The chicken—an animal with red ridges protruding from its head, a strong beak and a long mane of feathers—is the new carrier of the bird virus that has ravaged WCHS and which has a devastating side effect: it turns people’s heads into those of chickens. No student is safe from its claws.
“Old symptoms included diarrhea, coughing and headaches,” MCPS superintendent Monifa McCluck said. “In the new mutations, students are physically turning into chickens. MCPS is rolling out a new free lunch program including balanced chicken feed, oats and grains.”
Many Montgomery County citizens have questioned the necessity of continuing classes when such an extreme situation has arisen. In response, MCPS has cited the need and importance of education, although they have implemented an online version of classes for those who prefer to be at home.
“Turning into a chicken is the worst thing to ever happen to me,” WCHS junior Justin Fowl said. “I have my cognition from being human, but now I have all of these urges like wanting to bawk and peck the floor. I hope that someone is working around the cluck to fix it because this is aw-fowl.”
The pecking order of the average chicken coop has not meshed well with WCHS’s social hierarchy. Among other incidents, a chicken fight broke out in the cafeteria after mutated WCHS sophomore Henneth Smith was in line for cafeteria food and saw that chicken was an option.
“It’s terrible that they still serve chicken here,” Smith said. “That insensitivity hurts; it’s practically cannibalism for us. If they treat us so callously now, what will they do in the future?”
Several protests against mutated students have occurred across the county, with some calling for chicken hunts with others defending their right to exist as citizens of the United States.
“MCPS is taking every effort it can to help infected students integrate peacefully into the school environment, at least until a more permanent solution or cure is found,” McCluck said.
With the highest rate of mutations in the country at 97%, many wonder why WCHS was impacted the most. Theories range from a substance in the water to something nefarious within the school.
“My theory is that there is something weird in the school air or something weird about the school itself,” Fowl said. “The cafeteria food was infected with a strain of the original virus, and it all exploded into a unique mutated strain of the bird flu virus that affected students who ate the infected lunch.”
Authorities are researching what could have caused this specific mutation. Still, for now, they suggest that mutated students should be required to wear masks to reduce the transmissibility of the virus.
“Wearing a mask is a violation of my freedom,” Fowl said. “They say it is to prevent the spread of the virus, but they just want to control us. I am a proud anti-masker. It is anti-chicken hate.”
Although the claws of anti-chicken hate and counter-chicken hate speech have sunk deeply into Montgomery County, the MCPS Board of Education (BOE) has started to lay some eggs of order and policy hoping for a good hatching in the future. Masking rules and addendums to the MCPS’s “No Place for Hate” mantra to include chicken mutates are just some of the seeds of change implemented.
“I just hope that this is resolved soon,” Fowl said. “That people just treat us as people, because that is what we are, despite our new facial features. I just want to be a normal student again.”
