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I'm drinking a few beers and had one of those halcyon moments from my high school days.



As I sit here, I suddenly remember the exchange student from Denmark that was in my 10th grade biology class. He was a year older, but I guess since he didn't speak much English, it didn't really matter. I haven't thought about that guy in seriously 20-some years. This was 1991-ish. All I remember is that he had white-blond hair, a red face, and you couldn't understand what he was saying...kind of like the Swedish Chef from The Muppets.



Now, I had my biology class right after lunch. Being a small, religious school, everything was a fund raiser, so we had a school bookstore just outside of the cafeteria where school supplies and assorted junk foods were sold to benefit different things like the sports teams, poor kids, or something or other. I would normally buy a $0.25 box of sugar-ball candy, like Lemonheads or Cherry Clans, on my way past.



I would eat my sugary box of diabeetus in biology class.

The biology classroom had gerbils, hamsters, and other assorted rodentiae along the outside wall underneath the window. I would occasionally flip one of the aquarium-dwelling critters a candy, which it would hilariously ingest.



So one day, I bought a box of candy, went to biology class, and tossed a candy into a gerbil's aquarium near my desk. I thought that the little guy would pick up the candy in his paws and gnaw on it for a while, kind of like a racoon. No - he eats the entire candy in one big gulp. Oh shi-...

The teacher hated me because I was a smartass 16 year old. Plus, it didn't help my situation that she overheard me say that she had a huge ass early on in the school year. A woman scorned and all that.



About a minute into the teacher's lesson, loud little vomiting sounds started coming from the gerbil's aquarium near my seat. The fuzzball was choking -loudly- on the candy that I had given it. The gerbil couldn't swallow the piece of candy whole and was gagging as it tried to down it.

I sat there eating my candies with a 'wasn't me' look on my face.



Finally, the rodent upchucked the candy into his cedar chips. His candy matched the ones I was eating. Busted.

The teacher made me move my seat away from the gerbils, to the back row of the classroom. This was a science room with the black-topped rows of counters, each stool having a bunsen burner nozzle and an electrical outlet.

Apparently, another class was dissecting cats. They were storing their hacked apart, formaldehyde soaked, kitties in cake pans covered with tin foil in the back row of the classroom. I was now sitting in the back row with the dead cats and the dude from Denmark.

He looked over at me, smiled, and said "Hello" with a heavy accent. If it were a comic strip, imagine an umlaut over every vowel in his speech bubble.

Then he said the most profound thing to me:

"Ketz. Dead ketz." as he lifted up the tin foil on the one closest to him.

I just raised my eyebrows and nodded in agreement.

That was the only conversation that I ever had with the guy. Tonight, 20-some years later, I just recalled that conversation and thought that I would share it.