I knew I was about to burst into frustrated tears, and I didn’t want to break down in front of my classmates. I hurriedly signed, TOILET, to Kathleen, pulling off the lab apron and my glasses. I walked on unsteady legs to the bathroom down the hallway. Breathing made my chest hurt. My eyes hurt too with the effort it took to keep back the tears threatening to fall.

I had no idea where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing, but putting as much distance between myself and that classroom felt like the best idea I’d ever had. In less than two minutes I was out of the science hallway, halfway across the school, walking right into Ms. Phillips’ classroom.

Maybe I unconsciously knew I’d find the classroom empty because this was Ms. Phillips’ planning period. She was sitting at one of the worktables sketching and did not look up until I approached and tapped a finger on the tabletop.

“Can I paint?” I said when she looked up at me, pointing toward the corner of the room where our self-portraits were being kept.

For whatever reason, Ms. Phillips didn’t seem surprised by my request. Rather than fire a bunch of questions at me, she must’ve gotten everything she needed to know from the look on my face, and she simply nodded, smiling. She gestured toward the pile of canvases as if to say have at it.

I turned my hearing aids off after I got settled with a water cup and fresh paints, wanting nothing more than to be left alone in my own world of silence right then. And now that I was sitting down in front of my half-completed self-portrait, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to finish the thing or ruin it with a bunch of paint. It looked sloppy somehow, and all the colored paints I’d been trying to incorporate looked dull.

I could barely think straight as it was, so trying to pick what colors I wanted to use or what feature of the painting I wanted to focus on was pointless. The only thing I could hone in on was what if that chemistry midterm was just a preview of what would happen if I got hired on at a hospital as a respiratory therapist?

Sodium bicarbonate was just baking soda, so it wasn’t the end of the world that there had been an accident during that lab. It could be cleaned up and forgotten. But what would happen if I were at work in a hospital and somebody went into respiratory failure and I didn’t hear the alarms? That person could die, and it would be my fault.