Fantasy Story About a Boy Who Comes Down with a Funny-Looking Disease

"It's called Superior Nasal Operational Transport," our teacher said, "and you do it by sneezing." She closed her eyes, sneezed and disappeared. Then with another "Achoo," she reappeared inside the school's pet-ground. A two-headed snarky-dink yodeled and a cloud of orange gas poofed from under her tail, but the other animals ignored her.

I elbowed my twin sister, EmmaLee, and said, "Hey, if you take the first letter of each word in Superior Nasal Operational Transport, it spells SNOT."

EmmaLee shook her head with disgust and I wondered if her red pigtails would fly off. "Cameron, that's awful!" She pulled a glowing purple Kleenex from her pocket and dabbed her nose.

"And it's SNOT funny, either." I grinned and waited for her to groan or hit me in the arm.

Just then, the buzzer honked, "Ooga, ooga, oog," signaling the end of school and I tried my first SNOT sneeze to see if I could make it home before EmmaLee.

Only something went wrong. I landed outside of town, in that falling-apart wooden building where they used to keep something called cows. Two old, rusted tractor-thingies sat there, so I stayed and played on them-until a weird animal with two yellow legs and clawed feet strutted over. Its feathery, chestnut-red body looked fat and round. A wibble-wobbly shape sat on top of its head. The bird made a strange sound-a happy sort of "baaaarrrraaak" when I petted it.

Because we're twins, EmmaLee and I are in the same grade in school, but she always acted older. She knew just about every kind of animal there was and didn't like me petting the animals-from-the-past that wandered outside town. But she's a girl, and my sister to boot. I figured boys are smarter than girls, any day, and if she didn't know what I was petting, it wouldn't hurt her.

The sky turned a bright shade of watermelon-rind green, which meant a hailstorm on the horizon, so I held tight to the baaaarrrraaak-y animal and tried to sneeze my way home.

When I opened my eyes, I was in the kitchen. That part was great, but the baaaarrrraaak-y animal was missing. And something else was wrong. My skin looked blotchy, like a three-snouted skippylou with a splotchy suntan. That meant I'd soon be swallowing-uggg-a teaspoon of CureAll.

Mom gave me some but the medicine didn't help and its nasty, pink peppermint taste made me feel like barfing. By now, round bumps were popping out all over my skin and Mom consulted the computer.

It replied in its whiny voice, "My memory banks cover the years 2065 to the present. There is no disease matching those symptoms in memory." Then it locked up. Mom had to turn it off and back on again to get Windows to reload.

Finally, EmmaLee remembered there was an old doctor down the street. No one ever asked him for advice because computers diagnosed everything.

She sneezed over to his house and brought him back. The doctor looked at the bumps and splotches on my arms and chest. A faint scent of moss drifted off him as he stood, staring at my skin. Finally, he said, "Does it itch?"

EmmaLee put her hands on her hips and scrunched her eyebrows together. I could tell she was steaming inside. She'd probably figured out I'd petted something.

I rolled my eyes hoping the doctor would know it meant yes. I wasn't going to volunteer anything else with EmmaLee standing there, listening. Scuzzers! If I'd gotten a disease from some weird animal I'd touched, she'd never let me live it down. Even if we lived to the really old age of fifteen.

"Well, I haven't seen a case of this for years. You've got-" The doctor stopped what he was saying, pulled out a square pad and a funny, old instrument with the words, "Bic Pen" on it, and wrote down the disease for me.

"You have a pox called Children's Hyper-Itchy Can't Keep Energy Now," he said.

I scratched one ear and looked at the first letter in each word. "You mean I have something called CHICKEN pox?"

"Yup," the doctor said. "That's-"

"That's what you get for petting a chicken!" EmmaLee flipped her pigtails and stomped away, madder than a hive of zinger bugs in a kuku tree.

Cheese-ums! How'd she know I'd petted something?

The doctor smiled at me. "You don't really get it from chickens; it's a virus." He tilted his head slightly toward EmmaLee. "She'll probably catch it, too."

I watched EmmaLee huffy-puffing around the living room and planned my revenge strategy. "Well, don't tell my sister it's a virus, because when she breaks out in lumps and bumps, I'm going to ask little Miss Knows Everything what chickens she's been petting!"

And despite having the itchies, I grinned from blotchy ear to blotchy ear ... because life can't get any better than when you have something to hold over your know-it-all sister's head.

Sources:
Personal experience