THESE HALLS USED TO BE TALLER! excerpt

[Here's a little snippet of the chapter I'm writing today. Hope you're all having a good week so far! -- Erin]

In the two seconds it took me to turn to the other teachers and ask, "Where is the restroom out here?" Veronica's pants were wet. So were her eyes, quickly filling with tears.

And then, up walked Alexia, with wet jeans, too. A simultaneous pants-wetting. Two human beings synchronizing, almost to the instant, the peeing of their pants and underwear (and, thanks to gravity, socks and shoes). It was a scientific feat, worthy of first place at the school science fair at least. It was also the last straw.

I closed my eyes for a split second. Maybe this was just a dream. It was still the night before and I was in my bed having a nightmare about how bad the first day of teaching would be -- a worst-case scenario dream. Or maybe I wasn't even a grown-up yet. I was just a little kid dreaming about how awful it would be if I grew up to be a teacher at my old elementary school. When I woke up, I would crawl into my parents' bed. "I had a scary dream," I would say, and they would wrap me up in a blanket like a papoose and cradle me until I feel asleep again, this time to dream of ponies and playing bass with Barbie and the Rockers.

I opened my eyes. Unfortunately, I was still all grown up, still on the playground, and my mommy and daddy were nowhere in sight. I was in charge here, like it or not (NOT!), and I had a major mess to clean up -- now -- before a third or fourth or fifth kid peed her pants.

Frantic, I asked the other teachers to watch the rest of my class while I whisked these girls off to the office. "The nurse will get you a change of clothes," I tried to reassure them.

Wrong again! The nurse did have several boxes of old, scrambled clothes -- like the Brady Bunch's dryer had exploded under the cot in her office. But she was not about to participate in our sitcom catastrophe. Wet pants were beneath her. Can't say I blame her.

As I tossed around overalls and shirts and dresses in search of not one but two pairs of pants that would fit a first grade girl, I found that either the school's upper grades had a serious incontinence problem or these clothes were donated by someone who wasn't thinking much about the age, and corresponding size, of a typical pants-wetter. Most of the clothes were HUGE, and the few items that weren't were so tiny the wearer surely would've been young enough to sport a diaper anyway.

Finally I found some pant candidates. I felt as though I had just run a marathon through a thrift store (which, come to think of it, would definitely be my preferred kind of marathon). Proudly holding up the pants, I braced myself for the grateful hugs of pee-soaked girls.

"Those pants are UGLY!" Veronica exclaimed in disgust.

I looked at her, entire bottom half soaked and splotchy, with the most genuine confusion. I would no more have anticipated her response -- a fashion critique of the pants?! WHAT ?! -- than if she had ripped off her face, revealing her true alien features, and demanded to be taken to my leader.

"YOU ARE MARINATING IN YOUR OWN URINE!" I wanted to shriek at her.

But I couldn't. It was beneath me. So I held my nose and dove back into the box of moth-eaten clothes.