BOOGER BRAD

            I don’t know exactly why washing my hands changed from good hygiene into an obsession. I do remember the first time anyone brought it to my attention. When the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder appear, an outside observer is often the first person to point out that something is wrong. In my case, it was my fourth grade teacher.

            Mrs. Remley was one of my all-time favorite teachers. Her dark hair was short, like a grown-up’s, and had some gray in it already, but she laughed like a kid—suddenly, loudly, and without apology. Her sweaters were brightly colored and seasonal: apple and pumpkin appliqués for fall, snowflakes for winter, tulips for spring. She had gotten married a few weeks before school started, and when her first baby was born that spring, it was clear that she was low on sleep, but she always seemed happy to be there with us.

            She liked me. I was a good student: quiet but eager, obedient but enthusiastic. When she called us up to her desk, she always asked us to greet her with smiles on our faces and songs in our hearts. My friend Jenny and I made paper cut-outs of hearts and wrote song titles in them, taped them to our shirts. I was that kid who didn’t even seem to be kissing up because, in fact, I wasn’t. It didn’t really occur to me to misbehave. I suppose I never thought of anything that sounded fun and was, coincidentally, against the rules. Mrs. Remley had no reason to expect trouble from me.

            Our classroom was shaped like a slice of pie with the tip cut off, with the chalkboard on the smallest wall. My desk was one in a small island of desks toward the back of the room, stage right, and a counter with a sink ran across the back wall. Mrs. Remley sat up in the front by the chalkboard. Posters around the room encouraged the virtues of patience, kindness, and enthusiasm, and a bulletin board displayed pieces of notebook paper covered with newly minted cursive script and, for some of us, gold stars. Seating charts were mandatory but not alphabetical, and each teacher made a new one several times a year. I learned later that seating charts are designed primarily to split up troublemakers, but at the time, I thought they juggled us around so we could talk to different kids and make new friends. I appreciated it. Cliques are hard to break at any age, and if you were forced to sit next to someone new all day for weeks, you would get to know him whether he liked it or not. There was only one kid I really didn’t want to sit next to, because he picked his nose all the time. So far, I had lucked out.

            In a K-6 school like mine, fourth grade was the first year we were in the upper grades, which gave us recess privileges on the coveted front playground (no baby stuff, like swings or slides). The other boon was the new desk design, which was also more adult. In the lower grades, your desk was just a box on legs with an open front—no more than a glorified kindergarten cubby. In fourth grade, however, we sat at real institutional desks with lids that lifted up. The white slate lids were a source of contention between students and teachers, because the lids made very satisfying doodling surfaces. The doodles were especially good in pencil, because the graphite sunk right into the grain on the desk’s porous surface. I loved pencils. I have fought for years between my need to keep my belongings disposable and my love for a quality writing instrument. At the age of nine, I could already tell the difference between a decent pencil and a great pencil, and I kept several sharpened in the built-in pencil tray at all times.

            The day I remember was the first day in a new seating arrangement, which put my desk in the island in the back right corner. I was delighted to discover that I was, again, not sitting by the nose-picker. He was a real pain. We were nine years old, and he was still incorrigible. And it wasn’t like he ever wiped his finger on a tissue, either. Instead, he used his desk, the carpet under and around his desk, the underside of the group table at the front of the room, and who knows where else. I had seen him engaged in his hideous practice and had checked underneath the table myself, just to confirm what I already knew. Once he even came to school with a bandage wrapped carefully around the tip of one finger and showed off how he could get farther up his nose with this new apparatus.

            I sat at my desk, surveying my new view of the room, and I felt that something wasn’t quite right. Booger Brad felt too close to me. No, there he was, way on the other side of the room, talking to Matt. Why did I feel so strange? I shrugged it off. It was time for social studies.

            Mrs. Remley stood at the front of the room as we all took out our social studies notebooks. We were learning state capitals, and I was pleased that yesterday I had been able to remember “Sacramento,” which is never the first city in California that comes to mind. I set my pencil down on my desk to raise my hand for Arizona, and the pencil rolled off onto the floor. As I leaned down to pick it up, I realized what had been bothering me.

            My desk was now where Brad’s desk used to be. When our seats were rearranged, we didn’t actually exchange desks; they were just lifted and moved into the new formation. So while I was not using Brad’s actual desk, I was the new proprietor of his former carpet space. A mine field.

           I picked up my pencil carefully. It was a Ticonderoga No. 2—a real gem. I turned it over, checked the other side and the little bit of eraser left. I saw no boogers, and I started to put the pencil back on the desk. What if they were really small boogers, though? Or they had fallen off as I picked up the pencil? Snot might have touched my pencil and might have left invisible residue. I decided I didn’t want to use that pencil again until I had cleaned it. I had never really cleaned a pencil before, but I figured I could probably wash it off in the sink without damaging it permanently, though I would likely have to wait until it dried before I could use it again. Sure, wash it off. No problem.

          The new problem was that we were not supposed to get up and walk around during class. There were designated times during which we could go to the bathroom, use the sink, use the pencil sharpener bolted to the wall. The middle of a social studies lesson was not one of the designated times. Exceptions were made, of course, for emergencies, but I could tell that this was not an emergency in any sense with which I was familiar. At least, I had never seen anyone raise her hand in desperation and ask to wash off a pencil. I would have to wait until after recess. I lifted up my desk and set the offending pencil down in the tray, apart from my other pencils so I would definitely remember which one it was.

          I reached for a new pencil and noticed that my hand felt a little tingly, as if it were almost awake. I looked at my hand. There was nothing there, but it felt dirty. It occurred to me that if the pencil I’d dropped had been extremely dirty, then the hand that had picked it up was now considerably dirty. If I just grabbed a new pencil with that same hand, the new pencil would then be moderately dirty. And so on. I only had so many pencils, and it was only ten o'clock in the morning. I figured I could nip this problem right in the bud if I simply went to the sink and washed my hands, and then I could get on with the lesson. I thought I could do it quickly, and without being disruptive. Mrs. Remley would understand. I had to get on with it because I was wasting time thinking about it. “Albuquerque” was going to be a good one, and I didn’t want to miss it.

            I closed the lid of my desk, leaving all pencils inside, and walked to the sink, still listening to Mrs. Remley. “No, it’s not Salt Lake City,” she said. “Anyone else?” I turned on the water, but not too much, so I could still hear her. The next thing she said was, “Liz, what are you doing?”

            “Washing my hands,” I replied. I didn’t leave my task and turn all the way around, but I looked about halfway over my shoulder at her and smiled, so she would know I was being polite and didn’t mean to embarrass her in front of the class for having asked such a silly question.

            “Please go back to your seat, Liz,” she said. Firmly.

            I turned off the water, dried my hands with a paper towel, and walked back to my seat. We were both shocked. I knew that I had broken a rule, but I had had to do it. At that point, I was not yet surprised that the situation had grown so dire, only that Mrs. Remley had punished me for attending to it. She hadn’t even asked me why. How could I possibly get back to work with boogers on my hands? Stupid Brad.

            I stared down at my desk, where I could still see the remains of someone else’s old “I love Ryan” doodle, which had been in ink and was therefore impossible to remove completely. I took out a new pencil and scribbled over it. I was embarrassed for being admonished in front of the class. I was also angry with Brad, who was clearly at fault. Why didn’t Brad get sent back to his seat whenever he picked his nose? Why did we have to delay recess to erase our doodles if Brad could leave snot everywhere without consequence? He was getting me into trouble, and it wasn’t my fault.

            And it isn’t my fault. Of course, it wasn’t Brad’s, either.

            In our senior year of high school, Booger Brad and I were in the same art class. He sketched portraits. At the end of the semester, each student displayed his work for the class and explained his creative process. I listened curiously when it was Booger Brad’s turn because it had been so many years since I'd really heard the sound of his voice. From fourth grade on, whenever I saw him, I had only ever heard a quiet internal refrain: “He picks his nose, he picks his nose.”

            I worked on the potter’s wheel that year, my hands caked with clay. The ceramics lab relaxed me. In there, I could touch whatever I wanted because I already knew I would wash my hands on the way out. For years, I had known that I washed my hands too often, but I couldn’t stop myself from doing it. When opportunities arose to wash real, visible dirt from my hands, I felt normal. Even normal people wash their hands after they clean the litter box, re-pot a plant, paint the porch swing, glaze a teacup. When I went to the sink with my hands covered in wet clay, no one wondered why. I didn’t have to pretend there was ink on my hand that I was scrubbing off unsuccessfully, or that I had just eaten an orange and had peel stuck under my fingernails. My hands were covered with clay and I was washing them, just like the guy at the next sink was doing, thank you very much.

            Once I got shuffled into the college prep track, I stopped meeting new people because my classes were filled with all the same kids. They knew I had OCD. Nobody made fun of me, but it was tiresome to be known as a person with a mental illness. Ceramics was not a college prep course. I had never really talked to most of these kids. In front of them, I wasn't saddled with this irrational, tedious part of myself. In the ceramics lab, they knew me as I wished I knew myself—just Liz.

            I sat across the table from another senior, named Joel. He was a sculptor. That semester, he made a whole chess set, each piece a distinct medieval character complete with clothing, weaponry, and personality. He was delighted the day our teacher showed us slides of Michelangelo’s unfinished works for inspiration. We sat in the dark, both of us turned sideways to see the slide show.

            “Look at the way the partial figures seem to emerge from the marble,” our teacher said. To me they looked frightened, like people who had been sealed in stone, caught in their last desperate attempt to escape, like Han Solo in carbon freeze. "The truth is where the sculptor's chisel chipped away the lie," it said underneath the image of The Awakening Slave.

            "Is that a quote from Michelangelo?" someone asked.

            Our teacher laughed. "Actually, that's from a They Might Be Giants song," she said, "but a lot of the scholarship around Michelangelo suggests that he believed he didn't so much create these figures as reveal what God had already put inside the stone."

            I heard a tiny gasp when the Florentine Pietà appeared on the screen, and I looked across the table at Joel. His mouth was open just a little, and his right index finger was making little circles on his thumb. There was nothing cold about the figures that emerged from Joel’s clay. I don’t know if it was the malleability of warm clay, or the fact that I got to see the whole process from across the table, but it really was just like he was calmly, gently setting them free.

            My own experience with clay was squish, squeeze, pinch, smoosh. I used the potter's wheel because it was the only way I could produce anything respectable. With the wheel doing most of the work, I only had to coax the clay into vaguely bowl-shaped objects. One day, I had a pretty good piece going on the wheel when my thumb slipped, punching over one side of the bowl. I’m afraid I swore, and my teacher came right over to see what was going on.

            “Oh, you can save that,” she said. “It has a wonderful shape, a great line to it.”

            I ran my finger around the rim of the bowl, which was now shaped kind of like a lima bean. I did like the swoop my finger had made on the folded side. I pictured some painstakingly sculpted flowers on the exterior, maybe some vines. Vines would be easier. I cut my bowl carefully off the wheel and sat down across from Joel.

            He looked up from his clay figure. Yesterday, the body inside his blob of clay had still been hidden. Now, it was starting to take shape. I could see shoulders hunched over, and arms bent at the elbow. 

            “My thumb slipped,” I said.

            “It’s still good,” he said, and smiled. His whole face lit up when he smiled. Hell, the whole room lit up.

            “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do with it.”

            He bent his head back down over his clay. He must have showered before school because his hair was still damp. It was flattened against his head. He wasn't allowed to wear his hat in the classroom.

            Over the next week, Joel’s clay figure emerged steadily—I could see swoops of hair and a shirt collar. Meanwhile, I methodically rolled tiny pieces of clay into tiny vines, then scraped and scored them onto the outside of my bowl. The flowers were the real challenge. I needed leaves of clay thick enough to hold their shape but thin enough to be mistaken for petals.

            Joel didn’t say much. He did stop me one day, to take a closer look at my bowl. He handled it more carefully than I did, turning it slowly one way and then the other.

            “It’s nice, Liz,” he said. “Good save.”

            I blushed. I probably giggled. I rolled my eyes at myself and said, “Thanks, Joel.”

            At the end of class on Friday, as I was carefully sweeping bits of clay off the edge of the table into my hand, one of our classmates walked by.

            “Hey, Joel,” he said. “Whatcha workin' on?”

            Joel said, “Liz.” He turned his figure around on the table so I could see it from the front for the first time.

            It was me.

            It was me from the waist up, just what he could see from across the table. My head was bent over, with my hair falling over my shoulders, barely held back by the skinny barrette I always wore. I was hunched over a little, and my t-shirt clung to my body, but the unbuttoned shirt over it had fallen toward the table. In my hands was a tiny replica of the happy accident I had been working on. Only the face was blank.

            “I’m not done with the face yet,” he said.

            I couldn’t stop looking at it, which suited me just fine because I sure couldn’t look Joel in the eye. I could feel the warmth of his hands over my shoulders, down my arms, around my waist. A tingle much like the one I usually felt in my hands now covered my whole body. It was surprisingly warm and welcome. It was still a little scary.

            “What do you think?” he asked.

            I shook my head slowly. “It’s incredible,” I said.

            He looked back down at the miniature Liz. “The face is the hardest.”

            “Right,” I said. Right what? What was I talking about? “You even made the bowl,” I said.

            He smiled. “Yeah, I like the bowl.”

            It was hard to act natural after that. I could feel Joel’s eyes on my face as he tried to capture whatever it was he saw. I tried to breathe evenly as I felt his hand on my neck, felt his finger run across my eyebrow and down the slope of my cheek. I wanted to take extra care with my hair, maybe put on a little mascara, but I couldn’t change anything now that I knew he’d been looking so carefully. Each day, I came to class hoping he was done, and hoping that he wasn’t.

            One morning, I was late. Joel was standing at the sink when I got to class. The miniature Liz was on our table, and I decided to sneak a look at the face, which I still hadn’t seen. I was afraid I might handle it too roughly, so I put my hands in my pockets like I always do when I want to be sure I don’t touch something. I held my breath as I leaned over, and then it all came out in one gasp.

            There was no face at all—not even a place to put one. Joel had carved out all the clay in the head, leaving the hair to frame the empty space where the face should have been.

            “I couldn’t get the face,” Joel said, right behind me. I stood straight up and whirled around. I almost fell over before I could get one hand out of my pocket to balance myself against the table.

            “Oh,” I said. His gaze moved from my eyes to my mouth and then back up to my eyes.

            “I just wasn’t satisfied with how it turned out,” he said. “This seemed like the best way to handle it.” He stepped back.

            I turned back to the table and dared to touch my own shoulder. The clay was starting to dry out. It needed water. “It’s still really good,” I said, smiling, hopeful.

            Joel nodded. He was picking at his fingernails. There was a bit of clay stuck under one nail; otherwise, his hands looked clean. He flicked the clay onto the table. Then he swept it onto the floor.