*Chapter 5: Laughter Is Contagious*
683 Words
By Thursday, I had developed three new fears:
1. My own voice.
2. School announcements.
3. And anyone saying, “Tell that joke again!”
Because now?
**The jokes were spreading.**
Like the flu.
Or glitter.
Or glitter-flavored flu.
---
It started with **Maxine Bell**, the shy girl who usually sat at the back of class and spoke with the volume of a dying mosquito.
She giggled at one of my accidental one-liners in math—something about quadratic equations being nature’s way of telling you to give up—and the next day, she was **on fire**.
Punchlines. Puns. Perfect timing.
Even the teacher laughed so hard she snorted and said, “Who ARE you?”
Maxine smiled.
But her eyes looked… wrong.
Like she was watching herself from inside her own head.
Then came **Darryl Jones**, who did a full *roast* of the lunch lady that got him three days’ detention and a standing ovation.
By the end of the day, half the school was quoting me, mimicking me, *being* me.
And I could feel it.
**The locker. Watching. Grinning.**
---
“Okay, this is officially zombie apocalypse rules,” I told Maya at our usual spot in the library bunker, where the chemistry kits hummed softly with the sound of potential lawsuits.
She was already ahead of me. Literally. She had a **conspiracy board** now.
Like a *real* one.
Yarn, photos, strings, ominous sticky notes with things like:
> “HUMOR = HOST?”
> “MICROPHONES? WHY??”
> “PUPPETS???”
And in the center, circled in red:
**LOCKER 108**
With a crude doodle of a smiley face with rows of jagged teeth.
“Laughing fits are increasing,” she muttered. “Frequency of joke outbreaks is doubling every 24 hours.”
“…Joke outbreaks?”
“It’s viral now. Like a memetic parasite.”
“A… what?”
She sighed. “A joke so catchy it infects people’s brains. Think of it like a song that gets stuck in your head… and then eats your soul.”
“Oh cool, so it’s *t****k,* but haunted.”
Maya shot me a look. “You realize what this means, right?”
“That I’m accidentally the Patient Zero of a humorpocalypse?”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
Then she pointed to a page in her notebook. A transcript from *last year.* One student, a kid named Jay, wrote down this before disappearing:
> “I keep laughing even when I’m crying. Even when I want to scream. It feels like my body’s been hijacked by a laugh track. I miss silence. I miss *me.*”
I swallowed.
“Do we know what happened to him?”
She shook her head. “One day he just stopped talking. Like a switch flipped. His family moved. No forwarding address.”
Great.
I was turning into a magical stand-up comic version of a **biohazard.**
---
That night, I tried not to speak. Not at home, not while brushing my teeth, not even while arguing with my cat (which was hard because *she’s super judgmental*).
I stared at the mirror.
Practiced frowning.
Tried to say boring things.
> “My socks are beige.”
> “Taxes are inevitable.”
> “The mitochondria is STILL the powerhouse of the cell.”
But the words still came out **funny.**
My reflection even smirked at me once.
And I swear—just for a second—**it didn’t move when I did.**
---
The next day, things escalated.
At assembly, Principal Gomez stepped up to the mic to address “recent behavioral disruptions.”
Before he could speak, Maxine yelled from the audience:
> “Is this the stand-up portion of the school day?”
**The entire gymnasium exploded in laughter.**
And then… Maxine **collapsed.**
Fell like a string was cut. Still giggling.
Kids screamed. Teachers rushed.
Her mouth twitched like she was still trying to c***k one last joke.
And her fingers?
She’d written something on her palm in pen.
I leaned in.
It said:
> **“Knock knock.”**
---
- Writer
