Have a Nice Day by Julie Halpern

Author:Julie Halpern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

There. A complete essay and 100 percent avoidance of anything that would make me tear up in class or need to leave for toilet-using purposes.

Thank God we weren’t forced to read the essays aloud.

Just to turn them in.

Ruh-roh.

Did I just turn in an essay with the word “tits” in the title?

Can I plead insanity? Or has that been played out?

* * *

When I placed my essay on Mr. Groban’s desk, he gave me that weird-guy wink and said, “Glad to see you back, Anna.” I gave him the slightly obnoxious quick smile, the kind where you’re not really smiling and you do it so fast that the recipient sees both the start and end to the smile. Like you’re giving a smile and taking it back in the same second. I didn’t need the extra guilt of a teacher checking in on me. All those other kids in school are allowed to be absent without a welcome parade.

Then, as I left the class, I heard Groban say, “Feeling better today, Callie? Glad to see you back,” and I felt bad about the non-smile.

My stomach started acting up within the first five minutes of physics. Why couldn’t I be in chemistry where we have an experiment every day and lots of noise and moving around? Instead, it was lecture and note-taking time, complete with a rousing joke of “Physics Are Phun” from Mr. Fripp. The room was so quiet quiet quiet that there were several instances of Did that guy just fart or did his foot scrape on his chair?

I bounced my knee in my anxious prelude to a bathroom break. But I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave the class like a freak, and I didn’t want to spend any more time in a school bathroom than it took to pee, wipe, and wash my hands, and I sure as hell didn’t want to spend any more time on that godforsaken plastic nurse bed. And I really didn’t want my mom to have to deal with any more tsuris, as she called it, the Yiddish word for “trouble.”

That’s when Rodney Yee’s calming voice popped into my head. “Relax your eyes,” so I did. “The skin of the face relaxes deep to the bone. The bridge of the nose widens, spacious for the breath. The tongue is relaxed. The root of the tongue relaxes deep in the mouth.” All of which sounds super-flaky, and possibly a little gross, to someone who has not lived the Rodney Yee experience, but along with some deep, even breathing, Rodney managed to bring my anxiety level down in a few minutes. My leg even stopped bouncing.

I realized my eyes were closed, and I worried that Mr. Fripp was going to call me out, but he scribbled busily on the whiteboard without notice to anything going on in the classroom. I looked around and saw three or four other kids with closed eyes. Instead of looking like some weirdo relying on yoga breathing

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