James McConaghie has a disorder that makes him extremely sensitive to ordinary chemicals, even in small doses. To explain his sensitivity -- his requests that people not wear fragrances around him, that custodians warn him before cleaning a building, that his building superintendent not use pesticides around him -- he tells a story. It takes place when he was eight years old. He doesn't remember all the details, but over time, teachers, school officials, doctors, and his mother have helped him reconstruct it. Since this story has shaped the way he has lived the rest of his life, it is a story that he wants to get right.

In February 1989, an elementary school in Royal Oak, Michigan, fumigated for mice. The fumigators sprayed two neurotoxic pesticides, Ortho-Orthene and Whitmeyer Ficam-D, into the air ducts of the school. At the time, in Michigan, in-session school sprayings like this were common. McConaghie, a third grader at the school, was in class at the time. As the pesticides filtered through the school's air, he put his head down on his desk. His teacher asked him what was wrong, but he didn't respond. She asked him again, but he could not answer. The pesticides had made McConaghie sick. So sick, in fact, that he went home that day and was bed-ridden for three months. For the next nine months he stayed out of school, suffering from short-term memory loss, weight loss, and debilitating migraines and muscle cramps.

Finally McConaghie's life began a slow return to normal. He finished the third grade with a home tutor. He began to read. The migraines stopped. And in October of 1990, he was back in a new school to begin fourth grade. But McConaghie had not completely recovered. Ever since the poisoning, he says, he's been extremely sensitive to odors and chemicals. He might enter a recently-renovated house and get a migraine or walk by a neighbor spraying the lawn for crabgrass and lose control of his motor skills. And because odors and volatile organic chemical compounds are everywhere, appearing in everything from deck varnish to dye compounds, McConaghie, and others like him, live in an environment where they are constantly under attack.