AHMM, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Robideau looked at him.

  "I thought you said it was a penny a point."

  "Well, it is, chief. Times ten."

  Robideau sighed and stood up. He reached for his wallet and counted out the money. “I don't suppose any of you know what caused that boat to blow up?"

  "How would we know that, chief?” Creepy raked the cash in.

  "No reason. I just thought you might have some insight concerning it."

  "Not us."

  "I see.” Shrugging into his coat, Robideau paused when he saw the case of empty beer bottles next to the door. Sleeman's Honey Brown. He glanced again at the three old-timers sitting around the card table, staring guilelessly back at him.

  "It's recycling day,” he informed them. “The truck will be along soon. You might want to shift these empties out to the curb."

  "You kidding us?” Creepy Culbertson said. “We can get two dollars an’ forty cents for those, we cart ‘em down to the depot ourselves."

  "Right."

  "We're like you, Chief. On a fixed income here. Just three old harmless retired guys tryin’ to scrape by in this world as best we can."

  "Is that what you are? I was wondering,” Robideau said.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Jas R. Petrin

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: KANGAROO COURT by Toni L.P. Kelner

  Kate Forman

  * * * *

  The kids in the auditorium were goofing off, but they settled down when the bailiff stepped up to the microphone and said, “The Forty-Third Annual Session of the Jackson's Bridge High School Kangaroo Court is now in session, the Honorable Judges Dunbar, Reid, and Cuthbert presiding. Please rise."

  We three judges were waiting in the wings, and as everybody else stood up we hopped in, our kangaroo tails and ears flapping as we went.

  I had never hated Jackson's Bridge High School more than I did at that moment.

  * * * *

  In a way, it was my own fault that I got stuck with the tail.

  I'd heard people talking about Rat Day before, but it wasn't until a couple of days before the big event that my homeroom teacher, Mr. Lilly, went through the rules, and I came to realize how lame it really was. Once a year, the seniors were allowed to spend the whole day telling every other student in the school what to do. Not just the way teachers get off on it, either. No, the seniors could tell us underclassmen to wear our clothes inside out or push a peanut down the hall with our noses or sing like the losers on American Idol. This was known as being “ratted,” while the pranks were known as “rats.” Those of us ratted were supposed to laugh merrily and go along with the gag.

  "Are you serious?” I said, when Mr. Lilly was finished. “People actually put up with that?” The rest of the kids in my homeroom, mindless sheep for the most part, looked at me as if I were the crazy one. “What genius came up with this bright idea?"

  "My grandfather,” a voice said from the door, where Principal Picket had materialized. I swear that woman moved like a cat. Not a sleek black cat or a street-smart alley cat, but a sneaky Persian with a smug expression on her flat face. She was always turning up in the middle of some class when I least wanted her around. And I never wanted her around.

  "I see Mr. Lilly is explaining one of our most cherished traditions. You see, Garnet, my granddaddy first came up with the idea to help students blow off steam when spring fever hits, and I do believe the students would rise up if I ever even considered canceling it. Not that I would, of course. Doesn't it sound like fun?"

  "Yeah, like a root canal with no Novocain.” I probably shouldn't have said that, but there was something about that woman's tone and attitude that made me want to get myself in trouble. So I followed it up with, “I thought ritualized hazing was illegal. I'm surprised nobody's ever sued the school."

  "Well, maybe people up North go to court over every little thing, but people around hear don't resort to that kind of shenanigans.” The way she said “up North” made it sound as if I'd been raised in New York or Boston, not Charlotte, North Carolina. “Some students do get a little carried away, which is why we have a court system in place to take care of any problems that might arise. So don't you worry. I'm sure you'll enjoy it, and in two more years you'll be a senior yourself, and then you'll be in charge."

  "Only two years of torture—how nice,” I said, already trying to decide if I was going to have a sore throat or menstrual cramps to keep me home on Rat Day.

  But Picket was no fool and must have known what I was thinking. “Now you be sure and stay healthy. If you miss Rat Day without a verifiable illness or family emergency, you'll lose your Rat Day privileges as a senior."

  As if I cared. But then came something I did care about.

  "Not only that,” she added, “but you'll be barred from all extracurricular activities for the rest of the semester. Which would include Mr. Lilly's drama club. Bye now!"

  As she slimed away, I looked at Mr. Lilly and demanded, “Is that true?"

  He nodded sympathetically. “That's the rule."

  "Jesus freaking Christ!"

  "Language,” Mr. Lilly warned me, but he wasn't really mad. He was the only teacher I liked at all, and working on the drama club production of Macbeth was the most fun I'd had since my parents had forced me to move to Jackson's Bridge.

  That meant that unless I wanted to kiss my shot at playing Lady Macbeth good-bye, I was going to have to endure a day of hell. I had no illusions that it would be fun. Not only was I the “new kid,” meaning that I hadn't been in school with the same group of yahoos since kindergarten, but I was also known as “that weird goth girl” just because I happened to look fabulous in black. I was going to be a magnet for every sadistic senior in the school.

  The bell rang, but as I was grabbing my bag, Mr. Lilly said, “Garnet, can you stay for a moment?"

  There was a handful of snickers because people assumed I was in trouble, and a couple of busybodies tried to hang around to see what Lilly was going to do to me, but he sent them on their way.

  "Sorry about the language,” I said, semisincerely, “but this whole Rat Day thing—"

  "I know. Look, there's one rule I didn't get a chance to explain.” That's when he told me about the Kangaroo Court, which would be held the day after Rat Day to judge people who hadn't done their assigned rat or whose rats had gone too far. “I'm in charge of picking judges, and I thought you might want to be the sophomore class judge.” He pulled out an honest-to-God badge from his desk drawer and held it out to me.

  "And why would I want to do this?"

  "Because in order to preserve their objectivity, judges are immune from being ratted."

  "Seriously?"

  He nodded.

  Of course, I took it. I'd have taken it even if he'd warned me about the ears and the tail, but it's probably just as well he didn't mention the pouch.

  * * * *

  I didn't really know the other two judges, though it was a small enough school that I'd seen them around. The junior was fairly cool, in a geeky sort of way, and was working tech on Macbeth. I think he actually liked his kangaroo regalia; he was wearing a Qantas Airline T-shirt and had stuck his iPod in his pouch. His name was Faulkner, of all things. His mother claimed distant kinship to the famed Southern writer, and Faulkner confessed that he was just relieved that she hadn't named him after a Confederate general like she had his brother.

  The freshman was Mary Beth, who I'd tried to hate when I first got to Jackson's Bridge. She was perky, smart, and popular, and if that weren't enough to burn my buns, she was on the junior varsity cheerleading squad. Unfortunately, she was too damned nice to hate. Honestly and sincerely nice. I was hoping to find out she was a closet ax murderer or something equally disgusting, but in the meantime, I'd just have to be nice right back at her.

  Then there was me, feeling like a complete asshole, and when a camera flashed, I realized that my judicial debut was being immortalized in the student newspaper or the yearbook.
Maybe both. My pouch was overflowing with happiness.

  At a signal from Stuart the bailiff, who was also the junior class president, we judges sat, and the students in the auditorium did too. The court secretary, also the junior class secretary, handed us copies of the docket and then returned to her table, ready to record our verdicts on a brand-new yellow legal pad she'd probably bought just to look official.

  I looked at the table in front of me and rolled my eyes. I had an official legal pad, too, and two sharpened number-two pencils. I could die happy.

  Stuart said, “The first case is Trask versus Mitchell. Annette Trask and Erin Mitchell, approach the bench."

  As the two ersatz litigants made their way to the podiums set up in front of the stage, I tried to look as if I knew what I was doing. The way Mr. Lilly had explained the procedure, it shouldn't be too bad. There were only two kinds of cases. Either an underclassman had refused a rat, undermining some sainted senior's privileges, or a senior had issued a rat that was unsafe or inappropriate. Of course, very few rats were considered unsafe or inappropriate. As long as clothes stayed on, physical contact minimal, and no bones were broken, most were considered good, clean fun. I wondered how many psychologists had paid for their Porsches with the fees from the formerly ratted.

  The bailiff swore Annette and Erin in, using a wildly nonpolitically correct Bible, and then they were ready to start arguing the case. I figured I better pretend I cared. There was no telling when Principal Picket might come sneaking around.

  That first case was pretty straightforward. Annette, a senior and noted jock, had gone into the girls’ locker room while a class was getting dressed after fourth period gym and made them all sing “We Are Family” into her cell phone. Since the reception was bad in the locker room itself, they'd had to sing in the showers, but Erin stayed at her locker instead. I'd never noticed Erin before, maybe because she looked like a photocopy of half a dozen other juniors, only with less impressive curves. Erin claimed that she'd wanted to participate in the sing-along but that she'd had to take care of a “female matter."

  Once both girls had told their stories, we judges turned off our microphones and huddled together to deliberate.

  "Erin's guilty,” Faulkner said without hesitation.

  "I don't know,” Mary Beth said, sounding as nice as ever. “Maybe it really is her time of the month."

  "No way,” I said. “If she was on the rag, she'd have gone to the toilet stall to—” I saw that Faulkner was looking queasy, and decided to keep it clean. “If she needed to use a sanitary product, she'd have done so privately, not while standing at her locker."

  Despite my effort to be delicate, Faulkner turned red, but he nodded and said, “Um, yeah. That's right."

  Mary Beth looked unhappy, but agreed.

  "What should we make her do?” Faulkner asked gleefully.

  "You're not enjoying this a bit, are you?” I asked.

  Faulkner shrugged. “I tried to get Rat Day banned last year, and Erin was one of the ones who made a stink about it. I figure it's only fair."

  "You mean I wouldn't be wearing these ears if it weren't for her?"

  "Well,” Faulkner admitted, “she wasn't the only one. Caroline Hendry was the big one, but you know how Erin is always trying to suck up to her and the others in the so-called popular crowd."

  I knew no such thing, actually, but I was all for going after anybody who'd worked to keep Rat Day on the calendar. “Let's throw the book at her!"

  We went back and forth for a few minutes before deciding to make Erin sing “I Feel Pretty” over the loudspeaker during the morning announcements the following day.

  The rest of the cases were pretty much the same. Somebody didn't do the rat they were supposed to do because it was embarrassing, and we made them do something even more embarrassing as payback. I might have felt guilty if I'd liked any of the people involved, but at least two of them had played the laugh-at-the-goth-chick game, and another one had written a racist screed for the school paper that had really frosted my shorts. In fact, it was almost alarming how much I got into the whole thing. My future therapist was going to have to spend months assuaging the guilt I was going to feel someday. In the meantime, I kept coming up with humiliating punishments, with the able assistance of Faulkner. That boy had a real mean streak—I was really starting to like him.

  The only time we found in favor of the underclassman was when it turned out that the senior involved was the underclassman's ex-boyfriend. His story was that she wouldn't put on the old football uniform he'd told her to wear, but her witnesses pointed out that he'd had two other guys waiting nearby. One had a super-soaker water gun, and the other had a cell phone to get shots of the impromptu wet T-shirt contest, no doubt intending to post them on MySpace. That was the first time I saw Mary Beth get angry, and I was right there with her. We sentenced the jerk and his confederates to wearing cheerleader outfits and cleaning out the boys’ bathroom for a week. The cheerleader outfits were my idea, and I was rather proud of the enhancement.

  Still, even dumping on people I dislike gets boring after a while, and the other kids in the auditorium were looking bored, too, until the bailiff called out the last case: Hendry versus Burns. All of a sudden, people sat up straight and got quiet.

  Caroline Hendry was the head varsity cheerleader and, unlike Mary Beth, was exactly what a cheerleader was supposed to be: busty, blond, vain, and mean. Roxanne Burns, on the other hand, had a figure that was as straight as her long brown hair. She wore glasses instead of contacts to prove her mighty intellect and edited the school literary magazine with an iron fist and a red pen that never seemed to run out of ink.

  The two of them were like a snake and a mongoose—natural-born enemies. Having been unlucky enough to have encountered both of them my first week at Jackson's Bridge High, I hated each with equal enthusiasm.

  Caroline had introduced herself promptly so she could start insulting my hair, clothes, and school supplies right away. At first she'd denounced me as goth, then decided I was emo, and finally settled for calling me a freak—she couldn't even keep her cultural stereotypes straight! As for Roxanne, when I attended a meeting for potential staff members and contributors to the literary magazine, she'd made it painfully clear that my help was not wanted. Apparently, genre fiction of any kind was not appropriately uplifting, which left me out in the cold.

  I realized then that I was about to have a chance to cash in the karma points I'd earned for dressing like a marsupial in public, with interest.

  Caroline, as the aggrieved party, went first, speaking with an accent that was eerily reminiscent of Principal Picket's. “I feel bad about having to bring all this up,” she lied, “but it just wouldn't be fair to the other students who played by the rules if I didn't."

  Roxanne snorted, and for once I was in complete agreement with her, even though I had to keep my stern-but-fair judge face on.

  Caroline tried to look shocked but couldn't quite keep the flash of irritation out of her eyes. “Rat Day has always been real important to me, and I thought it might be fun to be more creative this year. To actually have rats. So I bought a dozen pairs of ears and tails.” She reached into a Belk's shopping bag and pulled out a set. The gray ears were pretty convincing, but I personally thought the tail looked more like an opossum than a rat. “I had an eyebrow pencil to draw on whiskers too."

  The cheerleader looked so pleased by her own thoroughness that I wanted to slug her.

  "Roxanne was one of the first people I gave one to. She put them on like she was supposed to, but when I saw her later in the day, she wasn't wearing them anymore."

  "I had on the ears!” Roxanne said.

  "But not the tail!” Caroline snapped, then went back into her sweeter-than-Tupelo-honey voice. “It just wasn't the same without the tail. Everybody else I told to wear them wore them all day long, and Roxanne should have too.” She sniffed in Roxanne's direction. “That's all I've got to say."

  Faulkner
said, “Roxanne, do you have a rebuttal?"

  "I certainly do. Caroline was lying in wait for me when I arrived at school yesterday, and—"

  "Objection!” Caroline said. “I was not lying anywhere. I just happened to see her."

  "One, we don't have objections in Kangaroo Court,” Faulkner said. “And two, Caroline, you had your chance. Now it's Roxanne's turn."

  Caroline's eyes narrowed, but she didn't say anything else as Roxanne continued.

  "As I said, Caroline was waiting for me when I arrived and demanded that I put on the ears and tail. Which I did. And I let her draw whiskers on my face, even though I'm allergic to that brand of makeup.” Now it was her turn to look pleased with herself because she'd been such a martyr.

  "Why didn't you keep the tail on all day?” Mary Beth asked. “Did you lose it?"

  "Not exactly,” Roxanne replied. “You see, I took it off at the beginning of gym class—"

  "See!” Caroline crowed.

  "School regulations clearly state that no accessories of any kind are to be worn with gym uniforms. Even if I'd been willing to break the rules, Coach Odo told me I had to leave the ears and tail in my gym locker. I was fully intending to put them back on after class, but when I got back to my locker, the tail was gone. Somebody had stolen it.” She looked directly at Caroline, making it obvious who she thought the thief was. “I looked everywhere, but I couldn't find it. I did put the ears on and was wearing them when I left the locker room, which is when Caroline saw me. I tried to explain, but she said she was bringing me up on charges. Quite a coincidence that she was lying in wait for me again."

  "Are you saying I took the tail?” Caroline said indignantly. “You just threw it away because you didn't want to wear it."

  "Don't be ridiculous. I'd worn it half the day already. Why throw it away then?"