Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut Read Online Free PDF Page A

Miss Hannigan, who loathes little girls? She’s Mother Teresa next to this dude. He walked the halls in his white lab coat and regularly snapped at us, sending shivers up my spine that I still remember.
    We dissected frogs at age eight, learning where the Golgi body was versus the spleen. We knew every human organ and bone at nine. Every system in the body by ten. About once every two or three weeks, as we’d all assembled around the lab’s black tables, each with our own station, including safety glasses, individual microscopes, dissecting trays, and tools, Mr. X would enter dramatically, like a royal from stage left in a Shakespeare play, grand and with an air of power.
    Sometimes he didn’t speak but took out four pieces of white paper. Oh shit. We knew what was coming. In silence he would fold the paper and press a hard crease into the stack. Next he’d open it and rip along the line. Gasps. He’d then fold the halves into quarters and crease and rip again. Panting. He would then slowly walk around the room, his shoes clacking on the floor as he passed each girl a small section of paper. Hyperventilation. Pop quiz.
    “One. Spell: cytokinesis.”
    “Two. Spell: Lumbricus terrestris .”
    “Three. Spell: deoxyribonucleic acid.”
    Shaking, I’d rev up my mechanical pencil ( click click click click! ) taken from my Hello Kitty pencil case, bite my lower lip, and go for it.
    After the three terms on our spelling test, he would walk around and collect the small rectangles. In front of the whole class he would announce his findings: “Melanie. Let’s see: Yes, no, no. One out of three. Not good.” If someone got all of them right, he would give them a curt nod, causing the girl to exhale slowly but not even dare smirk in relief.
    If we were doing an experiment, say, peeling back the skin of a Lumbricus terrestris, i.e., earthworm, and putting organs under a microscope, and if he felt someone was sloppy or not doing it per his specific instructions, he would walk up slowly, casually take the girl’s dissecting tray from her, and dramatically dump the contents in a garbage can.
    “Your experiment has been canceled.”
    Then he would take her three-ring binder, open it, and dump all the pages into the can on top of the worm guts. Devil.
    One day he caught me whispering with my friend and opened the door and asked me to go in the hallway.
    “ Get out. ”
    My heart pounded through my chest like a cartoon getting a boner for the girl skunk or whatever, except instead of cupids in my eyeballs there were skulls. I could feel the stress hormone cortisol coursing through my body as I crossed the lab full of classmates, who looked down at the black lab tables, averting their eyes.
    I solemnly did my walk of shame, fighting tears, to the door, which had a bumper sticker that read i [ heart] science . Except instead of a heart like on my Hello Kitty pencil case it was an actual heart, like in your chest with tubes and veins and shit. It was organy and he prolly thought it was really clever, but I just thought it was dumb.
    Looking back, I swear they could’ve found twenty heads in his fridge and no one would have been surprised. The stench of formaldehyde from his many jars of fetal pigs and the like still haunts me to this day as the anti-smell, the one I can’t abide, the one that makes my skin crawl. But not for the reason you’d think; for most people it would carry the stink of death, but for me it triggers thoughts of Mr. X.
    I had this teacher for three years and for that entire period, the two days a week I had science class I woke up with my heart pounding. I loathed him, but he still scared me. Until one day. When I snapped.
    I had just had a very disturbing experience unrelated to school. I had been obsessed with Saturday Night Live since toddlerhood and so was overjoyed when a friend of the family got a ticket for me. I went to the show and then briefly to the after party, where Don Henley, who had been the