Scene: a Child Fakes a Peanut Allergy

Robert Vetter
6 min readFeb 1, 2021

The scene opens in the dining room of a normal family home. Two young boys sit at the table. One is me, and the other my friend from my Catholic kindergarten, the home of whom I am currently at for a playdate. My school was Catholic in a very loose sense. We likely had chapel that day, which means that we sat in rows of chairs to act as makeshift pews while our PE teacher/preacher told us about how Jesus guided him to the 20 dollar bill he found on the sidewalk that weekend. Lights come all the way up and I, the child, speak.

Child: Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, please?

This is a con that I would often pull at my friend’s house on a playdate. I was very good at it. Notice the “please” at the end of the sentence to seem more adorable and endearing. If you were a parent, wouldn’t you want to serve your kid’s well behaved friend who’s asking for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I always had to ask for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because they combine three staple foods almost any house would have: bread, jelly, and peanut butter.

The parent onstage makes the sandwich and brings it to the child. The child at the dining table takes a bite, chews it, and swallows. He takes another bite, chews it, and swallows. Much of the sandwich has been eaten. The child looks up at the parent and very earnestly says:

Child: Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m allergic to peanuts.

I did this in multiple households while I was in kindergarten. After I dropped this atomic bombshell on the dining table, normally they’d ask me some questions about how severe it was, if I had an EpiPen, if they needed to take me to the hospital… And of course, I didn’t know the answers to these questions because I wasn’t allergic to peanuts. I wasn’t allergic to anything, so I didn’t know any proper allergy protocol. This added to the panic because at this point, the responsible adult of the house realized I would be no help in stopping my impending fake-anaphylactic shock. It was a very real possibility that I could die at their dining table.

At the time, I didn’t register any of this as panic or serious at all. Although I was surrounded by chaos and curse words shouted by the people around me trying to make my last moments on this earth happy, all I could hear was applause for my stunningly convincing performance in the role of “child with a peanut allergy.” This was my con, but it wasn’t a con for money, nor did I case the home for antiques I could sneak into my body bag before I was wheeled out the front door after I dropped to the floor. I conned them into giving me their attention, and they didn’t even know.

The parent runs to the landline and dials the phone number of the child’s mom. It rings, and she picks up. We hear the voice of Kristina Vetter, my mother, through the receiver.

Parent: I am so sorry I fed your child peanut butter I didn’t know he was allergic but he asked for a jelly sandwich at least that’s what I think he asked and I guess I thought peanut butter and jelly because who eats plain jelly sandwiches right? Anyway who is your primary care provider I can check him into the ER if you can meet me there —

Mom: Oh my God, is he doing this again?

This line should be delivered with exasperation and weariness. This is not an uncaring mother at all, so she should not be played as such. She is the zookeeper of the feral animal that goes from house to house pretending to have a peanut allergy because he hasn’t gotten bored of it yet. In my opinion, she is the most sympathetic character of this scene.

Mom: He doesn’t have a peanut allergy, but he’s in a phase where he tells people he has one. He doesn’t need to go to the hospital but if you need him out of the house, I understand, and I am happy to pick him up early.

The reaction of the Parent is up to the actor to improvise. It is a pivotal moment that will determine the rest of the scene. After all, this is a little more than five minutes into the playdate. Keep baby Antichrist in the home and risk him materializing frogs coming out of all of your drains or the walls leaking blood? Call his mom and meet the woman that bred such a creature? Or just take him out back and Old Yeller him yourself?

The first time I had heard the phrase “peanut allergy” was the year before when a new girl came into my class. I didn’t know what a peanut allergy was, but I saw the way a person with a peanut allergy could completely take over an environment and I wanted that for myself. For example, whenever someone would bring food on their birthday for the class, it couldn’t have peanuts in it because of her. In a way, everyone’s birthday also belonged to her. She had the power to literally part crowds when she walked through them, in case somebody had a peanutty granola bar in their pocket. My childlike, not entirely socialized brain saw her as the alpha of our pack, and I needed to get onto her level.

Now before you try to shame me for my actions, just know that I am already embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that I decided to lie about having a peanut allergy for multiple months. But before you start throwing around words like “crazy,” or “psychotic,” or “should have been medicated immediately,” be glad I wasn’t acting out for attention in ways that could be categorized as “Warning Signs That Your Child Will Grow Up to be a Serial Killer”

Here is a list of things that I could have done instead of faking a peanut allergy:

Killing small animals

Lighting fires

Breaking my own pinky toe at recess

Losing a tooth and then purposefully swallowing it

Crying until my parents agreed to pick through my stool until I could give the tooth to the Tooth Fairy

Swallowing marbles

Calling in a bomb threat to Chapel at my Catholic kindergarten

Consciously acting like the Antichrist, not as an effect of my con, at my Catholic kindergarten

Fake a different allergy

I was never harshly punished for this, which first of all why not? And second, is most likely the reason that I’m putting it into writing now. I know that I can still get attention for it by being a manipulative little bastard, so I’m just going to reframe it to make my psycho-ass seem normal now and put it on the Internet.

There is a lesson to be learned from this for any parents who might also be dealing with an abnormal child. Don’t make any excuses for this behavior unless you want them to think it’s okay for them to be a black hole of attention seeking behavior and steadily graduate from something like this to either getting a theatre degree, or doing hard drugs. If you don’t want to be harsh, that’s fine. You’ll just have to wait until they run out of houses. Don’t worry, they’ll eventually run out. A good con man knows that you never hit the same place twice.

The lights fade to black as the children go upstairs to play

End of Scene

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Robert Vetter

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Obnoxious. Writing seen in McSweeney’s, The Hard Times, Slackjaw, and more. Follow me on Substack: www.substack.com/robertvetter