#but even before then. several folks i knew had walking pneumonia in the summer

[mars-ipan]

fucking hell i hate being sick so much

[sedehaven]

Saving Ophelia Grace’s Toe

Y’all seem to like my stories about being a witch in the Bible Belt, so here’s another one. This is a coming of age story about a young witch (me), a bunch of adults of various degrees of uselessness, and Ophelia Grace’s rotten toe.

This is not a happy story.

Names changed when necessary.

CW: Body squick, graphic injury, incompetent nurse, malevolent nurse, poisoning, bureaucratic nightmares, dark DARK shit ahead

So, in spite of the crushing poverty that I grew up in, I was given the opportunity to attend a very prestigious boarding school for Juniors and Seniors in Klan Kountry, LA. It’s a public school, so it takes kids from all over the state.

My school was run by a dude named Brother Dave.

Brother Dave was so awful that one of our senior pranks (I DID NOT DO THIS) involved a password-protected screensaver on every communal computer in the school (including, I think, Brother Dave’s office computer) of a bouncing, 3-D image of this:

Dude was NOT well-loved. It is important to know that he and I did not get along. When I was still a prospective student, he told us that our mascot was the mighty Eagle, because Eagles Flock Together.

Y’all. Someone watched himself too much Mighty Ducks.

I replied, loud enough for the whole auditorium to hear, “That’s not true, sir. Eaglettes push their smaller and weaker siblings out of the nest as soon as they can.”

He looked to the staff for support, red-faced and embarrassed by this ninety-pound child who stole his thunder.

The biology teacher (who left for greener pastures after my first year--rumored to have been forced out for being too fabulously dykey for the new administration) looked at him and stated, in her very particular and crisp fashion, “Well, she’s right.”

Safe to say, he hated me from the start. So, if you read this and you wonder, “Why didn’t this silly kid just go to the grown-up?” That’s why. He was our grown-up.

Brother Dave started at the school the year before I did. He was brought in by a local Senator, because said local Senator Fucked Up Colossally.

Senator Fuckup was running against Mr. Sketchy Businessman. Mr. Sketchy Businessman was backed by the Ku Klux Klan (a big deal in parts of the world, folks. My school was in David Duke country.)

Senator Fuckup had a fancy name--well-respected all around the state. Like, several statues of one of his relations decorate the state capital. Big name.

Problem is, Senator Fuckup is half-Black.

In Klan Kountry.

Y’all.

So he’s already at a disadvantage. As it turns out, it takes a village to start a magnet school. Senator Fuckup was one of the founding board members, and promised all kinds of benefits if they put the school in HIS district.

Their other offer was in my own hometown, the Hub City, where several of our major state highways cross with two Interstates.A place with art and history and culture. A place with one of the largest outdoor music festivals in the state--a multicultural, international music festival! With art walks and museums and Mardi Gras parades! With a three-story library, a library for French language and culture, and the second-largest university in Louisiana!

Senator Fuckup PROMISED that the school wouldn’t want for anything if they went to Klan Kountry.

So they did.

It was no great secret that this school was Senator Fuckup’s baby. At the time that I attended, the school was number one in the nation. Something to be proud of.

Except.

Except.

Except that in order to keep various forms of funding, the school was required to take in more melanin-blessed individuals than the locals liked.

Enter Mr. Sketchy Businessman, who ran a series of TV and radio ads claiming that our STATE funded school was stealing money from the local school district.

That’s right. He claimed that our school took money away from the poor Whites of Klan Kountry and gave to the diverse and metropolitan school for the gifted.

Senator Fuckup tried to deflect and dismiss, BUT did NOT rebut those claims. He didn’t believe that the school’s funding was THAT MUCH of an issue.

Any reasonable person would understand that the school was funded from the State taxes. Right?

As it turns out, Klan Kountry is not filled with reasonable people.

Senator Fuckup is a member of a particular subgroup in Klan Kounrty--a not-insignificant population of Catholic Creoles. So, after he wins his election--barely--he realizes that Something Must Be Done to help the image of the school that everybody knew as HIS baby.

Enter his old friend, Brother Dave. Brother Dave, who nearly bankrupted his previous school. His brother-in-law was a contractor who got a few really juicy contracts through him.

Protip: Nepotism only works if the person being nepotized is competent.

Spoiler: Brother Dave’s brother-in-law built schools about as well as Brother Dave ran them.

Brother Dave’s old school is attached to an order of monks who build cheap and simple caskets for people who are into that kind of thing.

They bake bread for the poor. These are good people.

Y’all, these people made it KNOWN--statewide--that they had a casket ready for ol’ Dave if he ever stepped foot in their town again.

Still, Senator Fuckup decided that THIS was the man who would lead my school into a glorious future.

Brother Dave took an aggressive stance on admissions. He wanted kids who didn’t have a lot of drama, and kids who looked (WHITE) good on the recruiting materials. He pulled hard from the local Catholic (Segregation) Academies.

Y’all.

Our Black kids were nearly White-passing mixed-race kids, one kid who was ACTUALLY from Africa, a couple of kids from Catholic schools, and one dark-skinned Baptist girl who is bombshell model-gorgeous. (For those glossy brochures.)

So as many White Catholic kids as possible.

Y’all.

I’ve competed with private school fuckwits in academic contests my whole life, up to that point. If it was something that required preparation (science fair, for example), they wiped the floor with us.

Because daddy the petroleum engineer did the project for them.

If it was a you-know-it-or-you-don’t thing (quiz bowl, for example), they lost so brutally that I might have felt bad for them. You know, if they had souls. Which they did not.

So Brother Dave populated our school with what he thought were “good kids”. White, Catholic kids.

Spoiler: My class started with 250 students. We graduated less than half of that, even after he backfilled our class with new kids between junior and senior year. The class after mine was worse.

Why is that?

White Catholic kids at segregation academies in the late 90′s basically did busy-work worksheet stuff all day. They were not ready for 10 page papers and 5 page lab reports and 100+ pages of reading and 20-50 math problems and projects, projects, projects!

Also, if all you do is worksheets and sit-down-and-shut-up, there has to be a certain...chemical element...to cope.

So, yeah. Drugs. So much drugs. And booze.

Brother Dave also hired Nurse Bitchy Fuckface. She was actually his first hire.

Nurse Bitchy was a walking disaster.

I was sixteen when I first met her, and because she didn’t smell like street drugs (I KNOW WHAT THAT SHIT IS), I missed a lot of signs.

Looking back, I think that she might have been a Prozac-and-wine kind of person. But, as the only drugs that I was familiar with came from street pharmacists, I thought she was just evil.

Hateful to the queers, pagans, Goths, and all assorted weirdos.

You know, all the kids who could actually handle the schoolwork and the pressure. *eyeroll*

I’m allergic to Sudafed. Weird, huh?

A senior at my school told me to be careful with Nurse Bitchy. She has a sensitivity to acetaminophen (Tylenol) and couldn’t have it. Nurse Bitchy had given it to her a couple of times.

It was on my senior’s medical chart. If you’re keeping score, that’s felony attempted murder.

Nurse Bitchy gave me Sudafed seventeen times (that I remember) while I was at that school. She very nearly killed me doing it. Some times I knew, and some times I did not.

“But why did you take it, if you knew?”

Well, you innocent dove, if I refused to take the medicine that the Nurse gave me, then I got written up. Enough write-ups and I got kicked out.

My home school in the Hub City? Eh...as bad as Klan Kountry was, I didn’t have someone assaulting me daily. I didn’t have a gang of girls who got away with attempting to rape me with a broom handle. I didn’t have a very big kid who was given liberties with me (BY THE STAFF) because he was special ed.

Or, as my guidance counselor liked to say (after my father was murdered and I was flunking chemistry--not because of dad’s death, but because the chemistry teacher put all the girls and Black boys in the back of the class--which had NO air conditioning on hundred-degree days--after Brother Dave’s brother-in-law “fixed” it that summer), “Stephanie, you know that you’re the poorest student here. Do you really want to go back to THAT?”

No. I did not.

Under pain of going home to poverty, rape, assault, and maybe death, I took her poison. She watched me do it. And she smiled.

I only went to Nurse Bitchy when I was forced to. This happened far more often my Junior year. The teachers would send me because I was sick (I come from a smoker’s home, and I’m an asthmatic who is allergic to tobacco. My family never quit, so I’d end up with smoker’s pneumonia most times that I went home. Thanks for the lung scars, fam.)

Eventually, when I was a Senior, my computer science teacher realized that I was unresponsive with a fever in her class. She was new that year, and didn’t know any better. So she woke me up and sent me along. Nurse Bitchy gave me the usual and sent me back to class.

Very few humans retain the ability to projectile vomit after age seven. Did you know that?

Lucky me, I did. I still can.

I hurled all over my keyboard. I hurled and hurled. My classmates screamed and ran.

My computer science teacher, an ice-cold woman of Indian descent with a very posh English accent, unplugged the vomit-soaked, ruined keyboard. She took it and me to the nurse.

She slammed the keyboard down on her desk and screamed at her to NEVER send a sick child to her class again.

Nurse Bitchy was (shocking, I know) a racist. She feared the angry Indian lady.

My computer science teacher, I believe, spread the word about Nurse Bitchy’s ineffectiveness. Teachers stopped sending students to her.

That left a vacuum. Nobody was being forced to get medical help. But medical help was still needed.

Before going to school in Klan Kountry, I was a veterinary technician. I worked under-the-table from too young. Illegal-child-labor-too-young.

But, I knew my stuff. I had a stocked medicine cabinet and a dissection kit.

I started doing everything up to and including prison surgery in my dorm room.

I could handle most anything. Which was better than worrying that the nurse was going to poison one of my friends into the ground.

I didn’t ask for money or food or anything (food was a commodity at that school because our cafeteria was infested). I worked for the goodwill of my classmates, which is the shiniest coin in the realm.

I’d gotten into witchcraft earlier that year. People trusted the witch over the nurse. That’s where my school was.

I only had one case that I really couldn’t treat.

Y’all.

It was traditional in the girls’ dorms that unless you were asleep or studying, you kept your door open. Mine was open that night. I was writing Sailor Moon fanfiction, procrastinating on one project or another. I don’t remember, it was twenty-two years ago.

Ophelia Grace (not her real name) came to my door in Doc Martens, favoring a foot. Her roommate or a suitemate or maybe another theatre kid was holding her up as she hobbled into my room.

I hadn’t heard that she’d been hurt, but apparently she had been. She was feverish and weak. Her face was bright red. She was babbling.

“I’m sorry,” she said over and over again. She apologized for coming late. She apologized for coming at all. She was shaking.

I sat her and her friend on my roommate’s bed (we’d bunked them, and I had the top bunk). My roommate was out, in the art lab working on a particularly tricky painting. Probably for the best. He was squeamish (my ex-roommate is a transman, so I’m using his preferred pronouns.)

I grabbed a large bowl and a mug, filled both with water (salted the bowl of water), and went down the hall to the microwave.

The water in Klan Kountry was filthy. It smelled bad and tasted worse. Remember Mr. Sketchy Businessman? He wanted to relax EPA regulations for himself and his sketchy business friends.

They were actively dumping into the city reservoir. But Mr. Sketchy Businessman promised to KKKeep KKKlan KKKountry Lily, so he got 49% of the votes.

Racist douche.

I boiled the water in the microwave--first the mug, then the bowl. It was a walk I’d make several times that evening.

Ophelia had a fever, holding steady at “fucking HOT” by the estimate of her friend. My thermometer pegged it at 102. Not good.

I put a teabag and two whole cloves in the cup and let it steep while I took her temperature. I asked her what happened. I don’t remember the specifics of the injury, but I believe that something got dropped on her toe. I think it happened in the theatre.

Ophelia thought she could walk it off. I remember that.

She kept apologizing. I honeyed the tea and shoved it in her hands. The tea helped. She was shivering--hard--from the wracking chills of her fever.

I remember how her febrile shivers made the bunk beds shake.

I remember thinking that I was in over my head.

I remember grabbing my oldest towels, and closing my door.

I remember praying.

And then I took her boot off.

Y’all.

I’ve smelled rot. Some people think that all rot smells the same.

It does not.

Corpse stink has its own bouquet. Blood rot has a distinct stench. Necrotic yeast infections almost smell good--like yeast rolls and something meatier.

I’d smelled Ophelia’s particular rot before.

I was fourteen. A momma dog was brought in, heavily pregnant. She’d been delivering, and the third pup got stuck. There were 11 left. The stuck pup was dead, but we managed to save 4 behind him, plus the first 2, born healthy.

The uterus had begun to rot inside, and several of the pups had been dead for some time.

The spaying that happened after the pups were removed was green and black, with the consistency of pudding. We pulled as much out as we could, but the rest had to be rinsed out.

Thankfully, I’ve smelled that smell very few times after. It smells pungent and strong. Like garlic. Like a cream of garlic stew.

I thought I’d gotten a whiff of THAT smell when Ophelia walked in, and again when she sat down. Pulling her boot off was like the first deep cut into momma dog. Garlic and blood.

The smell of something rotting in someone still alive.

She had on two socks. I peeled off the first one. There was a stain at the toe. The second sock was worse. The smell hung around.

Our windows were screwed shut. I couldn’t do anything about the smell.

Ophelia cried into her tea. She was still apologizing.

The toe was purple and black. There was a lot of yellow pus under the nail, which was leaking out on either side. Red streaks ran up her instep, tracing her veins.

The toe was swollen and needed a lance.

I had no idea how she climbed the stairs to get to me. (I was on the third floor, and she lived below. We had no elevator.)

She started to get loud (peeling those socks off HURT), so I asked her a question. I asked about her history paper. The ten-page history paper was a rite-of-passage at the school, and I knew it was coming due for her. I told her to tell me about her topic and her sources.

She did.

Thank the Lord and Lady.

I got my dissection kit and rubbing alcohol. I made things as sterile as I could.

I told her that it would probably hurt, but that I would work quickly.

Her friend left after the first cut. She didn’t stay gone long, but I heard her vomit in our suite’s toilet.

Ophelia kept talking about her paper. I led her around on that topic, asking questions and asking for clarification. Asking about the books she’d read, and offering a few that I was familiar with on the subject.

This is why doctors and dentists know so many things about so many subjects. Talking keeps the patient calm.

Meanwhile, pus and blood dripped from the slits that I made in her flesh, onto a towel that bore the stains until I donated it to the animal shelter, years later.

I soaked her toe in the bowl of water. The salt burned, but she couldn’t scream.

There was an adult who was supposed to be watching us. If she was alerted to my low-tech medical unit, she would have stopped me and sent Ophelia to the murder nurse.

I filled another bowl, salted it, and microwaved it.

Ophelia’s friend rejoined us, and watched as I squeezed the rest of the pus out of her. Her toenail slipped off in the third bowl. The toenail was cracked. Ophelia kept it.

I wonder if she still has it?

Triple antibiotic ointment and a sterile dressing later, I told her to tell the nurse that she needed a doctor. Nurse Bitchy couldn’t keep us from a doctor if we asked for one. She said that she would.

I gave her a few oral anti-inflammatory pills and some Benadryl to get a good night’s sleep.

She left, with her boot in her hand and a soft smile on her lips. I cleaned my tools, my bowls, the floor where her foot was, and had to do a load of laundry because that one rag smelled so awful.

My roommate came back in time for headcount, and asked if I’d made ramen. Said it smelled pretty good in there.

It did. Rot can do that.

It was hard to sleep that night. I cried quietly until sleep took me.

Ophelia recovered. She became a witch some time later. In college, I think. We’re still friends, in a Facebook kind of way.

Brother Dave is still alive. After working for my school, he ended up helping the Church cover up three decades of sex abuse at a diocese school. Not sure what he’s up to, but probably nothing good. He’s a garbage human.

Nurse Bitchy just retired. She lasted twenty years at that school. God knows how.

Senator Fuckup died in a car crash and the school is being renamed after him. So are the new dorms that are being built.

Klan Kountry cleaned up their water after I left. That’s really good news.

The school continues. Apparently, it got better with Brother Dave’s leavetaking. I hope that’s true.

And me?

I’m still a witch. I’m still here.

And I can still smell that rotten toe on the edge of nightmares half-remembered.

~*~

I don’t want my diploma revoked or to be sued, so disclaimer time.

This is fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is coincidental.