Slob - Ellen Potter [53]
I felt a light brush against my left arm, and I opened one eye to see that Jeremy had crouched down beside me. We looked at each other for a moment without saying a word. It had all been so strangely similar to that night two years ago, only back then I had been blocking the door from Jeremy, not Wooly, and it had not ended with everyone being just fine.
“You did a good thing,” Jeremy said. “That was really . . . you know, heroic.”
I nodded. I didn’t feel heroic. But maybe it’s one of those overrated things.
15
I almost felt sorry for the security guard. He came rushing through the door, his underarm stains already creeping farther down his uniform than I had ever seen before, ready for a full-blown riot. But when he burst into the locker room, he was told that he wasn’t needed after all. He still hung around for a few minutes in the hopes, I’m guessing, that some new riot would break out. No such luck. Mason’s teacher’s aide appeared and quickly ushered him out. She must have had some harsh words for Wooly because he came out of the locker right after, muttering angrily to himself. He walked right past us without even noticing me and Jeremy on the floor. The noon bell rang. Gym class was over.
Jeremy went back to her classroom (GWAB had slipped out of the lunchroom for The Blue and White Rebellion, since they had lunch right before we did), and I changed back into my clothes and headed out of the gym. It was almost as though nothing had happened. Almost. But on my way out of gym class, Andre Bertoni failed to thump me anywhere on my body and no one made any farting noises as I passed by. If someone less of a bully magnet than myself had defied Wooly the way I had just done, there probably would have been some hooting or some “You rock”-ing. But no one knew what to do in my case, so they didn’t do anything. And you know what? That was fine by me.
The part that wasn’t so fine by me was having lunch with Izzy. With all the stuff that had happened in the gym, I had completely forgotten about Izzy and my suspicions. I even forgot to check inside the IPuffins tote bag to see if the cookies were gone before I went into the lunchroom. Of course the second I saw Izzy’s head towering above everyone else’s, it all came back to me.
Still, I didn’t feel like I could just go up to him and say, “Okay you creep, I know it was you who took my Oreos all along,” because I didn’t have any real proof. It was all circumstantial evidence, as they say. Instead, I decided to simply not sit with him. That was a statement in itself. Unfortunately, Izzy spotted me before I could find another seat and started waving like mad with this crazy big grin on his face.
And then he gave me the thumbs-up.
It’s really hard to snub someone who is giving you the thumbs-up. Try it sometime and you’ll see.
“I heard all about it, man,” Izzy said when I reluctantly approached the table and sat down. “The hallways were buzzing with the news.” He held out his bear-paw-sized hand and I had to shake it. “You are truly a hero, dude.” He lowered his head so that it was closer to mine. “But why’d you do it? People are saying you were protecting Mason Ragg. They said that he got scared of doing this race with you and he made a run for it back to the locker room and you wouldn’t let Wooly get at him to drag him out. Why’d you do that, man? I thought Ragg was your number one archenemy.”
“He’s not my archenemy,” I said.
No, that title belongs to you, I thought.
“He never stole my Oreos, you know,” I said.
“Really?” Izzy made the phoniest surprised face I had ever seen in my life.
“No,” I said coldly, staring back at him.
“Do you know who did?” Izzy asked.
“Let’s just say I have my suspicions,” I said.
Izzy lifted his upper lip like he smelled something bad. “Why are you acting like that?” he asked me.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like a detective on one of those cheesy old TV shows.”
That made me turn red in the face, which annoyed me to no end, since