Orbiting the Staff Meeting

After a year of teaching through screens and silence, I was willing to let anyone jab me with anything if it meant getting back into a real classroom. I hate needles—I’ve fainted in medical offices before—but when the COVID vaccines arrived, I signed up anyway.

Our Beaver Dam High caravan rolled down the hill toward the elementary school the morning of the first dose—teachers carpooling like a field trip for exhausted adults. Others walked the short distance downhill.

I had expected juice boxes or cookies like the kind you got after childhood shots. Instead, we were herded into the library to wait our turn.

Fluorescent lights and anxiety.

They called us in alphabetically. When my name was finally called, I walked into the nurse’s room, looked away, held my breath, and tried not to let the nurse see the part of me that was still seven years old.

The shot itself wasn’t bad.

It was the after part that got me.

The moment I stepped back into the library, I stretched myself across the carpet like a fallen soldier. Other teachers stepped around me with varying degrees of concern.

“You good, Snyder?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Just embracing the floor.”

We waited the mandatory fifteen minutes, swapping fears and symptoms we didn’t have yet. The general consensus seemed to be that we had done it and remained functional adults.

As we trudged back up the hill for the staff meeting, something warm and suspicious spread through my chest. My thoughts went soft around the edges.

I giggled.

By the time I sat down in the media room, I had reached one conclusion:

Oh God.

I am high.

Our principal was at the front clicking through slides, saying words I assume were relevant to education. To this day, I could not tell you a single one of them. If she announced the second coming of Christ, I missed it.

Because all I could think was:

I need cookies.

Immediately.

I leaned toward the athletic director on my right—the man who always had emergency snacks stashed somewhere like a granola bar prepper—and whispered, “Do you have cookies?”

He blinked. “What?”

“I need cookies,” I repeated, low and urgent, like I was negotiating for contraband. “Please. Go get me cookies.”

He stared at me long enough to determine I was serious.

He got up and left.

While he was gone, I tried—truly tried—to focus on the principal. But the SPED director two seats away was wearing a blouse with bright, swirling flowers, and I swear those flowers were moving.

They bloomed harder every time I looked.

Then there was the brand-new history teacher.

Fresh out of college.

Wide-eyed.

Still believed in organized lesson plans.

She watched me like I was her first real-world case study.

“Are you… okay?” she whispered.

“I’m fine,” I said, then immediately laughed at absolutely nothing.

The principal was talking about testing data.

The new teacher’s eyes widened. “Does the vaccine… do that?”

“Apparently my body does,” I said.

That made me laugh harder.

She stared at me, horrified and fascinated.

This was not the professional mentorship she expected.

The athletic director eventually returned carrying an entire box of cookies.

The kind meant for a crowd.

I ripped it open and ate three in under thirty seconds. Maybe four. Time was slippery.

I passed the box around. Everyone else seemed perfectly capable of sitting through testing data without urgently eating cookies or watching flowers breathe.

I was having a different meeting.

Beyond the media room’s glass door, a student’s chalk drawing smudged across the sidewalk: a blue planet, a crooked astronaut, desert dust already taking it apart.

She had told me the astronaut was me.

From my plastic chair, surrounded by testing data and teachers behaving normally, I believed her.

For fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, I was orbiting somewhere else.

—Tonya Snyder