said. “My mom won’t buy them.”
It was a half-truth. Clearly I had just stumbled upon the most awkward way to imbibe some of her germs, but I had always wished my mother would pack me trendier, more interesting lunches. My red delicious apples were not only far from delicious, they (along with their compatriots: a tuna sandwich, juicebox, and banana with my name written on it) were far from garnering me any semblance of popularity. Although perhaps, in retrospect, it was less my dearth of fruit roll-ups and Ecto-Cooler and more my propensity to enthusiastically contract diseases from people that kept me a comfortable distance from the popular kids’ table.

We proceeded out the side door of the cafeteria, into the field for recess, where I proceeded to involve myself in a grade-wide game of “Tag,” during which I would allow myself to become “it” and would then mercilessly chase Janice around the ball fields, tagging her in areas I thought most prone to infection.

“Stop tagging me on my stomach, Raquel!” she screamed, running away from me.

“It’s just a game!” I shouted. “It’s the easiest place to tag!”

“Why aren’t you chasing anyone else?” she yelled, her voice lilting as she panted through the syllables. Janice was not a good runner. The other children, who had realized they did not have to try particularly hard to avoid being tagged by me, began jogging comfortably along the sidelines, observing the action.

“I’m chasing other people too,” I said, and with that began half-heartedly chasing Keysha McGrady long enough for Janice to slow down, after which I pounced on her.

“What are you doing?!” she screamed.

“Nothing!” I said. “I’m playing a game!”

“You’re not tagging anyone else!” she went on. “Why are you being so weird today?!!”

“We’re all playing tag,” I said. “I’m just trying to make you it,” I said. While saying this she had confronted me face to face and upon saying the words “make you it” I proceeded to tag her three times during our conversation as if illustrating a point (I am tagging you!) with my actions.

“You’re it,” I said. And before I could run, Janice swiped her pox-ridden hand over my own shoulder.

“No, you’re it,” she said. Amazing, I thought. I’ll have the chicken pox by 6PM this evening.

Jumping on the opportunity of a lifetime I threw my palm against the skin of her left arm.

“You’re it again,” I said.

“No you,” she said, slapping me in the chest.

“You are,” I said, tagging her.

“You’re it, Raquel!” she shouted, tagging me.

“You!”

“No you!!!” she screamed, hitting me several times on my shoulder. “You! You’re it! I hate this game—I’m not playing!” she shouted.

“Fine,” I said, sauntering off to tag someone else. I smiled at myself. Janice would have more important things than this game to think about during the umpteen oatmeal baths she would have to take over the next five days. I imagined myself luxuriating in an oatmeal bath, which I was told would ease the itching after contacting chicken pox. I was not a tremendously big fan of oatmeal, but perhaps my mother would allow me to substitute a cereal of my choosing and I could lounge lethargically in a tub full of Honey Nut Cheerios, or Cinnamon Toast Crunch, or Trix. Perhaps it was only important that it be a breakfast item and I could lie for hours in a tub of waffles or pop tarts or bacon. The possibilities were endless, and I salivated at my upcoming affliction.
“Chicken Pox,” I thought, “will be the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.”


And it was mid-day later that week that I found myself absentmindedly scratching my stomach. Lifting the hem of my T-shirt, I discovered what appeared to be a new mole sitting beside my bellybutton. It itched like mad and I tried to ease the discomfort by pushing the corner of my lunchbox directly onto the blister and holding it there.

“Nurse Carol,” I said, walking to her yellow-cinderblocked office after being granted permission by Mrs. Schweitzer. “I think I have chicken pox.”
I gave no hint as to why I thought I might have it—I took no pains to detail to her my lengthy attempts to rub elbows (literally) with the previously infected.

“I think that’s exactly what you have,” she said after a few minutes of examining my lunchbox-dented stomach. “I have a few children who are out with it this week. I’m going to call your mother.”

And she did call my mother, who of course showed up half an hour later to pick me up from school since I was, in the nurse’s words, “highly infectious.” I beamed the car ride home, lifting my shirt just high enough to showcase my newly formed pockmark.

“So do I get the prize?” I asked.

“Of course you do,” she said, and true to her word she would give me something akin to five dollars and a bag of jellybeans, which, to me, was all anybody could ask for in the world.

“I hope you won’t be mad though,” she said, “I’ll probably also give your sisters something when they get it. I know you were lucky enough to get it first, but really I just want all of you to get it over with when you’re young.”

“So I don’t get anything else for being first?” I asked.

“You get a mother who’s very proud of you,” she said.

“You know, luck had very little to do with this,” I explained, outlining the blister with my nail. “I worked really hard to get this.”

“I’m sure you did,” she assured me.

“So do I get something extra for being first?” I asked.

“You get to stay home from school for at least a week,” she said. “And while this might seem a little weird, you get to help me out by making a point to infect both your sisters.”

I nodded, happy to help. “Just let me know what you want me to do,” I told her, scratching at my hard-earned virus that lovingly nestled itself into my skin.
“That actually doesn’t sound that weird at all.”