Homeroom Headhunters

by Clay McLeod Chapman

  “Eighth graders…and you? Really?”

  “Three of them.” I nodded. “They were going to town on this defenseless sixth grader.…”

  “And, pray tell, what was your involvement in all of this?”

  “I did what any civic-minded citizen would do. I got right in their face and said, Pick on somebody in your own grade!”

  “Please tell me you didn’t, Spencer. Please.”

  “I had to, Mom.… They all had penny rolls in their hands.”

  “…Penny rolls?”

  “They’re like brass knuckles for middle schoolers. You hold them inside your fist for extra punch.”

  “How do you even know about these things?”

  “Middle school isn’t what it used to be, Mom. It might’ve been all peace, love, and understanding when you were in the seventh grade, but now it’s more like tribal warfare.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “So one of them pulls back his hand, ready to clobber me.” I reeled my own hand back for dramatic effect. “But I duck just in time. His penny-fisted punch lands straight in the assistant principal’s face!”

  “Wait.” Mom blinked. “Assistant principal? Where’d he come from?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”

  “Sorry, sorry.”

  “He’d come in to break it up—and BAM! Fifty cents right in the nose.”

  Mom was staring at me like I had meat loaf all over my face.

  “…What?” I asked.

  “You didn’t have an asthma attack, did you? Because this sounds a lot like a Spencer had another asthma attack and is covering it up with a whopper kind of story.”

  “Just a little one…”

  Mom took in a quick breath, holding it. “You had your inhaler, right?”

  I tugged the shoestring from around my neck with my thumb, pulling My Little Friend out from underneath my T-shirt.

  “Good.” She released the air in her lungs. “You’re supposed to call me if you have an attack, remember? Always. You promised.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  Mom pressed her palm against the side of her head and stared at me. She suddenly looked exhausted.

  “You know,” she said, “it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to tell me what really happened at school today.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Ever hear the story about the boy who cried wolf?”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  She held up her hands. “I just wonder if you’d have an easier time fitting in if you, you know, told the truth now and then.”

  Now it was my turn not to say anything for a while.

  “Dad would’ve believed me,” I said finally.

  “Spencer. I didn’t say I didn’t believe you.…”

  “Dad would’ve thought I’d done the right thing.”

  “Well—your father’s not here, is he?”

  Stalemate. There was nothing left for us to do but stare each other down.

  I caved in first. “Who says I want to fit in, anyway?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “What’s the point of being just like everybody else?”

  “Seems like it’d be easier to make friends if you didn’t push people away all the time.”

  “I’m making plenty of friends already.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Sully.”

  “Sully?”

  Whoops.

  “Just some girl.” I shrugged. “She followed me around all day today.”

  “Tell you what.” Mom paused for dramatic effect. “I’ll make a deal with you.…”

  Didn’t I tell you?

  “Promise me you’ll keep an open mind and stay out of trouble,” she said. “And I’ll make meat loaf sandwiches once a week.”

  I mulled it over. “I’ll give you six months.”

  “Only six months?”

  “A trial period.”

  “At least promise me you’ll be on your best behavior,” she said. “Can you do that much?”

  “Fine. I’ll try.”

  My plate was clean. Mom had barely touched her meat loaf sandwich.

  “You gonna eat that?” I asked.

  “All yours.”

  word of advice to all the newbies out there: Never head to the boys’ room alone.

  I should’ve known better. Between classes on my second day, I stumbled upon Riley Callahan and a couple of his Cro-Magnon cronies sneaking a cigarette in the middle stall.

  “What are you doing in here?” Riley flicked his cancer stick into the toilet.

  “I was just leaving.…”

  I spun 180 degrees, but it was too late. I found myself flanked by two eighth graders. They flossed their arms through mine and carried me kicking into the middle stall—where Riley was waiting, toilet seat up and everything.

  How considerate.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Riley.…”

  “Shut it,” he said. A red welt had blossomed across his forehead from his run-in with the locker. His eyes were swollen from my inhaler hose-down. Each socket was wrapped in a pink ring, like he was suffering from a nasty case of cotton-candy conjunctivitis. “I don’t care how tough you think you were at your last school; maggots start at the bottom of the food chain.”

  “I’ll make a note of it, thanks.”

  Next thing you know, I was completely inverted, literally head over heels above the bowl. The change in my pocket was falling out, landing in the water with a series of loud kerplunks.

  Kerplunk, kerplunk, kerplunk!

  “Make a wish,” Riley said, flushing.

  You better believe I made a wish. It was something along the lines of, Please oh please oh please get me out of here.…

  “How long do you think you can hold your breath?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “I bet a blast from your inhaler would come in pretty handy right about now.…”

  All I could do was breathe in deep and close my eyes before the whirlpool sucked my head in.

  Riley’s cronies gave me a few moments underwater to reflect on how life at Greenfield had been going thus far for me.

  Let’s see: Day one—asthma attack. Day two—head flushed down toilet.

  Only 178 school days left to go.

  “Better find your spot on the totem pole fast,” Riley called out from above the water’s surface, “or some friends who’ll watch your back.”

  When I washed ashore, I found myself alone, stranded on my own tiny toilet bowl island.

  A bathroom-bound Robinson Crusoe.

  I sat there listening to the sound of water dribbling off my clothes.

  Blip.

  Blip.

  Blip.

  “Mr. Simms.” Assistant Principal Pritchard’s voice crackled from the intercom above my head. “Come to the boys’ locker room. We have a busted pipe. Busted pipe in the locker room…”

  That’s when it caught my eye. Some peculiar bathroom-stall graffiti.

  A stick figure. Holding a spear.

  Just above its head, somebody had written:

  WE ARE WATCHING YOU.

  If there’s one thing I’ve discovered, no matter what academic institution I’ve transferred to, it’s that you can learn all you need to know about a school by its graffiti.

  If you want to find out what’s really going on within the hallowed halls of your school, don’t crack open the yearbook. Sneak into the rear stall of the boys’ bathroom and read up.

  This is where the real history is written.

  Who kissed who. Who used to like who.

  The graffiti here sucked. That was just a sad fact. A finger painting from a kindergarten class would have been better than what was thrown up on the walls here.

  So I fished a Sharpie out from my soaked shorts, then peeked through the stall door.

  All clear
.

  I found a free space and started. I didn’t have a lot of time before the bell rang, but more than enough to sprawl my masterpiece above the toilet paper dispenser:

  A portrait of our own beloved Riley hunched over in The Thinker pose, deep in contemplation, with his shorts down at his ankles.

  I am the Van Gogh of vandalism.

  Suddenly I heard a shuffle from the neighboring stall.

  I leaned over and peered under the stall partition.

  There, in plain view, I saw a pair of bare feet.

  Someone’s in the bathroom with me. Right in the next stall. A second ago it was empty.… And what’s up with the missing shoes?

  “Hello?”

  The feet disappeared.

  “…Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Who’s there?”

  Okay. Keep calm. Whoever it is, they’re probably just as scared as I am.

  Play it cool, play it cool and—

  I rushed out of my stall and kicked open the neighboring door.

  “Gotcha!”

  Empty. I threw open the other stall doors to see if whoever it was had slipped into a different toilet.

  Nobody. I was completely alone.

  The bell for class rang. I looked down and noticed ink smudges on my hands. Great. I beelined for the sink. A good way to get caught throwing up graffiti is to have black Magic Marker all over your fingers.

  The ink wasn’t coming off. I kept scrubbing, until I saw something behind my reflection. Above the row of stalls.

  Turning around, I looked up at the ceiling as a fiberglass panel slipped back.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.…”

  omething very strange was going on here.

  Somebody was screwing with me.

  But before I could do anything about it I had to suffer through second period.

  I had Scotch-taped one of Sully Tulliver’s MISSING flyers to the inside of my three-ring binder. That way she’d stick with me through all six periods.

  “Any bright ideas on how to survive the next fifty-eight minutes?” I asked the picture.

  I could almost hear Sully answer: Set your desk on fire?

  “I’ve got a better plan.…”

  I took a seat at the very back of the room and assembled my sharpest pencils.

  “Today, we spearfish for medium-textured, fine-fissured fiberglass ceiling panels.…”

  Thar she blows!

  My record from my old school was six pencils in thirty minutes—and on day two here at Greenfield, I planned on obliterating my top score, in world history class.

  “Wish me luck,” I whispered to Sully’s picture.

  “Can I get everybody’s attention, please?” Mrs. Witherspoon called out just as the bell rang. “Time for our oral presentations.”

  My chest seized. Oral—what? My mind drew a blank.

  “Two minutes,” she said. “Topic of your choice. Now, who’d like to go first?”

  Witherspoon wouldn’t pick me. Not on my second day. Not with only one day to prepare. That would be too cruel. No teacher is that—

  “Mr. Pendleton.” Mrs. Witherspoon zeroed in on me, a hunter eyeing her quarry. “Might I ask what all the pencils are for?”

  “You can never be too prepared, ma’am.”

  “Maybe you’d like to start us off, then?” Mrs. Witherspoon suggested. “What better way for you and the class to get acquainted.”

  Everybody’s heads turned. No one looked all too happy to be making my acquaintance.

  Where did this pack of rabid werekids come from? It was like they could sniff the fresh-student smell on me and were ready to pounce.

  “Is it possible to take a rain check?”

  “Just because you’re new to our school doesn’t mean you can come unprepared to my class, Mr. Pendleton. What sort of example would that set?”

  Was that…a challenge? I do believe so.

  Greenfield really hadn’t rolled out the red carpet for me. First, Riley sent me toilet diving. My clothes were still damp. And now Mrs. Witherwhatever had to throw down the gauntlet.

  I had tried to play nice—but she’d clearly provoked me.

  I’d suffered enough indignities.

  Time for payback.

  “Well, I guess when you put it that way…I’d love to.”

  “I have my stopwatch ready to go whenever you are.”

  I took my time walking up to the front of the class, sensing each and every eye on me. My classmates’ stares practically pinned my limbs to the blackboard like a frog about to get dissected.

  Not one of them knew what to make of me.

  Or cared.

  Here’s a bit of advice for the newbies, courtesy of yours truly: The best defense is a good offense.

  Looking around the room, I could tell I wouldn’t be making any BFFs here. If I was going to crash and burn, I might as well have some fun with it.

  “I recently moved here from…”

  I scanned over the maps of the world wallpapering the classroom, thinking of a million and one other places I’d rather be.

  “…Papa New Guinea,” I said.

  “Don’t you mean Papua New Guinea?” Mrs. Witherspittoon asked. “The islands in the southwestern Pacific Ocean?”

  “That’s what I said,” I said, as if I actually knew what I was saying. “Didn’t I just say that? Have you ever been to Papua New Guinea before, Mrs. Witherspork?”

  “Spoon,” she corrected me. “It’s Witherspoon.”

  “Well—have you?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “Maybe you might learn a little something today!”

  A jaw dropped in the third row.

  “Everybody in my family is an anthropologist,” I began. “I’m actually thinking about continuing their research on the Swanahanzi tribe located there.”

  “The—who?” Witherspank asked, eyes widening.

  “Swanahanzi. Headhunters. Not the nicest neighbors.…”

  This was good. This was really good.

  “Sounds…dangerous,” a flawlessly coiffed blonde uttered from the front row. She was wearing a tennis outfit.

  Does this school even have a tennis team?

  “It most certainly is,” I agreed, before turning back to Mrs. Whitherspazz. “Did you know that the Swanahanzi are the only known tribe that continues to practice headhunting?”

  “…No, I didn’t.”

  “You mean to tell me—and the class—that you’ve never heard one bit of information, not one tiny iota of detail, about the Swanahanzi tribe? Ever?”

  “I guess not.”

  “The Swanahanzi build huts made out of human bones and—”

  “I’m not sure if this is the most appropriate topic,” Mrs. Witherspelunking started to interrupt.

  But there was no stopping me.

  I cut her off. “When a tribesman kills an enemy, they’ll bring the body back to their village and remove the head. Then they sew the eyes and lips shut, and eat the brains from the skull like it’s a bowl.…”

  “Spencer—”

  “They’ll add a squirt of eyeball jam for flavor and slurp the whole thing down, believing they absorb the essence of their enemy.…”

  “Spencer, please—”

  “And it’s been rumored,” I said, gearing up for the cherry on top, “that members of the Swanahanzi have found their way to the United States, perhaps to this very town—so you better watch out!”

  “SPENCER!”

  Suddenly those rabid werekids looked like a herd of bewildered deer caught in the headlights.

  Silence. Sweet, baffled silence.

  Spence: One.

  Witherspoilsport’s world history class: Zero.

  “Well…what a vivid imagination you have, Mr. Pendleton.” She gave a less-than-enthusiastic golf clap.

  “Who knows?” I couldn’t resist. “They may even be here, in school, hunting as we speak!”

  “Your two min
utes are up, Spencer!”

  I could feel every eye follow me as I strutted back to my desk.

  How was that for a first-impression preemptive strike?

  “So,” Mrs. Witherspittle sighed, “who’d like to go next? Anybody?”

  The girl in the tennis getup impaled the air with her arm.

  “Sarah. The class is all yours.”

  The tennis pro cleared her throat as she made her way to the front. “Good morning, class. My name is Sarah Haversand—and today, I’d like to talk about school spirit.”

  Oh boy. Here we go.…

  “School spirit is a vital part of any school. It is the very lifeblood of our student body.”

  “Mr. Simms.” Assistant Principal Pritchard’s voice blurted out from the intercom over Sarah’s head, interrupting her presentation. “We have a busted pipe in the boys’ bathroom. Busted pipe in the boys’ bathroom.…”

  Where were we?

  Ah, yes! Back to spearfishing medium-textured, fine-fissured fiberglass ceiling tiles.

  I waited until Mrs. Withersplat’s back was turned, before hurling my first pencil straight up at the ceiling.

  Bull’s-eye!

  First throw was a success. Right into the blubbery underbelly of white fiberglass. The pencil was a little crooked, like an upside-down Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it would do.

  “I feel as if the students here at Greenfield don’t have enough school spirit,” Sarah continued. “While I, for one, sometimes feel like I have way too much.”

  Throw number two was an utter dud. Not enough thrust.

  If I was going to break my record, I needed to start some rapid-fire harpooning—and fast.

  I steadied my arm for the next shot.

  Deep breath.

  Focus.

  Aim.

  And—fire!

  I threw that pencil harder than any javelin. Its sharpened end buried itself all the way through the panel. This was Olympic gold medal material.

  Then I heard a grunt above my head.

  I rolled my eyes up while keeping my head bowed.

  There.

  One of the panels in the ceiling seemed to breathe. The fiberglass bulged just a bit before settling back.

  “When we come together and share our pride at pep rallies,” Sarah proclaimed, “Greenfield becomes more than just another school. It feels like we’re a family.”

  Then it happened.

  The panel directly above my head pulled back, leaving an inch of darkness.