In school the next day a nurse came into our classroom to talk to us about good hygiene.

“But we learned that stuff in kindergarten,” said Trevor McBride.

“It won’t hurt to refresh your memory,” the nurse said, giving him a hard look.

I’m guessing she heard about Trevor eating the Starburst off the bottom of his sneaker.

First she asked us who uses hand sanitizers. A bunch of kids raised their hands, including me. I don’t actually use hand sanitizer, but I didn’t want people to think I was unsanitary.

Boris looked at me, horrified. “What do you use that gunk for?” he asked.

“To clean my hands, what do you think?” I said.

“You don’t need hand sanitizer to clean your hands,” he said. “Just lick them.” He actually licked his hands till they were all slimy. “Human saliva has special cleaning germs in it.”

“That’s dog saliva,” I said.

He snorted and smiled while shaking his head. “Where do you hear this crazy stuff, man?”

“Okay, class. Look at your hands,” the nurse continued. “Do they look clean?”

“Yes!” we all said.

“Well, they may not be as clean as they look.”

That sounded pretty menacing. The nurse pulled this gel out of her bag. She went around the room squirting it on our hands, then told us to rub it in. After that, she went up to one of the boys in the front of the class and shined this little flashlight on his hands. His hands turned blue and had loads of glowing white splotches on them.

“Those white splotches are bacteria,” the nurse told us.

We all made barfing noises. I mean, I sort of felt sorry for the kid, but honestly, it looked like he had just been splashing around in the boys’ toilet.

The nurse didn’t yell at us for making fun of him, which should have been a tip-off. But we were too busy fake-barfing to notice.

“Now let’s see how many germs the rest of you have,” the nurse said.

That shut us all up real quick.

As it turned out, the other kids were completely disgusting, too. Their hands were glowing so much they looked radioactive.

By the time the nurse got to me I was feeling pretty confident. I’m not the cleanest guy in the world, but I had JUST gone to the bathroom and luckily I remembered to wash my hands. I held out my palms. The nurse shone the light on them.

Then everyone started making barfing noises.

Because guess what? My perfectly clean hands had a billion glowing spots on them.

“This is such a SCAM!” I yelled. “My hands are squeaky clean!! This is just a trick to embarrass us!! Don’t you nurses have something better to do than humiliate kids?”

The nurse did not look very happy with me.

“Settle down, Captain Mayhem,” Mr. K said.

I may have overreacted. But I don’t always remember to wash my hands after I go to the bathroom, and I think I should at least get credit for it when I do.

After that, the nurse shined her flashlight on Boris’s hands.

You won’t believe this, but there wasn’t a single glowing spot on either of his hands. Not one. Even the nurse looked surprised. She held the light closer to his hands, then farther away.

No spots.

“Hmm. Those are the cleanest hands I’ve ever seen,” she said.

“I licked them clean,” Boris said proudly.

She laughed because she thought he was kidding.

After the nurse finished grossing us all out, she showed us how to wash our hands properly.

Then she said we shouldn’t eat things that were stuck to the bottoms of our shoes.