Friday

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"What would you like to be when you grow up, dear?"

"An organ donor."

Nobody heard him the first time. "What?"

"An organ donor."

"Cool!" yelled a classmate, "why not a piano donor?"

"No, I'm going to be an organ donor."

The classmate scratched his head. "Organs are really big and expensive, and they sound too old, and they play them in horror movies, and I don't like them. Why would you want to donate one?"

"I'm going to donate all my organs when I grow up."

The teacher frowned. "Dear, you should think of some other job. That one isn't very fun. Maybe a doctor, or a -"

"I wanna give people organs!" exclaimed some other girl. "Shiny organs. Pipe organs and regular organs."

The boy grinned. "Yeah!"

"Do you know that there is another kind of organ?" asked the teacher.

"Yes, I do," said the boy. "Bloody organs. I know. Those are cool."

"Organ donors do not donate instruments, dear, not usually. They aren't, well..."

"Oh, I know. Organ donors are only organ donors when they're dead. I know that. That's why I think it's cool, to have all the parts of me shipped all over the world, to help people. I would basically live forever, in tons of different people's bodies. I'd never disappear."

"Matter can be neither created nor destroyed," retorted a short girl wearing pigtails. "Even if you weren't an organ donor, you'd never disappear." The teacher wrote down the girl's name on a sheet.

The boy replied, "True, but if I were an organ donor I'd keep on living even after I was dead. My organs wouldn't decompose. Well, eventually they would. But not as fast as if I was laid in a big wooden box and - "

"Children, do you believe in reincarnation?" interrupted the teacher. "That is our next unit. Please open your books to page 450 - "

Little hands waved in the air.

"Yes, that page, kids - the one with the picture of the cockroach and the butterfly being eaten by the mouse. This lesson will be a little different."

Innocent eyes gleamed in anticipation.

"We will have a quiz," the teacher said, "on Tuesday. Study hard and you'll do well."

Busy little fingers worked pencils through worksheets, learning how bad people became cockroaches or dirty socks, good people turned into televisions, and extra bad people were only to become Damned, a horrible thing for which not very much description was offered. The pigtailed girl was led out of the room by the teacher, and the boy who wished to become an organ donor yearned to know where she was being taken, for she was his only friend, and he, her only.

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