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Show 146 "Some of them are white and some of them are black but they all wiggle when you get them under your fingernail." "Stop it!" I screamed as loud as I could; and, just as I expected, one of the nurses came running in her soft-soled nurse's shoes all the way down the hall. Squeak, squeak, squeak, her front flapping and her cute little nurse's cap bouncing and her shoes suck-sucking at the floor until she saw it was Owen and stopped short, panting. "Oh," she says, and opened her mouth wide as if to say something more but I could tell nothing was going to come out. "No problem," says Owen, "no problem. I was just explaining crabs to Jenny here." What cows these nurses are. "Oh," she says again, and turns her big dumb eyes on me-and what I saw there amazed me. I think she was jealous, jealous of me, for having been the lucky one to hear about Owen's social disease. What I_ have is eczema. Eczematoid Dermatitus, my chart at the nurse's station says, though that's just another way of saying Bad Skin. When I was younger, and more determined to understand myself, I looked it up in a medical encyclopedia. "A chronic skin eruption of unknown etiology," it said, "marked by the presence of reddish patches ranging in size from a few centimeters in diameter to large plaques the size of the palm or larger." Oh Jesus, if they had only |
