No Talking

“Cooties,” slang for body lice during WWI, caught hold among elementary school children who have used the term for generations to imply inferiority and express discomfort with members of different genders than their own, i.e. difference implies uncleanliness and infestation. Gender animosity typically fades as kids get older and develop comfort with difference, but, at Laketon Elementary, most fifth-grade boys and girls still stay separate, in part because the popular Lynsey and Dave retain strong gender biases. The concept of cooties become a symbol both of the fifth graders’ developing maturity, and of their deeply rooted gender divide. The fifth graders acknowledge that they are too old to use the childish term cooties—“that would have sounded like baby talk” (19)—and so instead “They used words like ‘dumb’ or ‘gross’ or ‘immature’ or ‘annoying’” (19). By contrast, the fifth graders do not connect this to the possibility that they should have also outgrown the bias itself. For Lynsey and Dave, cooties take the form of talking too much, and each believes the other gender is way too chatty. They agree to the contest of silence to prove to each other that they’re better; though no one will say it out loud, it is implied that the losing team will be confirmed to have cooties. By the end of the novel, both cooties and gender discomfort have faded as the children learn to accept difference and make friends of all kinds.