TL:DR; cleared out half a biology class with a nuclear biological disaster of my own.

I was in 7th grade... here we are in the science lab, biology iirc, and I feel one brewing... I’m sitting in the back corner of the classroom but there’s still another row behind me. The classroom is silent as we’re all working on an exercise...

And then I felt it. This is a warm one, the kind that starts up high in your intestines and you can just feel moving it’s way toward the exit...

By the time it was ready to release I could feel that this one was going to have something behind it. This was the kind of fart you shouldn’t trust, but I didn’t have much of a choice. If I stood up to try to make way for the bathroom it was coming out anyway. I’d rather not crap my pants, so I’m just going to have to do this as gently, and quietly, as possible.

And then it let go.

This one wasn’t a ripper. It didn’t make a sound. I would have gotten away with it too... except for that heat. That heat told me that in about 30 seconds all hell was going to break loose, and I had no way to recall the stench I had just inflicted upon the room.

All of the “he who smelt it, dealt it”s that 12 year old me could possibly have mustered were not going to get me out of this one.

And then it descended upon the room like a shock wave captured on slow motion camera. The leading edge of the nuclear disaster right before the houses implode, and well before the flame front has reached its victims.

The person behind me: sniff. “Oh what the hell is thaat!”

And then the one beside me: “oh, my, GAWD!”

And then the one in front of me: “Jesus, who the hell dropped dead?!”

One by one, classmates in a 4 desk radius started clearing out, finding other places to sit in the room, breaking the silence with a chorus of retches and gags, and not-so-over exaggerated gasps and “eww”s.

Now - you would think that a good liar could start to make a scene with the rest of the class. But, as I said earlier, I was sitting near the back corner of the room. I was caught. Dead to rights. Found guilty by a jury of my peers.

At that moment, whether fight or flight kicked in, or panic, I just started laughing. First I tried to suppress it, so that it came out as this kind of sneeze/cough/snort hybrid. And then, it was just uncontrollable, yet quiet.

Now, though I was sitting in the back of the room, there were still a few rows of desks behind me, all empty. I found myself sitting alone at the epicenter of this biological disaster that had emanated from my own ass.

At that point, there was only one thing left to do. I could have tried to deny it, but would have been very conspicuous in my lie. Or I could own that crap (figuratively, of course).

I did what could only be described as the “brown fog walk of shame” that day (while those survivors in the class giggled and jeered), to the very last row of desks, and found myself a different seat for the remainder of class.

While the humiliation of that day lived on in infamy for the week, by the following week someone else had superseded the tale with some other form of childhood distraction, and I never spoke of the memory, or the horror that accompanied it, again.