The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [23]
The general rule with LP is: If you get on his bad side, you’d better have your head on a swivel, because he can come out of nowhere and take you down before you even know he’s there.
3. Snapper—Snapper looks pretty harmless, if you’re one of those people who consider little third-grade girls harmless. But everybody at my school knows better. Snapper is one of those girls who is used to getting her way; she is a brat through and through. Which in itself isn’t all that bad. But it is triply terrifying considering that her signature move is a bite so hard it would snap a man clean in half if her mouth were big enough. And it isn’t too far off. Sometimes if you look at her right before she’s about to strike, her face is all mouth and nothing else.
Lots of little girls are biters. That’s not really all that new. But the difference with Snapper is that she is an especially talented biter. If she isn’t getting her way, she strikes fast and hard. Once her iron jaws are clamped around whatever appendage you’re unlucky enough to have too close, you can pretty much kiss it good-bye until either several teachers are able to pry open her jaws or she simply gets tired of making you beg for mercy.
The worst part about Snapper’s bite and perhaps what makes it especially deadly is that struggling only makes her bite harder. One kid even was poking her in the eyes and pulling her hair so hard we all thought she would soon be bald, but all that did was make her bite so hard that she broke the skin and the kid ended up with an infected arm for three months.
4. The Hutt—The Hutt got his name because he kind of looks and sounds like Jabba the Hutt from the Star Wars movies. He has thick lips and a slimy, sluglike appearance. He also slurs his speech, and when he does talk, it is with a raspy, gurgling voice. And I bet he would choose to ride around on a concrete slab with Princess Leia chained to him if that was possible. He is kind of a slobby, gross kid, and normally that would make him ripe to get bullied himself, but the fact is that the Hutt is a jerk, flat-out. He is an eighth-grade bruiser and often likes to trip kids in the halls for no reason other than to show everybody else just how cool he thinks he is. The sad truth is that Jar Jar Binks is more likely to ever end up with a girlfriend than this kid, and that makes me feel a little bad for him, despite the fact that he’s usually nothing more than a mean blob of slime.
5. Kevin—Kevin is your typical, run-of-the-mill, good old seventh-grade bully. He’s tall, big, has a lot of freckles, and likes to make kids miserable. His standard move is also pretty classic: He’s a lunch-money guy. He thrives on lunch money the way zombies thrive on brains. It got so bad at one point that the school had to lower the prices on their à la carte items, such as cookies, pizza, and Little Debbie snacks, because so few kids could afford to buy that stuff anymore. Oddly enough, that was the one year that our school actually passed the Presidential Physical Fitness standards in gym class.
A lot of kids come to me for help with Kevin and I do what I can. But sometimes it seems like there are at least twenty Kevins running around the school feasting on kids’ lunch money. One day, a day that everybody now calls the Day the Lunch Money Died, Kevin had thirty-three confirmed attacks spanning six different grade levels. It had been the largest-scale lunch money massacre in history. There’s no question that Kevin has a hunger for lunch money that goes far beyond basic greed. I was eventually able to get Kevin to lay off the younger kids for the most part, which is better than nothing. Plus, he’s gotten so good at taking lunch money that he rarely has to beat anybody up anymore. Kids basically just throw their quarters at his feet as he walks by them in the halls.