Dark Days at TAC

by Richard Pinkerton

Tucker Pyles sat with two of his best friends, Ash and Hew outside the front of the school.

  ‘Things are gonna be different, this term,’ Tucker declared. ‘Too many people have given me a lack of respect this year and that’s gonna change.’

  ‘Oooooh, wow,’ the burly Hew scoffed. ‘What are you gonna do, throw your weight around more than usual?’

  Tucker eyed him with contempt, immediately seeing the taunt about his immense size. ‘See what I’m talking about? I don’t even get respect from you two anymore!’

  A smirk appeared on Ash’s brown face. ‘You never got it from us in the first place.’

  ‘And that’s gonna change, because it’s time for me to be top dog at this school again.’

  ‘So does that mean your bite is going to be worse than your bark for a change?’ mocked Hew.

  ‘Just you wait and see!’

  Tucker spotted a skinny, bespectacled junior walk through the gates. Tucker rose to his feet, bowled over to the unfortunate year-niner and grabbed him roughly by the shirt. ‘You, you little ubbhead. Who the hell are you?’

  The young thirteen-year-old flinched as the smell of garlic from Tucker's breakfast invaded his nasal cavities. His eyes bulged as he stared at Tucker. ‘Michael Smith.’ He shuddered.

  ‘Ha! What a stupid name! Michael. Your parents must have hated your guts. And Smith? What a weirdo!’ Michael Smith squirmed uncomfortably under the stench Tucker practically spat at him. ‘What an ubbhead. Hey Ash, what do you reckon, shall I give him a Charlie?’

  The athletic Maori snorted. ‘Why ask me? You please yourself.’ He sighed and gazed up into the sky.

  Tucker glared at his hapless victim. ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn't give you a Charlie, ubbhead?’

  ‘Because it’s the first day of a new term?’ the junior whimpered. ‘And because you're a nice guy who wouldn't give me one?’

  ‘I'll tell you what, ubbhead,’ Tucker said, always happy to be buttered up, even if they didn't mean it. ‘Give me your lunch and I'll let you off with an ear twist, how’s that?’

  The unfortunate junior reluctantly reached into his bag and pulled out a plastic bag with a few sandwiches, a chocolate biscuit and a banana in it.

  ‘Is that all you've got?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Call this a lunch? I wouldn't even call this a snack!’ Tucker drove his knee into the side of Michael's leg causing him to cry out and stagger backwards.

  ‘Hey! You said you wouldn't!’

  ‘I lied.’ Tucker smirked. ‘That’ll teach you for not bringing a decent sized lunch. I expect a bigger one tomorrow, OK? Now ubb off before I give you a real ubbering.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An ubbering! A beating, you stupid moron. Now scram!’

  The junior quickly hobbled away.

  Tucker pulled out one of the sandwiches and examined it. He smiled. ‘Ubba! Cheese and lettuce. My favourite.’ He engulfed it in seconds.

  ‘Wow, that was really telling us,’ Ash snorted. ‘Our respect for you has just gone through the roof after that machismic display of toughness. Stealing a junior’s lunch. What a man.’

  Colin nodded. ‘A real tough guy. I'd like to see him do that to someone like Rex.’

  ‘Don't you mention that name to me, Hew!’ Tucker scowled, his mind filling with bitterness. ‘He confiscated my cell phone the week before term finished and deleted all my photographs off it.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s because you were taking shots of girls’ legs underneath your desk.’

  ‘I got some good ones too and he didn’t give the phone back to me until the end of the week.’

  ‘Just be thankful you weren’t trying to get a shot up Vanessa’s dress,’ Ash said. ‘You would have got more than your cell phone taken off you.’

  ‘Damn straight,’ Hew said. ‘He probably would have smashed the thing over your thick skull.’

  ‘Well as far as I'm concerned that particular ubbhead doesn't exist at this school.’

  ‘Tell him that to his face.’

  ‘Oh, I'll tell it to his face all right. I'll do a lot more then that; I'll knock him out flat!’

  ‘Yeah, with that breath of yours I'm not surprised! What have you been eating?’

  ‘Just Weetbix. Nothing like a good healthy plate of Weetbix for breakfast.’

  ‘And what else? Garlic bread?’

  ‘Well I had some on my Weetbix of course. Garlic that is. Garlic and some chopped up Brussel sprouts. UBBA!’

  Hew screwed up his face. ‘That's sick.’

  Ash scrunched up his face too.

  Tucker paused to gaze on one of his classmates, Holly Robinson, who trotted along the path in their direction. He’d admired her big brown eyes, rounded chin and kissable cheeks so many times, he knew every curve by heart. Her hair looked different and in fact, it enhanced her entire look. It seemed to Tucker, that over the holidays she had gone from total babe to beyond total babe. It frustrated him deeply that she was so dedicated to her idiot boyfriend, Rick Maverick.

  ‘Tucker,’ she said. Tucker’s heart skipped a beat at the sound of his name. Holly never talked to him and whenever she did, it was usually in a lot less pleasant tone of voice. ‘Mr Reaper wants to see you in his office before assembly.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Tucker.

  ‘How the hell should I know? He just told me that when I saw you, to… you know… tell you to go see him. Way to ruin my morning having to see your butt-ugly face.’

  Now that was the tone of voice he’d come to expect from her and most of the other hot chicks for that matter. He watched her walk away, admiring the shape of her butt as she left, but once the vision of beauty had gone from his line of sight, disturbing thoughts came to mind. He thought back to a prank he had pulled on the last day of school the previous term. ‘Oh no... I wonder if it's about the toilets.’

  ‘What you did before the holidays?’ Hew asked.

  ‘Yeah. Do you think he found out?’

  ‘How could he?’ Ash asked.

  Then a more pleasant thought occurred to Tucker and he stared at his pal’s with a smile. ‘Hey, I know! He must want to know if I want to take over from Dale Casterton as head boy, seeing as Dale left at the end of the term. They want me to take over, that’ll be it.’

  ‘Crap!’ both his companions chimed in at the same time.

  ‘Why not?’ Tucker imagined himself standing on the stage giving a speech as the new head boy. ‘I would make a great head boy.’

  ‘Well, for one thing, you're not a year-thirteen,’ Hew said.

  ‘And another thing, you'd make a really stink head boy,’ Ash said.

  ‘I would not!’

  ‘Would so! You'd make the worst head boy since Janet Barton.’

  ‘But she was head girl two years ago, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Both Ash and Hew burst out laughing.

  ‘Urrrrrbarrrrrrr!’ Tucker snarled. ‘Just you wait, I will be head boy. They'll be begging me to be head boy. You'll see!’

  Ten minutes later, Tucker sat in Mr Reaper’s office. It was only a small office as it was nothing much to look at. Boxes of stationery stacked up next to the wall. Apart from a couple of filing cabinets, the only other object was a large pot plant standing next to the desk which had papers and other bits and pieces strewn over it. Mr Reaper obviously didn't care much for keeping his office tidy and Tucker certainly didn't care much for his facial expression. It looked grim and dour and although that seemed to be its usual state, Tucker realised he was not there to be offered the position of head boy.

  Tucker tried to break the tension in the air. ‘Nice day, isn't it, Mr Reaper?’

  The Reaper scowled. ‘Why is it that whenever someone says that to me they end up feeding me a whole load of crap?’

  ‘You'll never hear anything like that coming from me, Mr Reaper. You won’t hear anything come out of my mouth that doesn't make total sense. No verbal diarrhoea
, I can guarantee you that. If you want pearls of wisdom, than all I have to do is open my mouth. All totally intelligent and intellectual.’

  ‘That's debatable. You're here because I heard some serious allegations about you.’

  ‘Me? I didn't do anything!’ Tucker's mind was suddenly full of a hundred possible reasons why Mr Reaper had called him to his office. The main one had been preying on his mind ever since he had found out that Mr Reaper wanted to see him. ‘And I definitely didn't smear the toilet walls next to the library with cow dung before the holidays.’

  Mr Reaper eyes lifted. ‘You did that?’

  ‘No, sir!’ Tucker flinched. ‘In fact, I think that it was Rex Cassidy who did that, not me.’

  ‘That's not Rex's style.’ Anger burned in the Reaper’s eyes. ‘And if I find out that it was you, young Tucker, you'll be in serious trouble.’

  ‘No, it wasn't me. I don't know anything about it. In fact, this is the first I've heard of the toilet walls being covered in cow dung. Boy, Mr Reaper there are some real ubbheads around, aren’t there? Like the guy who poured a bottle of urine into the staff tea pot.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘On the last day of school.’

  ‘I don't remember...’ Mr Reaper’s face screwed up. ‘Come to thing of it, the tea did taste a little funny that morning…Aghhhhhhh…Hey wait a minute Pyles, weren't you on staff kitchen duties that morning?’

  ‘N… No.. Yes, I was, but it wasn't me, it might have been Pete Cook, he was on staff kitchen duties as well.’

  ‘Are you sure that you didn't do it, Pyles?’

  ‘Yes, I'm sure.’

  ‘You don't look too sure to me.’

  ‘It wasn't me, it was Pete!’

  ‘Blaming others eh? If you knew about it, why didn't you report it?’

  ‘Well, I had only heard rumours about it.’

  Reaper scowled at Tucker and fidgeted violently with his pen. He opened his mouth to say something else then sighed in frustration. ‘Anyway… the reason I called you here, was that I was told that you were seen smoking out by the incinerator this morning.’

  ‘What?’ That was the one thing Tucker hadn’t been expecting. Sure, he had been smoking there that morning, shortly before his bullying of Michael Smith, but he was positive that no one had seen him.

  ‘Is it true, Tucker?’

  ‘No! I'm allergic to cigarette smoke. In fact, I don't even know what a cigarette looks like. I've never ever seen one before.’

  ‘Rubbish, Tucker, I know for a fact that your dad smokes. Don't lie to me; I've heard enough lies from you for one morning.’

  ‘But I'm telling the truth, I wasn't smoking!’

  ‘What's that bulging in your shirt pocket then?’ He pointed.

  Tucker glanced nervously down at the cigarette-pack-sized bulge that swelled underneath his jersey. His heart began to beat fast and he had trouble speaking. ‘Ah...’

  ‘Well? What is it?’

  ‘A... a book?’

  ‘A book?’ Reaper scowled. ‘Let's see it!’

  Tucker hesitantly reached down into his jumper and withdrew the object from his pocket. It was indeed a book. Mr Reaper’s eyes poked out of his head and his left eyebrow lifted up and down a few times. Then he grabbed it from him and his frown returned. ‘Tobacco Growing?’

  ‘I just wanted to expand my general knowledge, Mr Reaper.’

  ‘Where did you get this? You certainly didn’t get it from the library!’

  ‘I brought it on Trade-Me.’

  Mr Reaper huffed. ‘I guess I ought to be thankful that you’re not manufacturing P. This school has been having a lot of problems with that lately.’

  ‘I’d never take that garbage, Mr Reaper. That’s really dangerous. Surely no one around here would be that stupid?’

  ‘You’d be surprised! Anyway...’ He shook the book in the air. ‘As far as I’m concerned, this is all the proof I need of your flagrant abuse of school rules. You're on detention every lunch time for a week.’

  Tucker lowered his eyes to the ground in defeat and groaned. He wondered who had dobbed him in. Surely, it couldn't have been Ash or Hew? Whoever it was, he was going to get a good ubbering once he found out.

  ‘One more question, Tucker and I want a truthful answer. Who else was smoking with you?’

  ‘Huh?’ It had just been him and Hew, with Ash there for company.

  ‘Who else?’

  Tucker paused. He didn't want to get his friends into trouble, but he had to try to get back on Mr Reaper’s good side. He just couldn't resist dropping the name of his worst enemy. ‘Rex Cassidy was with me.’

  Reaper’s eyebrow lifted several more times. His eyes widened and he stared at Tucker dazed. ‘Rex?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Trying to settle your differences were you? Smoking the peace pipe, so to speak?’

  ‘The peace cigarette,’ corrected Tucker, feeling that things were going a lot better now.

  Mr Reaper seemed to believe him. ‘The peace cigarette.’ He smirked. ‘Well Tucker, Rex will be joining you for TWO weeks’ worth of detentions every lunch time.’

  ‘Two weeks! But you said one!’

  ‘That was before I had a confession! I didn't really have solid proof that you had been smoking. But now that you've admitted it, I can go ahead with a more serious punishment.’

  ‘But I wasn't smoking!’ wailed Tucker.

  ‘Get out of here now Tucker, before I make it a month of detentions.’

  Tucker sighed in defeat, rose to his feet and with his head hung low, left the office.