6-Year-Old’s Plan to Skip School Backfires When Her ‘Chicken Pox’ Won’t Come Off

Illustration - Shutterstock

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” goes the old saying, and it’s certainly true for kids who want to get out of doing something they don’t like.

Many kids will go as far as staying under the covers for a long time to make themselves appear hot and sweaty to look feverish or even put the thermometer in hot water to make the temperature appear higher than it is.

Earlier this spring, Lily Schooley, a 6-year-old from Saint Austell, Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, took these tactics to the next level!

It all started when Schooley had a particularly tough spelling test coming her way at school. Desperate for a solution, she watched a video on YouTube, called “10 Ways to Get Out of School.” One of them particularly appealed to her as it happened to be a sickness going around her school. All she needed was some kind of special equipment and she could be, literally, home free.

Lily came down from her room and asked for a red marker, claiming she needed it for her assignment. As her mom, Charlotte Schooley, told the Daily Mail, “she came down 10 minutes later and she was stroking her arm. She said ‘Oh mummy, I’m feeling a bit itchy. I’ve think I’ve got a rash.’”

Knowing that a chicken pox epidemic had been going around school, her parents took a good look. But what they saw definitely wasn’t pox. “Me and my husband were aching with laughter, trying not to let on that we knew,” Schooley said to the Mail.

Deciding that they would call their daughter’s bluff, her mom told her, “Oh gosh, it’s come on so quickly in 10 minutes. We’re going to have to see the doctor.” This was enough to send Lily running upstairs to try to scrub the dots off as quickly as possible and then pretend they went away.

Unfortunately for this clever 6-year-old, her plan didn’t take into account that the marker she used to draw on the “pox,” was a permanent one! This meant that poor Lily would not only have to go to school but that she would have to do her PE class with her arms and legs covered in marker dots.

Her mom, Charlotte, told the Mail, “we had to send her in with a letter the next day to say they weren’t contagious or real and we just couldn’t get them off.”

As for the spots, the family tried everything to get them to come off without much success. “We used body wash, soap, hot water, baby oil, alcohol wipes. I think it was hairspray in the end that got it off—after four days,” mom Charlotte said to the Mail.

Meanwhile, everyone in the town and at school was convinced that Lily must be infected. As Charlotte told the Mail, “Everyone was looking at her like she was contagious. We had to tell everyone she wasn’t.” Thankfully, Lily’s teachers got a huge laugh out of it, as they had never seen a child go to such great lengths to skip school.

As for Lily, she’s still watching her YouTube videos, learning how to dress up the family cat, but you can be sure she'll stay away from tips for how to skip school!