Big story in our middle school was that one day some greenhorn student puked on the staircase and made it slick with bile and vomit. This was on a Friday, right before all the classes let out, so the janitor didn’t have time to make it over before the stairwells were flooded with excited young teens loudly talking and scampering down the stairs to go to the school busses. The fourth-floor doors burst open with people and one particularly popular kid ran ahead of everyone to make some girls laugh. He gets to the third floor and encounters the beginning of the bile-slick as he’s still dancing around on the staircase. He notices the trail of rancid puke, half-digested cafeteria sandwiches leading down towards the puddle of yellow in front of the third-floor door. As his mind works hard to process this scene, in its last scene it will ever process, his white, crisp sneakers meet the slippery, mucusy bile, slip up from under him, and he stretches out his arms to catch himself on the railing, missing. Instead, the railing comes up and smashes into his lower jaw, sending his head flying backwards, landing right on the apex of one of the tiled staircases, cracking it open like a soft egg. He flopped down the rest of the stairs, coming to land in the puddle of vomit quickly turning to red with bright blood streaming out of his mouth, down his face and out of the back of his head. As all the girls start to back off and scream, he lifts his head and moans through his broken, bloody teeth and pushes out a chunk of pink and grey brain matter before collapsing back into the fresh, darkening pile of bodily fluids.

Only a small number of students claimed to have seen first-hand the event but none would talk about it. Only those who had peered over the screaming crowd and had seen bright, red puddles of blood pooling down the staircase would remember, and the event quickly became a sort of legend in our school. We never heard of that popular kid again, although some who knew him claimed he fell into a coma and woke up again a couple of days later, permanently mentally retarded.