Finding Yourself at Ground Zero

I'm going to apologize right now for the bathroom humor, but while at the movie theater last week I found myself in a smelly situation that I'm sure is not unique to me. You know when you walk into a stinky public bathroom and there are 10 stalls and you just so happen to walk into ground zero? A zillion (three) things go through your (my) head: Be mature and just suck it up while sucking up as little fresh oxygen as possible; stay and have the person who walks in behind you think that it was your doing; or get out before you loose your popcorn and not be concerned with issues of maturity and the fact that everyone has been in been the cause of a nose wrinkling of the odorous kind (even if the last time you will claim was when you were in diapers and the only reason you have to claim it is because your cousins David, Daryl, and Darin were on the other end and bring it up at opportune moments).

One of these moments happened to a friend of mine. We'll call her "Erica". She had a delicious birthday meal at the Olive Garden. But about halfway home "Erica" was feelin' the rumblin' in the tumblin, if ya know what I mean. So she pulls over at a rest stop on the interstate - because it's an emergency and it's safe in it's anonymity. Except that it's not. Because when she walks in, there are only two other people in there who just so happen to be a former student of hers (she's a teacher, like me) and the student's mother. And what were they doing there? Getting ready for homecoming, naturally! Because this girl is, with the help of her mother, trying to fool her father into thinking that she was going to the homecoming dance dressed the way she was when she left the house instead of the way she was looking when she left the rest-stop. And as "Erica" walks in to take care of business, there is a definite acknowledgement of the presence of the other - a conversation, in fact. So there "Erica" sits after she makes her way to the furthest stall possible, wondering how she is to deal with the explosive situation that she finds herself in. And what's worse is, while she is deliberating on how to forage the last shreds of her dignity and leave with as few losses as possible while her assailant looms ever closer, fate throws yet another curve ball she was not expecting: the student tries to have a conversation with "Erica," her former teacher, while she is suffering with the enormity of her decision while seated on the throne. I would imagine the student felt uncomfortable, wondering why her teacher is 'going' without really going. But there poor "Erica" sat, the situation ever more pressing, for what felt like forever, having a conversation over the bathroom stalls with her former student and her former student's mother, all while trying to hold it in while coming up with - at best - how she will manage her speedy retreat, all the while knowing that she is a) dropping a bomb on everyone (creating 'ground zero', if you will), b)everyone will know it was her, and c) she will have to walk past the suspecting unsuspecting to make that very retreat. What's a girl to do? Luckily, as "Erica" likes to tell herself and must, in all actuality, believe in order to move past this incident, another person did walk in and there is a chance the two makeup brush holding women at the sinks in the rest stop bathroom getting ready for Homecoming 2007 thought the things they heard were coming from this new woman, OR that the flush of toilets drowned out the sound of "Erica's" humiliating defeat with their swirling cascades of water. But "Erica" will never know for sure, and neither will I. But for her sake, I sure hope this case of mistaken identity bait and switch worked. Because "Erica" and I look a lot alike. And that is DEFINITELY not something that would EVER happen to me. I just don't do those sorts of things.