When you miss school for a week,
everyone assumes you’re at Disney World
riding Space Mountain.
After three weeks,
your friends stop saving you
a seat at lunch.
Your chem teacher asks the class
to partner up and dissect a pig,
but you’ve already been dissected.
Your arms open wide.
Your throat dissolves in electric-yellow bile.
Your drugged hooves crumble when you stand.
Your appetite thins, but your waist swells.
Your mother says,
“an apple a day keeps the doctors away.”
You clench a honey-crisp apple between your teeth.
It muffles the pain as you’re forced to run the mile
Your phone screen flickers on.
It’s a coupon from Victoria Secret.
It’s an elevated white blood cell count.
It’s your report card wishing your dreams auf wiedersehen.
Curled around your Pepto-Bismol colored vomit,
you hope for an appendicitis
as you try to figure out
how to calculate the area of a trapezoid
without all the answers.
You learn SOH-CAH-TOA and
sick kids don’t belong in honors
Rosette Pavkov studies History and Creative Writing at the University of Illinois. She is the two-time winner of the
John L. Rainey Prize for undergraduate creative writing. In her free time, Rosette enjoys working on leather crafts and Arabic studies.