The Fourth Stall Part III

by Chris Rylander

  Later in the morning somehow a whole section of the eighth-grade locker bay had red dye sprayed inside all of the lockers. How Kinko’s crew had managed to pull that off without being seen by anyone is still a mystery to me. Luckily my locker wasn’t affected, but it didn’t mean I didn’t still feel horrible for the kids whose lockers were. Backpacks, gym clothes, jackets, sweatshirts, homework, textbooks, all ruined. You’d have thought that the school mascot died that day or something when walking by that locker bay since so many kids were crying. It had been a pretty cruel and ruthless attack, but if that was the worst she was going to do, then maybe this wouldn’t turn out so bad, after all. I mean, at the very least all of these attacks had diverted some of the attention away from my marked face. I was still getting ribbed pretty good by kids, but it would have been much, much worse without all of the other distractions.

  But anyways, as you might suspect by now, those two things weren’t even close to the worst things Kinko had planned for me and the school.

  Later that day, around one o’clock or so, I was sitting in science class, listening to these two kids behind me argue quietly over who was going to carry whose backpack that day. They were Kate and Kiah, best friends since I could remember and the two nicest kids in the whole school. Nice to a fault, actually.

  “No, I’ll carry your backpack today,” Kiah whispered. “I mean, your back has been sore since you hurt it at tennis practice last week.”

  “Kiah, don’t worry about my back. I’ll carry your bag. I mean, you’re the one who broke his foot playing football this year!” Kate insisted.

  “Ah, that’s nothing. It’s just a scratch,” he said.

  “A scratch? You have crutches!”

  “Hey, well, okay. Why don’t we carry our own bags this time, if you’re going to be so stubborn? But at least let me buy you lunch today.”

  “But I was going to buy you lunch today! I’ve been planning on it all week,” Kate said, her voice rising.

  Luckily for them our science teacher, Mrs. Lavine, was all but deaf. One time a kid mixed together some chemicals he shouldn’t have and the resulting explosion actually shattered three of the classroom windows, and Mrs. Lavine didn’t even turn around. She just kept on writing stuff on the board.

  “Shoot, what are we going to do?” Kiah said.

  “We can vote?” suggested Kate. “That’s the most diplomatic way.”

  Kiah laughed quietly. “But our votes always end in a one-to-one tie!”

  “Maybe this time will be different?” Kate said.

  I tried not to barf all over myself. Of all the people I ended up sitting next to, why did it have to be them? Everybody usually got pretty annoyed with them. We all kept saying that they should just stop messing around and get married already, since it was obvious that’s what was going to happen eventually. Except they’d probably argue more than any married couple on the planet, despite also being the nicest to each other. Well, this was mostly based on my own parents and movies, but whatever.

  Around the time they were about to start counting their votes and would inevitably reach another one to one stalemate, they stopped talking. The whole class did. Instead we listened to the trickling sound that was growing louder and louder, the same sound the creek had made the night it mercilessly swallowed up four thousand dollars of hard-earned cash.

  Then kids in the front row started leaping from their desks. Mrs. Lavine was still involved in grading some quizzes and hadn’t yet realized that something was happening. Those of us near the back never had the luxury of being able to react in time to avoid damage because all of the kids jumping around on their chairs and desks in front of us blocked our view and distracted us.

  I didn’t figure out what the deal was until I felt my feet were suddenly engulfed in cold liquid. The other kids in the back started leaping from their desks, only making the splashing worse. I, however, just sat there and let the water gushing in from under the classroom door swirl around my ankles.

  By the time Mrs. Lavine had figured out that her feet were in eight inches of water, the flowing had stopped and now the water just pooled there, cold and smelly and slightly yellowish, obviously the act of a master saboteur.

  They dismissed us from the school for the rest of the day while they investigated what exactly had happened to cause the whole school to flood and also to start the clean-up process. Vince and I walked home that day together, and while we both agreed that it was likely Kinko who was responsible, what we couldn’t figure out was why.

  I mean, all the incident had done was ruin some shoes and get all of our students a free half day off from school, maybe even more. What was her angle?

  By the next day—on which school was canceled again—we found out. And it cemented Kinko, in my mind at least, as the most diabolical and genius saboteur in history. The act, which had seemed subtly good at first, ended up being the ultimate sucker-punch. Which I’m sure was exactly the intent.

  School was canceled for the next three days while they tried to clean the place up, fix the pipes, and test for mold. Which, like I said, seemed awesome. But it wasn’t. There are state laws that require all students get a certain amount of school hours every year. So we now had to make up the time missed either at the end of the year or during winter break.

  So just like that, she’d cost us three days of our already limited precious holiday break. And the rumor was that the incident had caused so much damage and would be so expensive to fix that the school was basically flat-out broke now and might have to cut a few programs, including several spring sports and over a dozen school clubs.

  If our school had been a living, breathing person, then Kinko had basically just shot it in the gut with a shotgun with a debilitating disease all over the ammo. Okay, that’s kind of morbid, sure, but so was an entire school having to tromp through our own sewer water for half a day.

  Furthermore, Ears, my best informant, told me he heard that Dickerson knew it was an act of sabotage. But he assumed it was an inside job. And that I was at the top of the suspect list. The word was that Dickerson would be gunning for me when school resumed that Thursday.

  And that’s when I realized exactly what Kinko’s game was. She was going to destroy me and my school in a single diabolical move. This wasn’t business, this was personal.

  I held my nose closed from the musty stench of the recently flooded, old building as Dickerson led me into his office on Thursday morning. He’d personally come to my first-hour class to escort me. That was never a good sign.

  “What happened to your face?” he said as he sat down.

  “Oh, just a joke some friends played on me,” I said, trying to sound casual. The ink had started to fade, thankfully, but it was still plenty visible.

  I could tell from Principal Dickerson’s expression that he didn’t find the “joke” very funny at all. In fact, he was disgusted by it.

  “I knew you hadn’t changed,” he said.

  “But I didn’t do this!” I said, pointing at my face. “Why would I?”

  “I don’t know what sorts of gang rituals you kids have these days. So who knows?”

  “Gang rituals?” I said. “Mr. Dickerson, I never—”

  “I know you’re up to something again, Christian,” he interrupted. “Those pipes didn’t burst on their own. That red ink didn’t just come from nowhere. Not to mention the whole fleet of school buses getting their tires slashed. Do you have any idea how much all of this has set us back? We’re going to have to lay off some teachers! Do you really want that on your conscience? If you even have one?”

  “I swear I had nothing to do with this!” I said, which wasn’t entirely true.

  “Why would I ever believe you anymore?” he said.

  I didn’t know how to answer that convincingly so I just shrugged.

  “Well, just know this, Christian. The school board determined that the pipe incident was ‘accidental,’ even though I know better. But I’m telling you, the next ti
me anything, and I mean anything, ‘funny’ happens around here like the red-ink locker bay incident that I know was a deliberate act, you’re taking the fall for it. And you’ll be expelled immediately. Vince, too.”

  “But you can’t just . . . I mean, you need proof!”

  “Not when a student has a history like yours, I don’t,” he said.

  I could see, thankfully, that he was taking no pleasure in this. In fact, it was likely that his hands were tied. I mean, considering what our school had been through, he was probably under a ton of pressure from the Higher-Up Suits to put an end to this type of activity here. And so his hand was being forced. I could hardly blame him, even as unfair as it was.

  “I haven’t been doing any of this, though,” I pleaded.

  “One. More. Incident. That’s it, dismissed.”

  I got up and left feeling pretty helpless. I mean, now my choices were:

  Do nothing, wait for another attack, and then get expelled.

  Fight back, underestimate Kinko once again, and get the snot beat out of me by Sue and Michi Oba and then Staples, and then probably get expelled for good measure.

  Start working for Kinko like she’d asked and then definitely get expelled and probably get the snot beat out of me afterward for kicks.

  Beg for mercy.

  And so, at lunch that day Vince and I went to the computer lab to type an email to Kinko. Option four was about all we had left. Vince was a much better writer, so he helped me, and together we came up with what I thought was a pretty professional and thoughtful email.

  In it we explained to Kinko my predicament, explained how badly she had crippled the school. Expressed that we all knew she was superior. But that doing anything further wouldn’t ever get me to work for her. All it would do was ruin the school year of a bunch of kids and maybe even the lives of some teachers. And then at the end we hinted that if any further action was taken against us, we’d have nothing else to lose by waging war right back. I thought, all things considered, that she’d be stupid not to accept the truce. It made perfect sense to me. She really had nothing more to gain by continuing this any further.

  We clicked Send.

  Now all we could do was wait.

  After school Vince and I went back to the computer lab. iBully was there, as usual, working on some top-secret coding project. I nodded at him, and he flicked a quick wave in my direction, never taking his eyes off the screen.

  I logged into my email and saw the reply right away. Kinko had replaced the subject line with a smiley-face emoticon.

  “Vince, I think she went for it!” I said.

  Vince grinned and nodded. “Well, what are you waiting for, open it!”

  I clicked the email. Instantly my computer screen turned blue. In fact, all of the screens in the lab did. Then words started flashing on the screen in bold green letters, one at a time.

  YOU

  ARE

  GOING

  DOWN

  PUNK

  !!!!!!!

  LOVE,

  KINKO

  On the last screen with her name on it there were also hearts and smiley faces and an animated flower that was dancing on the back of a unicorn.

  This had happened on every computer in the lab. Then the screens all flashed black, and a white animated skull appeared and it looked like it was laughing. Then everything went dark.

  “Holy, Mac. She sent a virus to the whole school!” Vince said.

  iBully wheeled his chair over, looking panicked.

  “No, no, no, that’s not possible,” he said as he started typing frantically at my computer. “I set up all the extra security myself. The system was hack-proof . . . well, except by me, of course.”

  iBully sat there and typed madly for at least fifteen minutes, the whole time muttering technical mumbo-jumbo to himself like, “Wire access net compromised” or “Cnet drive isn’t found; how is that possible?” or “Server failure at code zero zero seven?”

  Of course I had no idea what he was saying, but all in all it didn’t sound good.

  It must have affected the whole school, because by that time the school’s computer teacher and tech guy, Mr. Kilmer, was in the lab, watching iBully go. Even he knew that iBully was the only person who could possibly fix this.

  iBully was able to get the screen from pitch-black to blue with some text on it and eventually to a green screen with some text, but in the end he never could get it back to a normal Windows screen. After twenty minutes more he pushed back from his table and looked at us, dazed.

  “They did it,” he said.

  “What?” Mr. Kilmer demanded. “Did what?”

  “They took us out,” iBully said. “I’ve never seen work so advanced. They wiped out the whole system. All my years of hard work, gone, all of it. Backup servers, too. It’s all gone forever.”

  He got up slowly. He stumbled toward the door, barely able to walk.

  Mr. Kilmer went after him. “Wait, wait, what do you mean? It’s all gone? Grades, school records, all of it? Are you sure they got to the backup servers? How is that possible?”

  I saw iBully nod slowly as they exited the computer lab. I looked at Vince. He looked at me.

  For once, there was nothing to say.

  I knew it was bad when I went down to the administration offices the next morning after getting called in and saw my parents there. My mom was crying.

  If you think this was like last time where I could talk my way out of it, you’re wrong. This time it was official. It was a “done deal,” or so Dickerson said several times during our meeting.

  I was hereby expelled from Thomas Edison Elementary and Middle School.

  I tried to argue that I hadn’t planted the virus, but Dickerson said it didn’t matter. They were still able to trace it to my school email account, and that was enough since I had already been warned numerous times that year, which, in all honesty, was the truth. The school board had already approved the decision and signed the papers.

  The only good news was that I had managed to convince Dickerson to let Vince stay in school. I signed this thing called an affidavit stating that Vince was in no way involved in the email exchange that caused the computer system meltdown.

  The school didn’t let me go back to class to get my stuff or even to my locker to get my jacket. They said all of that would be mailed to me later that week. We were escorted out immediately. On the way out I saw Mr. Kjelson, who’d I’d really been looking forward to having as a baseball coach later that school year. And now it would never happen.

  He gave me a somber head nod as we passed. I tried to smile, but all I managed was a lip quiver. I forced myself not to cry.

  The car ride home was the longest of my life. My parents didn’t even talk to me. Never before had they had absolutely nothing to say to me. Not even last year when I’d confessed to cheating on the SMARTs for the entire school.

  When we got home, they still didn’t say anything. My dad just pointed upstairs. We all knew I was going to be grounded forever; that much was obvious.

  I went up to my room and lay on my bed. Well, at least one thing had become much clearer now: there’d be no pulling our punches anymore. I was going to eliminate Kinko’s whole operation for good.

  My parents had taken my phone from me first thing when we’d left the school that day. But what they didn’t know was that Vince and I kept a pair of long-range walkie-talkies hidden in our rooms for use in just these types of situations.

  At 3:45 p.m., when I was sure that he’d be home, I contacted him via our emergency channel. He must have been anticipating it, because he answered right away.

  “I can’t believe it” was the first thing he said.

  “I know,” I said as quietly as I could.

  “I heard about you sparing me,” he said. “You should have let him expel me. Then we could still go to school together wherever you’ll end up.”

  “No, you need Kjelson this year. He’s the only coach good enough for
you. Besides, there’d be no way to know that we’d end up at the same school.”

  I thought he knew I was right because there was a long silence. Then finally he spoke again.

  “It’s like my grandma says, ‘This—sucks.’”

  There was static on the line and I couldn’t hear the middle word, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was.

  For once Grandma had nailed it.

  “Anyways, Vince, I was contacting you to tell you to get in touch with Tyrell, Great White, and the Beagle. There’s only one thing left to do, and that’s to get revenge and save the school. This time, it’s war.”

  That night we called a secret meeting in my basement after my parents fell asleep. The planning went well, with pretty good contributions from everybody.

  “What about you?” Vince said. “How will you get out? I’m sure your parents will be keeping tabs on you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ve gotten out while grounded hundreds of times. This will be no different. They’re basically ignoring me, they’re so mad anyway.”

  “What about getting to Thief Valley tomorrow? We obviously can’t ask Staples. My brother is away in college now. . . . My mom will be working. We can’t call a cab; it’ll be too suspicious. . . .”

  “Vince, I got it covered, pal. Are we all good?”

  Great White, Tyrell, and the Beagle all nodded and got up to leave. Vince hung back for a minute after they all walked out.

  “Mac, I . . . I just can’t believe you won’t be my catcher this year. I need you back there, man.”

  I was getting choked up thinking about it. Seriously.

  Vince must have been in the same boat because he simply turned and left and that was that.

  We all met the next morning at nine at Vince’s like we’d discussed the night before. Everyone showed up right on time, and they all had their supplies in their backpacks. Except for the Beagle, our school’s animal and science expert. He had two huge duffel bags with small holes punched in them. Knowing what was inside made me shudder.

  “Okay, so how are we getting there?” Vince asked.