My greatest fear when I was younger was Pringles. Occasionally, my mom would bring me a can, but I would cry and yell and pound until she left clutching her wounded pride in one hand and return receipt in the other, wondering why she even tried in the first place. In retrospect, it wasn’t the chips themselves that got to me. It was the claustrophobia of it all: choked bodies, lightless cylinder. When you hold chips folded against each other that neatly, you really hold complete homogeneity, which is to say you hold proof that nothing is original and neither are you. That’s why I would rearrange all the furniture in my room after my mom left. To practice novelty.

I think we are all Pringles inside Bridge Academy’s new mental health classroom, starched between floor-tile tessellations and fluorescent white lights. I ask Sophie next to me if the green wallpaper reminds her of sour cream and onion wrapping or if she ever dreams about freedom, of playing God, of dumping potato chips out her window to their deliverance and death. She stares at me. I notice her heel twitches when she turns away.

Twelve feet away, at the front of the room, Miss Charyl stands and introduces herself as our new mental health teacher. I think she is more teeth than person because she smiles incessantly, even when she pauses to take a drink from a pink water bottle. Today we will be fighting stigma by identifying mental disorders, she beams as she sets down her bottle, and it would be wonderful if someone could start us off. Someone raises their hand.

“Is this class graded?”

It isn’t. Sophie exhales lightly and produces a rose gold laptop. She’s typing up a report for her new Save the Zimbabwean Bulldogs club. I don’t think Zimbabwe has bulldogs. My dad almost took me to Zimbabwe once—we had made it all the way to his private jet before my throat constricted and I wanted to swim out of my skin because great black spider legs had crawled all over it. I had tore through half of my seat before my dad noticed. He told me there were no spiders, just nerves, but I was never allowed on his private jet after that. I ask Sophie why Zimbabwean bulldogs. She replies Zimbabwe because it is impoverished and she is a humanitarian, bulldogs because they are Yale’s mascot and she needs the Dean’s favor.

Three rows away, Miss Charyl has magnified a slideshow whose title, in big block turquoise letters, reads Psychosis. She asks if anyone has heard of Psychosis. She beams even though nobody has responded, taking out an index card and enunciating deliberately: psy-cho-sis is an abnormal condition of the mind in which the mental state struggles to differentiate between its inner psyche and reality, often to the extent that the diagnosed loses touch with reality.

Then she smiles again and asks for questions. Someone asks what it means to lose touch with reality.

She struggles with this one for a second, then declares it is when we cannot discern what we touch. For instance, a person with psychosis might touch a table and think it is something else. Satisfied and teeth glistening, she flips to the next card—De-pre-ssion—and reads again.

I think about the time I woke up from a nightmare and couldn’t feel my hands so I broke a Pringle under my palm, crushing the fractured pieces into crystal shards. While they carved crimson rivers into my bleeding skin, I had smiled and thought I am both the artist and the product and when I have finished cutting my palms then my hands will be lacerations of a blood stained glass masterpiece.

I think there is no realer way of touching reality than grinding a potato chip to dust under my hand.

Next I wonder if my weekly suicidal thoughts are a symptom of any mental disorder, as they are very “mental” but too orderly to be a “disorder” because I think about killing myself exactly once every Friday when my dad leaves for a corporate meeting in Tokyo or Dubai or Kremenchug-Konstantinovskaya and never says good-bye. I wonder if fitting one-half of the requirements for a “mental disorder” can be rounded up into a full diagnosis. Before I can ponder that, though, Miss Charyl announces our homework, which is to write a four-page essay on the detriments of student stress. Under her smile, the entire front row has the chemistry review packet open on their laptops, and Sophie types a report for her Diversity Club where everybody is white. Someone’s juul is exhaling mango smoke behind me and I try to count how many puffs touch the back of my neck.

Six puffs later, my old math teacher Mister Whitaker comes running into the classroom looking mildly disheveled and shouting loudly. That happens to be a lot for him because Mister Whitaker is quite an average man with a circular bald spot and square glasses. He also wears the same white polo shirt everyday, and once I asked him if he always dresses identically to cling to a semblance of routine in a world where entropy will inevitably reign supreme. He asked me if that’s what I thought. I told him yes, but I was more afraid that history repeats itself in tireless circles and I am a byproduct of someone else’s existence and we are all doomed to die of monotony if not entropy.

He sent my dad an email after that recommending that I see a the-ra-pist. My dad told him to go fuck himself and threatened to take away his job. I guess that’s why he’s not my math teacher anymore.

Anyway, it is strange to see the average Mister Whitaker all sweaty and out of breath, saying a fire started in the 600 wing is raging through the entire school. I didn’t even realize that Miss Charyl had fainted onto the floor.

“DOES ANYONE REMEMBER THE PROCEDURE FOR PUTTING OUT A FIRE,” Mr. Whitaker asks frantically to the front row.

They are still scrolling through their chemistry notes when Mr. Whitaker grabs one of them, Dylan, by the shoulders and forces him to look up.

“Young man, do you have any ideas?”

“Um, combustion of two moles of ethane requires seven moles of oxygen? And that makes like, a big fire?” he offers.

Mister Whitaker takes a deep breath and says that is a good start. Then he asks Dylan how to reverse the process—instead of creating a fire, how does someone extinguish one.

Dylan shrugs and says we never covered that in the chemical reaction lab practical. Mister Whitaker throws his hands in the air, which Dylan uses as an opportunity to put his head back down and read the stoichiometry subsection. Two doors down, there is screaming.

Mr. Whitaker turns to Sophie and asks her if she knows anyone who might be able to help. She says that she doesn’t, though he could reach out to the Stop The Amazon Rainforest From Burning club. That doesn’t calm him.

Now he’s pacing back and forth getting unnoticeably more agitated. He asks to use someone’s phone to call 911.

“That’s the one hundred and fifty-sixth prime number,” Jared murmurs. Jared is graphing a parabola.

“Jared! May I borrow your phone to call 911!”

Jared holds up a lazy finger and keeps his concentration on the penciled gap between his graph’s focus and directrix. When he looks up and sees Mr. Whitaker, he blinks a couple of times.

“What?”

Inhale, exhale. “Jared, may I use your phone?”

Jared answers it’s in cubby seventeen. Mister Whitaker mutters something profane under his breath and stalks to the cubbies, but Miss Charyl chooses this exact moment to rouse from unconsciousness. With renewed vigor, she jumps up and slaps Mister Whitaker’s hand away from Jared’s iPhone.

“Nobody touches their phone until class is over. According to the American Optometry Association, excessive use of a cellular device can cause high levels of stress,” she snaps.

He just stares, waiting for someone to interject, but most of the class, realizing that the chemistry test will be cancelled, works on their college applications instead. The room feels awfully hot. I wonder if it is a coincidence that there are tendrils of smoke creeping under the door.

Obsessive compulsions. We are all claustrophobic potato chips. Delusions. If I am going to die, I will make sure I take this sour cream and onion papering down with me. Suicidal tendencies. When my mom first left, I thought it was my fault, so I jumped out the third-floor window and tried to kill myself. It didn’t work, though, and the doctor wrote it off as a vitamin deficiency. Disconnect with reality. I feel bad for Pringle cans. I wonder if they feel sad once they have lost their chips and their purpose, and if emptiness is a state or a lack of one. I used to fear Pringle cans until I learned to identify with them. Now I fear them even more. I am the can and the contents, the glass and the knife, the artist and the masterpiece.

 Now the green wallpaper is peeling away and inward from the wall, curling from the heat. There’s not much to do anymore besides wait for the fire to burn this sour cream and onion cylinder into a million floating pieces of aluminum debris. That’s what entropy’s all about.