The Morality Of Nuts Is Nuts

I’m not supposed to have peanut butter at school. Some kid steals a bite of my pb&j and dies. Is that really going to happen? What if it does? Was I wrong? Was he wrong? Was it A Great Evil; this act of peanut-buttering while in school? Who even cares? Because:

1. A kid is dead, maybe, or if he lives,

2. Why doesn’t he have food?

That’s the kind of whack thinking I think because my folks are Agnostics. I mean we question everything instead of just getting mad that some punk took our sandwich.

My friends pretty much all go to some kind of church, or temple, or meditation thing, at least around holidays. Some go every week. Duncan W. (me being Duncan A. since he joined my second-grade class 7 years ago) goes Sundays and Wednesdays, and even to Church Camp in the summer. I don’t know if that’s because he’s very good or very bad or his parents just like him out of the house regularly, which I can understand. But they all have their Ten Commandments, deep cleansing breaths, or prayer before meals. Easy-peasy. My family doesn’t know what to believe, which:

1. I do not advertise, and

2. means no church, no ten commandments, and no “God is great, God is good, so we thank Him for this food” amens.

Instead, during our dinners, we talk, endlessly, about ethics, morals, principles, why do people do what they do, and biblical virtue versus secular humanism. Who cares!? I’d rather have 10 rules and a prayer and get on to the food!

For reals, I did take a peanut butter sandwich today. We were out of the WoW-No-Nutz spread and I was like, “Dude, who is going to inspect your sandwich?” Mom says I wolf down my food too fast anyway. So, banking on my ability to disappear that sandwich in two bites, and the fact that nobody in the lunchroom cared what we were eating, or if we were eating, I took it.

Sure enough Doug The Nut, called “Doug-the-Nut” because he is nuts and he can’t have nuts, came up to me and tried to kiss me! My mouth was f-u-l-l of peanut butter and I don’t even know what he thought he was doing but he grabbed me, making kissy faces and laughing. The girls walking with him were laughing. I was choking on a glob of peanut butter, struggling not to cough it right into Doug’s deathly allergic face, and trying to get away from his choke hold so hard that the yard duty lady took us to the office for fighting!!

 I was like, “Doug! What the hell?!” When I could talk again, being dragged by the arm toward the doom room. And he laughed, until the smell of my breath got to him and he stopped walking right there.

Yard duty lady was not having it. “Oh, so you were trying to kiss him and now you won’t even walk next to him?”

But what could we say? His eyes and nose flared at once and I guess that’s because he looked scared and angry in general. He wasn’t laughing now. So here we are, sitting across from each other in Principal Hailey’s office.

 “Dude, drink some water and use that hand sanitizer.” Doug whispered while shooting me some side-eye.

Doug the Nut points his head at the bottle of sanitizer on the counter. Could he spaz out and go into that anaphylactic shock from my peanut-y breath? OMG! Just as I sit down with sanitized hands and a paper cup of water from the dispenser, yard duty lady comes out of the Principals office and barks, “No talking! Sit down and wait! I shouldn’t even have to deal with the likes of you, I’m supposed to be helping in the cafeteria!”

I wipe the arms of the chair with a sanitizer wipe I snagged from the counter because I don’t want to kill Doug the Nut. What if he sits here next week? He’s always in trouble for something.

We get into the office and before Principal Hailey even looks up from his phone, Doug, says, “We were just horsing around. We weren’t fighting.” He’s in trouble so often I thought for sure he would put my nut crimes front and center first thing, like, “Duncan A. had peanut butter,” and skate on out of there.

This school takes nut violations way more seriously than fighting. And what’s up with that? Are cashews on par with a choke hold? Really? “Back off or I’ll Brazil Nut your ass, man!” It’s crazy but true. You get expelled for having nuts. But fighting is a 2 day in house detention. So, does that mean it’s more, or less, achievable to bar Planters’ Peanuts than people punching each other? Maybe all warfare should use deadly nut catapults, then.

See? See how I think? My butt is about to be as roasted as my peanut butter but I’m on about nut warfare. Just then, Principal Hailey glances at me, barely looking past the screen in his hand, “True?”

Doug is looking at me very intently. Since I’m feeling guilty for trying to kill him by nut butter breath, even though he was kiss-attacking me, I just say, “Yeah. Totally messing around.” Hailey looks back to his phone and says, “Well it got out of hand, boys. You’ve got detention for the rest of the week. Start tomorrow.”

It’s Thursday so it will be one day of detention. I’m doing the moral math as we stand up and it seems that disturbing the yard duty lady is a bigger violation than punching the crap out of a friend, but not near as bad as carrying concealed nuts. That’s assuming Hailey didn’t know what day of the week it is.

Doug and I walk out and he starts laughing. He really is nuts. It’s so ironic. Then he says he’s sorry about the kissing but we’re even since he got the nut smell off me before we saw Hailey. “Man, if he had smelled all that peanut butter…”

The horror.

As usual, I gave this all a lot of thought: I want to eat. Doug wants to laugh. Yard Duty Lady wants to, help, I guess. Hailey wants to look at his phone. A kid was almost histamined right into the hospital. But it’s all sorted when culprit and victim (I’m not sure who was which) sit around together doing nothing for a few hours on Friday, after school but before we hit the movies with friends.

Turns out Doug the Nut is the most virtuous of all of us in my nut butter morality play today because he saved me from an unfair compulsory nut expulsion, even though he would gain nothing, and was most potentially harmed.

1. I’m going to bring some nut free snacks to detention tomorrow, and

2. Am I going to have the best topic for dinner tonight, or what?