Peashooter turned back to me. He didn’t look all too happy.
I think this boat just got rocked a bit.…
• • •
Witherspoontificate kick-started our class the following morning with a discussion on the decline of Napoleon.
“What could’ve caused the downfall of this once-mighty emperor?” she asked. “Can anybody think of an example of what lead to Napoleon’s demise?”
Sarah Haversand’s hand shot up. “The invasion of Russia?”
“Yes—the disastrous Russian invasion in 1812. What else? Anyone have any thoughts?”
I raised my hand.
That’s right: I actually raised my hand.
“Spencer? You have something constructive to contribute?”
“Seems to me like he got a little carried away,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Maybe he wore out his welcome and should’ve called it quits while he was ahead and before somebody else overthrew him and sent him and his men to juvie hall for the rest of their lives.…”
“That’s…mostly true. Napoleon was overextending his army because of his ambition to control more and more of the European continent. Sometimes your desire to control can lead to your own defeat.”
I hoped somebody up above was listening.
“Mr. Simms.” Pritchard’s voice sputtered out from the intercom. “Please come to the boys’ bathroom. We have another busted pipe.…”
I raised my hand again.
“Something else, Mr. Pendleton?”
“May I have a pass to the bathroom, please?”
• • •
I finally broke the administration’s code.
Took you long enough, Spence.
Whenever Pritchard mentioned a “busted pipe” over the intercom, it meant Mr. Simms had to slog through the aftermath of another tribal act of sabotage.
Talk about employee of the month.
Peashooter had pilfered the master list of locker combinations from the office, then gutted the lockers and stuffed their contents down the toilets.
Homework assignments. Notes from class. Graded test papers.
All soaked.
“Any idea who did this?” I asked.
Mr. Simms glanced at me, then turned back toward the mess.
“Bathroom’s out of order,” he said. “Best you use another one.”
“Mind if I help?”
“Don’t you have some class to go to?”
I nodded. “Probably.”
“Suit yourself.”
Mr. Simms got to work on mopping up the flood of toilet water.
I picked up a sheet of loose-leaf paper floating on the floor, the ink bleeding across the page. “Do you always clean up after them?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.…”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
He turned around and looked me dead in the eyes. “What if I do?”
“So all this time I’ve been saying there’s a tribe of kids running around school and you acted like you didn’t believe me, like I was crazy, you knew they were here?”
Simms went back to his mopping without saying another word.
“Who else knows about them?”
“Just us, far as I can tell,” he admitted. “That’s probably how they want to keep it.”
“Are you gonna let them get away with this?” I whispered, wondering if there were eyes staring down at us from the ceiling.
“You mean rat them out?” Mr. Simms huffed. “Who’d believe me?”
I knew how he felt.
He checked to see if the coast was clear, then whispered, “I hear they’ve asked you to join.”
“How do you know that?”
“Just because I’m a janitor doesn’t mean I don’t see what’s going on.” He sounded a little offended. “My advice? Not that you asked.”
“What?”
“Better know what you’re getting yourself into.”
• • •
Mrs. Royer started off our English class by scribbling THE CALL OF THE WILD BY JACK LONDON across the blackboard.
“Here was neither peace, nor rest, nor a moment’s safety,” she read from her book. “All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril…”
I peered up toward the ceiling, not surprised to see the fiberglass panel pulled back.
Of course.
For the last part of the passage, Mrs. Royer placed her copy down on her knee and looked out at the class, reciting the rest by heart. “They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of…”
I recited right along with her: “… Claw and fang.”
“Spencer!” Mrs. Royer’s eyes widened. “I’m impressed. You’re one of only two students to have read this book before I assigned it in class.”
“Who was the first?”
Of course I knew who it was.
“You wouldn’t know him.… He wasn’t here for long.”
“What was his name?”
All I needed was to hear her say Peashooter’s true name. Research for Operation: Tribal Identity Retrieval had hit a brick wall with him, and I was desperate to know.
The other members of the Tribe had been a cinch to pinpoint. It had taken a little sifting through the yearbooks in the library, sure—but eventually I’d stumbled upon their pictures.
Sporkboy, Compass, Yardstick.
Even Sully.
I had unearthed photographs of their former sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade selves. Dressed in regular clothes. No arsenals strapped to their chests.
Not Peashooter, though. No photos. No records of his middle-school existence whatsoever.
Mrs. Royer swallowed. Her lips parted. She took in a quick breath:
“His name was—”
Bells shattered the classroom.
The fire alarm. Somebody had pulled the fire alarm.
I’ll give you one guess who.
“Well, everybody,” Mrs. Royer called out over the clamor, “you know the drill. Out into the parking lot!”
Students were herded through the hallway. I straggled at the back of the line.
Passing the boys’ room, I heard something inside.
An oink.
Could’ve been my imagination—but I stepped inside. Seemed empty. The doors to each stall were shut.
Another oink.
“Who’s there?”
I walked over to the first stall and pushed it open. Nothing behind door number one.
“Sully—that you?”
Opening the middle stall door, I suddenly came face-to-face with Sporkboy.
Guess I should’ve gone with door number three.
His face was masked with the kind of hairnet that the cafeteria ladies wear.
He was brandishing corn dog nunchucks.
I repeat: Corn dog. Nunchucks.
As in, Sporkboy had taken two frozen corn dogs from the cafeteria deep freeze and tied them together with a shoestring. He swung them through the air in total ninja fashion. Those petrified hot dogs blurred into a battered haze until one of them landed directly on my shoulder. The cold sting rang through my bones.
“Ow!”
“That’s from Peashooter,” he said, jabbing me in the chest with his corn dogs. “Stop sniffing around.”
“How do you keep those things so frozen?” I rubbed my shoulder.
“Liquid nitrogen from the science lab,” Sporkboy said. “Compass came up with it. It freezes things superfast and for hours.”
“Compass has way too much time on his hands.”
“Follow me,” Sporkboy said, dragging me out of the bathroom. I spotted the graffiti scrawled across his arm: MODEL STUDENT. “We don’t have much time.”
“Wait—where are we going?”
GHOST STORY NUMBER THREE: SPORKBOY
Chosen Name: Sporkboy
Given Name: Benjamin Greenwood
Area of Study:
Wild-card, Arts and Crafts
Weapon of Choice: Spork-daggers, natural gas, mascot-Kevlar, penny-roll mace
Last seen: 6th grade
Notes: Off his rocker. Daredevil. Wants to impress the rest.
SPORKBOY FIELD NOTES ENTRY #1:
LOCATION: CAFETERIA
TIME: FOURTH PERIOD. 11:20 A.M.
Sporkboy hefted a tub of dehydrated mashed potatoes across the cafeteria floor. He poured a gallon of water into the vat of desiccated flakes, gleefully stirring up his caldron full of instant spuds with a ruler.
SPORKBOY: We don’t use our old names anymore. We’re new people now, so we need new names.
ME: New? New how?
SPORKBOY: Nobody wants to be who they were. Now we can be whoever we want to be.
His name used to be Benjamin.
Benjamin Greenwood.
I first found his picture after flipping through three years’ worth of Greenfield Middle School yearbooks. Even though the picture was in black and white, I could totally tell that was Sporkboy’s carroty-red curly hair. Those were Sporkboy’s freckles spread all over his chubby cheeks.
Werekids would pick on him because of his weight.
SPORKBOY: I’d be walking down the hall, just trying to get to class, when somebody would come up and punch me in the gut.
He got called all kinds of names:
Lard Bucket
Garbage Disposal
Barf Bag
Benjamin was in the sixth grade when he disappeared. One day he was getting teased in English class—the next, his desk was just empty.
When I pressed him to tell me why he’d left everything behind—his family, his friends, his whole life—he grinned so wide his cheeks pinched his eyes until I couldn’t see them anymore.
SPORKBOY: I found my real friends.
ME: And nobody picks on you anymore?
SPORKBOY: Peashooter says, “When people tease you, it’s only because they’re afraid of something they sense in you. Something they don’t understand. The only way they know how to deal with it is to make fun of it. That’s just because they’re scared.”
ME: Peashooter sure has a lot to say, doesn’t he?
SPORKBOY: Peashooter always says, “The more you know, the more havoc you can wreak.”
ME: He really says that?
SPORKBOY: All the time. He says, “Limited minds, limited havoc. Bigger minds, bigger havoc!”
ME: Well…how about you? What do you say?
SPORKBOY: What do you mean? Whatever Peashooter says, goes. That’s the law of claw and fang.
So much for independent thought.
ME: So…what’s with all the potatoes?
SPORKBOY: You’ll see. “Double, double, toil and trouble…”
SPORKBOY FIELD NOTES ENTRY #2:
LOCATION: BOYS’ BATHROOM
TIME: FOURTH PERIOD. 11:24 A.M.
It took some prying, but Sporkboy eventually told me what his last straw was.
Corn Dog Day.
Benjamin had sat down in the cafeteria, when some kid from class slid into the seat next to his.
It was none other than Riley Callahan.
SPORKBOY: Nobody ever sat at a table with me. Not on purpose. Certainly not Riley.
Benjamin had a rep for doing whatever people dared him to.
If you dared him to chew an old wad of bubble gum scraped off the underbelly of his desk—he’d do it.
If you dared him to pick up a fresh steaming dog turd with his bare hand—chances are, he’d do that too.
He and his pals had made a bet that Sporkboy couldn’t eat ten corn dogs before the bell rang.
Ten corn dogs in less than ten minutes.
One corn dog per minute.
SPORKBOY: Here was Riley, this upper-tier, in-crowd guy who acted like I didn’t exist most days, daring me to dig in.…
All the other kids circled around the table while he chowed down, chanting out his name: “Benji! Benji! Benji!”
He chewed through his fifth corn dog.
His sixth corn dog.
His seventh.
SPORKBOY: The first few corn dogs went down okay. But then my throat started getting dry. By the time I got to number eight, I couldn’t swallow anymore. The cornmeal mush started sticking in my throat.… It just wouldn’t go down.
Rather than realize Benjamin wasn’t capable of swallowing, Riley took the palm of his hand and pushed the tail end of corn dog number eight into his mouth.
He literally tried to shove it down Benjamin’s throat.
The stick running through the middle of the corn dog slid through the meat and stabbed Benjamin in the back of his mouth.
SPORKBOY: It tapped at my gag reflex like he was pushing my upchuck button.
He brought up seven and a half corn dogs.
SPORKBOY: I puked all over Riley.
The entire cafeteria echoed in laughter. The sound still reverberated in Sporkboy’s memory.
He told me he’d never eat another corn dog again.
SPORKBOY: Food with concealed weapons is a dangerous endeavor, you know?
SPORKBOY FIELD NOTES ENTRY #3:
LOCATION: CAFETERIA
TIME: LUNCH PERIOD. 11:45 A.M.
“Mr. Simms.” Assistant Principal Pritchard’s voice cut through the hallway as students started filing their way back inside the building. “Please come to the cafeteria. We have a busted pipe.…”
Not a busted pipe—but a bust of Riley Callahan rendered in mashed potatoes with a half dozen bread-battered hot dogs stuffed down his throat.
The likeness was quite striking.
A crowd had gathered around the cafeteria doors to marvel at Sporkboy’s masterpiece.
Today was Corn Dog Day.
riday night. Time to roam through the mall with my pals or catch a movie at the multiplex with my girlfriend.
Hardly.
Try, sneaking back into school.
There had been a note waiting for me in my locker after fifth period. It was in Sully’s handwriting:
Meet me in the science lab tonight.
But when I slipped into the lab, it wasn’t Sully who was waiting for me.
I found Peashooter and Compass instead. Compass was carrying a pillowcase with something heavy inside.
“What’s going on? Where’s Sully?”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Peashooter said. “She asked if we’d come pick you up.”
Suspicion quickly took over.
“You got her to write that note, didn’t you?”
Peashooter shrugged his shoulders. His patented grin crept out across his lips. He had tagged his arm with LOST BOY.
Why was I here?
Compass reached into the pillowcase and pulled out a jar with some kind of clear fluid sloshing around.
“Here,” he said, holding the empty sack up to me. “Slip this on.”
“You can’t be serious. I’m a guy with asthma.”
“One drop of this stuff and—poof.” Compass swirled the contents of the jar. “Out cold. I hope I got the recipe right. Haven’t tested it out on a human subject yet.”
“Yet?”
Peashooter slipped the pillowcase over my head, and something wet dripped across my forehead.
“Deep breaths,” Compass said as the unexpected smell of Mentho-Lyptus seeped through the cotton.
I tried to fight, but my limbs suddenly felt rubbery.
“Maybe you should give him more.” Peashooter’s voice sounded like it sank an octave with each word. “Just to be sure.”
My head got heavy. My neck couldn’t hold it up.
Anybody got a pillow?
• • •
I woke to a mechanical hum. At least that’s how it sounded from under the pillowcase. A full-on migraine pounded against my eardrums, like a marching band was parading through my brain.
The cotton cover gradually slipped off my head. I wished it had stayed on.
I was hanging upside down.
Again.
Only this time, in shop class. My hands were tied behind my back. Beneath my head was a table saw.
Turned on.
The protective guard had—rather inconveniently—been removed. The saw’s teeth blurred together into a continuous streak.
My Little Friend slowly slid out from beneath my T-shirt. It dangled in front of my face before the shoe-lace slipped completely off and fell onto the blade and—zzzst!
No more inhaler.
Looking over to my left, I saw Yardstick holding the end of a rope. The rest of the Tribe stood behind him, Sully included, watching me wriggle through the air.
Peashooter stepped up. “How’s it hanging?”
If this is the best pun he can come up with, I should be the only one allowed to crack jokes.
“Oh, you know,” I yelled, over the hum of the table saw. “Hanging by a thread.”
Peashooter held up my backpack. “What’ve we got here?”
“That’s mine!”
Rummaging inside, he pulled out my math textbook. “What’s tonight’s homework assignment?”
“Review pages thirty through thirty-two.”
“Sucks that you have to carry this heavy textbook just for three measly pages.” He flipped through. “Why not just bring home the ones you need and leave the rest of your book behind?”
He ran my math textbook across the table. The blade chewed through its pages, sending a fine dust of math equations flurrying straight into my face.
If I had any doubt that blade was real, it quickly faded.
“What other homework do you have?”
My language arts textbook was next.
Then world history.
One by one, Peashooter ran my textbooks through the saw until there were none left.
“Now what?” he grinned. “How about…”
He pulled out his staple remover. He pinched me by the nose and tugged.
“You?”
He let my nose go, sending my upturned body swinging back and forth through the air like a pendulum. There was about three feet between my neck and the blade.
“Yardstick!” Peashooter called out.
Yardstick shook his head. “I don’t know about this. I don’t think we should—”
“Just do it!”
Yardstick eased the rope downward as Peashooter recited: “Down—certainly, relentlessly down!… How fearful…the proximity of the steel!… Death would have been a relief.…”
Homeroom Headhunters Page 11
