In the sixth grade, I often got out of school by pretending to be sick. I'd stagger into the infirmary complaining of immobilizing nausea. A nurse would pat my head, and give me some Pepto-Bismol. I'd swallow the pink stuff and, after an interval of time, tear ass into the john with my hands over my mouth. When I came out of the can they almost always directed me to a thinly padded cot and said, "Lie down, hun. We'll call your Mom."
By spring, I decided it was to time cut out unnecessary steps. Why bother with going to school at all? This posed a more difficult task. My mother's homing device for bullshit was well-calibrated. She was already suspicious of my bouts with the stomach flu. I'd have to come up with something bigger, something impossible to track. I decided on fainting.
It was easy. I just walked in late to breakfast one morning and announced that I had fainted. "I don't know for how long," I said, "I just came to on my bedroom floor." My mother called my father and told him what happened. "Better take him to the doctors, Barb," he said. "Better take him today." It worked. My sister went to school alone. I got out of my uniform and turned on the TV.
At the clinic, things got complicated. Climbing up onto the examination bed the nurse admonished me: "Don't jump up like that. Slow movements only. You don't want to pass out again." Right. Okay. Slow movements. Play along. She asked me a series of questions. "How long were you under, Brenner?" I told her about five minutes. It sounded like a reasonable length of time. The nurse was incredulous: "That's a long time to be out." Apparently most fainting spells last a minute at most. I had not done enough research. My mother came to my rescue: "Well Brenner, are you sure it was that long? Did you look at the clock?" I told them I hadn't, but that it just felt like a long time. Both women nodded.
The nurse took two vials of blood from my arm for tests. It seemed a little unnecessary to me. I didn't realize then that people, especially pre-teens, don't go around fainting, and that passing out for no reason is never good, medically speaking. We waited for the results. By noon I had given up all hope of catching the remaining segment of The Price is Right.
My tests came back clean, which only meant that more had to be done. The next day I came back for an EKG. They glued little electrodes to my chest, and I watched the graphing machine dictate the rhythms and waves of my heart: totally normal. My mother was visibly relieved. I tried not to look guilty.
I went back to school with fainting officially out of my repertoire. Playing hooky was supposed to be effective and straightforward and should in no way require medical attention. But I didn't 'fess up. I let the lie lay, and my fainting spell continued to puzzle doctors and silently worry my parents.
The following week my mother took me to get an MRI. The doctors told me to put on a hospital gown and then shoved me into a narrow white tube where I had more than enough time to contemplate my guilt. "God, I'm such an asshole," I thought as the magnetic fields whirred around my totally healthy brain, "but at least I'm missing Math class"
