Allergy Girl
I was six when I learned peanuts were out to get me. And soy. And wheat and corn and gluten and yeast and tree nuts and barley and cucumbers and melons. One day my allergist pricked my arms until they ballooned into dozens of pink patches, revealing a grand total of 27 allergies. All nuts count as one. Growing up, I was always encouraged by my school nurse to sit in the nut-free zone during lunch. This quarantined area in the corner was empty and smelled of Lysol and Lunchables. I decided to take my chances and sit with my friends and their peanut butter breath. If a cashew were to kill me in my school cafeteria, at least it would have been at the cool table.
While I never took my allergies seriously enough, I’d always get frustrated when my dad didn’t either. When he didn’t know how to feed me, he’d try to tell me it was all in my head: ”Nuts are good for you! Just give them a chance!” On a few occasions I’ve eaten watermelon just to prove a point to him, and then raspily explain that I didn’t invent a shoddy immune system as a quirky personality trait.
Although I can see why someone would. Being Allergy Girl can have its perks.
For starters, I always have a way out of tough situations. If I’m getting destroyed by a midterm or bored of a conversation, I can keep one pecan in my pocket in case I need to anaphylaxis my way out. I can even stop a lecture early if I owe my friends a favor.
My Epi-Pen also talks when you pull off its safety cap, which is pretty fucking cool. “If having an allergic emergency, pull off red safety guard,” she’ll banter with me and my friends. She’s always by my side and is much more portable than an Amazon Alexa.
In a lot of ways, my allergies have also made me a bit of a prodigy. When I was little, I had allergic reactions to three different allergy medications (Zyrtec, Claritin, and Allegra), so when we got to the irony chapter of the literary device unit in sixth grade, I was way ahead of the curve. I learned a lot from cucumbers, too. “I call bullshit! They’re 99 percent water!” people used to say when I apologized that I couldn’t eat their salad. Cucumbers taught me to be suspicious of the one percent long before Bernie did.
I am proud to say my allergies make me different from other white people, which is very brave. When I say I’m gluten-free, I mean that my body misidentifies gluten as a pathogen, not just that I’m upper-middle class and in a book club, probably. That’s intersectionality, babe!
Despite being a wunderkind, I always stayed humble. I was never patronizing when my classmates weren’t familiar with a certain kind of oatmeal or beet chip, and would sometimes even offer them some of my stash from the teacher’s closet while they were enjoying the class pizza party. When I order my bunless bean burger at the select restaurants that sell them, I can get French fries as my side without guilt. If I were to choose the fruit cup, it would probably contain watermelon and honeydew and cantaloupe, and I would probably need two Benadryl. I guess I can see where my dad was coming from.
