When we finished cleaning up, Miss Daisy said she had a surprise for us—we were going to visit the school nurse, Mrs. Cooney.

Yay! Mrs. Cooney has blue eyes that are the color of cotton candy yogurt. She looks like some movie star, only I can’t remember her name. But every time my mom sees that movie star on TV, she asks my dad if he thinks she’s pretty. My dad always says no. Then my mom gets mad. Then my dad has to spend the next hour trying to convince my mom that my mom is just as pretty as the movie star.

Mrs. Cooney wanted to marry me last year, but then I found out that she was already married to some guy named Mr. Cooney.

Miss Daisy told us to take our lunch boxes with us, because we would go right to lunch after we saw Mrs. Cooney. Then we had to walk a million hundred miles to the nurse’s office. Mrs. Cooney was waiting for us in her nurse’s uniform.

“Good morning!” she said.

“Are you going to weigh us and measure us today?” I asked, because she weighs us and measures us every year.

“No, today I’m going to do something much more important,” she replied. “Today I’m going to teach you how to wash your hands.”

What?!

Was she kidding? I know how to wash my hands. Everybody knows how to wash their hands. Teaching us how to wash our hands is like teaching somebody how to breathe through their nose.

But Mrs. Cooney didn’t care. She had us all gather around the sink in her office.

“First, you should use warm water,” she said, turning on the faucet. “Next, lather up both sides of your hands with soap. Don’t forget your wrists, and between your fingers.”

I slapped my own forehead. I couldn’t believe that Mrs. Cooney was showing us how to wash our hands.

Andrea was taking notes on her smartphone, of course. She probably thought there was going to be a quiz at the end, or she might win a prize for having the cleanest hands.

“While I’m washing my hands,” Mrs. Cooney told us, “I always sing ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.’ That way I know I’m washing my hands long enough.”

She started singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” while she scrubbed her hands.

Mrs. Cooney is loony.

“Finally, rinse off the soap and dry your hands with a clean towel,” she told us as she held her hands under the water. “And that’s the correct way to wash your hands!”

Well, duh!

Mrs. Cooney had us all line up to wash our hands. She even had Miss Daisy wash her hands.

After we all dried off, we sat on the benches in the nurse’s office.

“Why is washing our hands so important?” Miss Daisy asked.

“It’s all because of germs,” Mrs. Cooney told her.