Suckers - Jack Kilborn [44]
“I don’t want to hold the baby.”
“I don’t want to hold the baby, either.”
“Well, somebody has to hold the baby.”
“I know! Let’s let Clumsy Joe hold the baby!”
“That’s a great idea! Clumsy Joe can hold the baby!”
“Hey, Clumsy Joe! Come over here for a minute!”
I walked up to the front of the classroom, which was currently functioning as a theatre stage. “Hi, fellas. What’s going on?”
Tim, who was my best friend in Ms. Peckin’s seventh-grade class, held out the naked baby doll to me. “Here, Clumsy Joe. Why don’t you hold the baby?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m pretty clumsy.”
“That’s okay. We trust you, Clumsy Joe.”
“Well, all right…”
“Okay, I think we’ve seen enough,” said Ms. Peckin from her desk. “The three of you can sit down.”
“But we weren’t done!” I insisted.
“Don’t argue with me, Andrew Mayhem. That skit was not appropriate and you know it.”
I just stood there, appalled. We’d spent an entire evening coming up with the clever dialogue and shocking plot twist (Clumsy Joe drops the baby). And I personally had spent several hours rigging up and testing the baby doll so that the fake blood sprayed just right when it hit the tile floor. Ms. Peckin hadn’t notified us about any content restrictions on the assignment beforehand, so how dare she decide at the last second that baby splatter was inappropriate?
“Does that mean we get an F?” I asked.
“No, it means that you’ll redo the assignment. Now sit down.”
I sat down. Vile old twenty-five year-old crone. Revenge was in order. Sweet, cruel, delicious revenge.
The following Monday, Ms. Peckin walked out into the school parking lot to find her car covered with bloody dismembered baby doll body parts.
Somehow she figured out that I was responsible.
Detention was not unknown to me. I sat up front, staring at the periodic table of the elements poster on the wall, wishing the clock would magically fade to an hour from now the way it did in the movies.
Ms. Peckin looked up from the paper she was grading as the classroom door opened. “You’re fifteen minutes late,” she said.
“I couldn’t find the room.”
“Then you’re here until 5:00.”
I turned around as the kid sat down.
“Up front, please,” said Ms. Peckin.
The kid got up and sat down next to me. I didn’t recognize him, but he was extremely skinny and had a sizable nose.
“What am I supposed to do while I’m here?” he asked.
“Just sit.”
“No homework?”
“Just. Sit.”
The kid nodded. When Ms. Peckin returned to brutally savaging the paper she was grading (at least, that was a safe assumption), the kid turned to me and rolled his eyes. I rolled my eyes back.
We sat there for a long moment.
The kid took out a blue pen and wrote on his palm. He quickly flashed the message to me: “I’m Roger.”
I didn’t have a pen handy, but he passed his over to me. I wrote “I’m Andrew” on it and flashed it to him.
Roger nodded, and wrote a message on his other hand. “Ms. Peckin seems pretty cool.”
What the hell was he talking about? Ms. Peckin was the evil antithesis of cool! Clearly, the new kid was wacky in the head. I gave him a facial expression that indicated that I felt he was wacky in the head.
He kept holding up his hand to show me his fatally flawed message.
Ms. Peckin looked up again. “What are you doing?”
Roger balled his hand into a fist. “Nothing.”
Ms. Peckin stood up and walked out from behind her desk. “Let me see what’s in your hand.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Open it.”
Roger opened his hand and smiled sheepishly. Ms. Peckin read the message. “Oh. Well, this time is really meant for silent reflection, so no more of that, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
We both got out at 4:45.
As we walked home from school, Roger told me his life story, which even for a seventh grader was pretty uneventful. He’d lived in Arizona all his life, until his dad got a job in Chamber, Florida.
“What is there to do in this town?” he asked.
“Well…you can go to school,