The reek of good living

One of the first times I ever felt like I finally wasn’t being treated like a kid was when I was in seventh grade, in Ms. Maguire’s class at Apex Middle School. The morning news was filled with devastating tales from a city in India called Bhopal, where a leak at a Union Carbide plant spewed a chlorine cloud into the air that killed nearly everyone in town overnight. We had always been encouraged to keep up with current events and have lively discussions about them, and I found the discussion invigorating even as I found it disturbing that a gas cloud could envelop you in the middle of the night and suffocate you.
Suffice it to say that yesterday, with all Apex schools closed and half the town evacuated, the similarities between Apex (motto: "The Peak of Good Living") and Bhopal are not lost on me.