Within only the first few days of school, a frightening outbreak has occurred—a cootie outbreak. While cooties usually infiltrate the elementary schools, J-DHS is experiencing a rare outbreak. It is believed that it has largely been caused by the lack of social interaction (especially among the different genders) over the past year and a half. Now that larger groups of students are having to be in the same room together for longer periods of time, a cootie breeding ground has emerged.
“When I go into a classroom, I have no idea who’s going to have it. And the teachers have no sympathy whatsoever. They put girls and boys next to each other willy nilly. This is exactly why I was remote for the past year and a half. I simply didn’t have to worry about any of this!” junior Yamelda Yamington* said, angrily.
“Stupid girls and their stupid cooties. I guess there goes my fifty dollars for getting a girlfriend by the end of high school. And it was a triple dog dare too. Darn it!” senior Yamichael McYamillbee said, storming off.
However, there is one means of protection from this raging pathogen that might just let McYamillbee get that fifty dollars. A specially designed vaccine, known as a “cootie shot” among students, grants immunity. Usually using either a finger or a pen, the person giving the vaccine draws a circle with two dots on the recipients’ skin, reciting a specific line. But despite the positive conclusions coming out of the AP Statistic classes about the vaccine’s success, there has been some skepticism.
“‘Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you’ve got the cootie shot.’ What kind of poliwag is that?” sophomore Yammy Yamilton stated. “I say it’s all made up. Just a way for the girls to infect more of us guys. You know, it was girls in my biology class who started doing it first. That’s how I know it’s all fake. What does science have to do with vaccines anyway? I’m not stupid.”
“I’ve done my research and this supposed ‘cootie shot’ is not approved by the FDA. They can’t inject me with random stuff that some boys probably found in their disgusting locker room. And there’s no actual needle either? It’s all bogus, if you ask me,” freshman Maryam Yamfly said. “I was actually in English class when the boys first started doing it two rows behind me. All I’ll say is that it looked mega sketchy.”
While students continue to grapple with this outbreak, we went in search of the other side of the story.
“Why aren’t teachers and administrators getting the cooties, you ask?” Mr. Gasparini said. “Well, duh. We have the greatest staff in the whole world and I’m sure António Guterres would back me up on that. But despite our greatness—which I think is about an 80/20 split in this equation—I would say it’s probably because the cooties aren’t real to us anymore. I mean, once you graduate second grade, it’s kinda sad if you still believe in it. But I guess it’s the pandemic—yada yada ya—gotta give the students a break—whatever. It’ll run its course and it’ll be over. We’re strong. We are J-D.”
As this story continues to develop, we will keep you, our readers, updated. Will enough students get the “cootie shot” that they’ll reach herd immunity? Will McYamillbee get his fifty dollars? And, most importantly, will Mr. Gasparini ever stop referencing António Guterres?
*Due to the fact that it is still unknown all of the ways cooties can transmit amongst this older age bracket [ex: in case reading a sentence from someone who has cooties can cause the reader to get cooties themselves], we are retracting all student names. We have replaced the names with Yampage editor-approved pseudonyms for our readers’ safety.
