The only trouble was that no one at school loved me. Kids still hated me and I wasn’t famous yet (I’m still waiting, but it’s not so important any more). In fact, that fall I’d done another really stupid thing that had everyone teasing. I’d gone to school with a terrible cold and a roll of toilet paper.

Let me explain. It’s pretty hard to squash a tissue box and put it in your pocket, but it’s pretty easy with toilet paper and I needed a lot of it because I had this terrible, terrible cold and I sneezed and I blew and I sneezed and I blew until I ran out of toilet paper, then I ... ah ... ah ... sneezed! I put up my hands to catch it and I caught it all right. I got snot from my chin to my forehead. GROSS!

Keeping my hands over my face, I ran to the teacher and asked, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

And the teacher said ... “No.”

Desperate, I looked around the room and thankfully found a sink. I washed my hands and my face, with soap, thank you very much. Then I did something stupid. I didn’t stop at drying my hands on the towel dispenser. I dried my face as well. It was dripping wet after all. But Chris Schell saw me and shouted, “LaFaye’s blowing her nose on the towel dispenser.”

I wasn’t. But cool-kid-everyone-loved-him Chris Schell said I was and that was enough to get everyone to call me “Sneezy” and “Snotty” and a ton of other couldn’t-make-it-as-one-of-the-Seven-Dwarves-names and throw clean tissues at me which I kept because I’d learned you should keep extras for disasters.