(Wo)Men

One day in the 7th grade, I was struggling through a class day with a particularly pernicious bout of diarrhea. I had an exam after lunch and was confident that by this time, I had the diarrhea under control. However, shortly into taking the test the need to evacuate my bowels of some ineffable nastiness became increasingly potent. I was nervous about asking to adjourn from the classroom during the exam both because my teacher might think I was trying to escape her attention in order to cheat on the exam and because the act of leaving during the exam would draw the attention of other students to just how badly I needed to relieve myself. Additionally, a girl named "Stacey" with whom I had long been childhood friends and on whom I had recently developed a childhood crush sat directly in front of me. These anxieties about having to pass the noxious intestinal equivalent of a thin french onion soup only served to increase the evacuative urge. As a result, I began passing aurally muted and nasally repulsive bursts of gas from my posterior. As little as anyone else, I did not want "Stacey" smelling these bursts and by now the evacuative urge had become undeniable. I awkwardly shifted around "Stacey" to clear the desk aisle, the gas inflated posterior of my jeans moving directly past her face and nose, and walked as inconspicuously (as my swelling embarrassment would allow) to the desk of the teacher. I made my request to use the bathroom to her. She fumbled thunderingly through her hollow metal desk drawer for the hall pass before locating it. After she handed it to me I exited the classroom in the same manner through which I had approached the teacher's desk. The click of the classroom doorknob that indicated the door had fully closed also functioned as the tensely anticipated pistol shot of a competitive sprint. As if the evacuative urge was another racer against whom I was competing to first cross the finish line, I sprinted down the hallway and ducked into the first bathroom I found. I was relieved to find the bathroom vacant and I entered the second stall. The explosive and sonorous contents of my bowels having been expelled, my short term memory suddenly reminded me that the bathroom I had entered did not have urinals on the walls. As I quickly assessed the relevance of that detail, I heard the giggling voices of pubescent girls entering the same bathroom that I had...