Overview:
The article humorously recounts how a teacher’s illness prompted a co-worker to go overboard disinfecting the school with Lysol, creating chaos and a “Lysol apocalypse” while highlighting the absurd lengths people go to prevent the spread of germs.
It was Monday.
As usual, we were sitting in the conference room. The room overlooked the football field. Kids hopped the fence and cut through the graveyard behind the school.
I sipped my coffee and smirked. I wondered why a boy and a girl were going to the graveyard so early. Smoking? Vaping?
Then the girl jumped into the boy’s arms and I knew.
“That’s odd,” I said to myself. “Usually that activity is reserved for Stairwell 4. Either it’s occupied or—”
My phone buzzed.
Meeting today.
They were calling for the stragglers.
I walked in and found the team staring at one another like freshmen at orientation. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. It felt ceremonial, like we were waiting to see who would die first.
Mr. Jones came in late. His hands were dripping and reeking of hand sanitizer.
“Larry is sick,” he said. “He went home.”
The reactions varied.
Joan checked her phone, looked up, then checked it again, typing furiously.
Maxwell popped one of his glass eyes out. Goo hit the floor.
I imagined another pandemic. Distance learning. Coffee in hand. No pants. A necessary break.
But the real performance belonged to Eugenie Pebbles.
She put a hand to her forehead like a silent-film actress, staggered, and collapsed onto the floor.
“I’m dying!” she cried.
I turned my head to the left. Then back.
“I’m going home!” she declared.
A day passed. No Larry. No Eugenie.
Wednesday, Larry returned and was immediately thrown into a closet. Like The Thing, he had to prove he was human and not an alien before being told to go home again.
Eugenie hovered nearby, masked, gloved, vibrating.
“I want to tell you something, T.S.,” she said. I had placed my jacket and coffee on the table, flattening them with the weight of the world. “I’m sick, but I don’t have COVID.”
“Okay,” I said.
There was a pause where I should have added something.
“I’ve been Lysoling all morning,” she said.
I was half-listening. The caffeine burned through whatever filter I had left.
“Ms. Pebbles,” I said, “you know Lysol isn’t going to kill the infection. Larry already infected us all. It’s only a matter of time. Like a zombie virus.”
“A zombie virus, child?” she said, laughing. “You’re crazy.”
“I prefer the slow zombies,” I said. “The Romero ones.”
She waited. Nothing came.
“We’re probably all infected already,” I added. “I could use another vacation.”
She laughed. “We just got back from vacation.”
“Wouldn’t you want another one?”
“I’m not sick,” she said.
“A vacation is a vacation.”
She slammed her chair back and stormed out.
An hour later the fire alarm went off.
And the smell of sanitizer hit us all, even on the third floor.
For a second, it pulled me backward—to college—when the dorm across from mine had to evacuate because someone microwaved feces. Same smell-memory circuitry. Same disbelief turning into compliance.
Kids poured into the hallway coughing, shirts pulled over noses and mouths, eyes tearing. I started coughing too, the kind where your body is annoyed before it’s scared.
At first there was no urgency. Just confusion. Then the white, cloudy mass started to move, drifting after the students like it wanted to stay with them.
That’s when the urgency kicked in.
By the time the building fully evacuated, the hallways were saturated. The Lysol hung thick and sour, coating the back of the throat.
It felt less like disinfectant and more like a World War I mustard gas attack—minus the helmets, plus backpacks and Crocs.
Outside, the kids clustered on the baseball field, coughing, laughing, some covering their faces, others filming. A local rapper blared from someone’s speaker, turning the evacuation into a mosh pit.
Eugenie stood proudly behind the gate.
“I went overboard,” she said, adjusting her mask. “I should’ve stopped at one can, not two. I vacuumed, and vacuumed, and I saw the virus pop out with my own eyes.”
“Like the zombie apocalypse,” I said, laughing. “You nuked the infected city to stop the spread.”
I gave a wry smile. “You’re a hero.”
And indeed she was.
Her gas attack fixed the rodent problem.
And the smell problem.
If there’s ever a tribunal, let me serve as her character witness at the International Court at The Hague.
