The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [36]
We put on ski masks in case we were caught. Then we’d still have a chance to run and possibly get away without being identified. We nodded at one another and left my office, creeping through the halls, staying low and close to the walls.
Soon we arrived at the fourth-grade locker bay. I looked at a printout of locker assignments that I’d acquired earlier this year by helping out an administration office student assistant with a problem involving her parents and some boy who apparently had really dreamy eyes. We stopped in front of our target’s locker.
“You have the key?” Joe asked me.
“No, we came all this way and I forgot to check,” I said.
Joe rolled his eyes. “I was just asking.”
I smiled at him and held up the small brass-colored key. Vince and Joe nodded, but if there is such a thing as a nervous nod, those were it. We all knew how serious searching through another kid’s locker is. Especially if you broke in by using the master key. That’s right. I was holding the master key to every locker in the school.
How did I get such a key? Well, there’s actually a pretty cool story that explains it all, how I got my office and keys to the school and all sorts of other perks, such as the locker master key. Remember how I said before that I’m in tight with the janitor? Well, it’s kind of a long story, but I don’t think you’ll mind.
It all started a couple years ago. At that time, I didn’t have the cool office in the East Wing boys’ bathroom. Back then we operated our business inside two giant tires on the far side of the grade school playground. It wasn’t much. I mean, it was just two huge tires that they stuck in the ground for kids to climb on. But it did the job. The tires were pretty big and they provided just enough privacy for us to run our business. Of course, back then things were much simpler. We didn’t handle the same sorts of problems, and the tires were really all we needed. To be honest, a lot was different back in those days. I even had a different strongman; we called him Bazan. The story of what happened to good old Bazan is pretty long and complicated itself, so I’ll leave that for some other time.
Anyways, like I was saying, back then business was pretty simple. I worked out of the tires with Vince and Bazan and mostly just handled easy stuff like writing kids notes to give to their crushes or maybe getting them snacks that their parents wouldn’t buy for them. Young kids had a lot of simple problems that they just couldn’t solve themselves, so business was booming. But it was booming in a small sort of way because they also didn’t have much money.
About that time, the school was experiencing some problems of its own. It seemed that some kid had been splattering the school with graffiti. It was everywhere: in the bathrooms, on the sides of the building, on lockers, on walls, on the trophy case. The artist even managed to tag the principal’s door. The coolest part was that the graffiti wasn’t lame stuff like a name or a dumb saying; it was actually really awesome caricatures of all the school’s teachers and staff like the lunch ladies and counselor.
The drawings were really funny. They always pointed out the teacher’s funniest parts. Like Mr. Dickerson. The graffiti version had a really huge balding head and big creepy eyes, just like the real Mr. Dickerson. One of the math teachers, Mr. Thompson, had two big front teeth, and his graffiti picture had even bigger front teeth and little bunny ears. My personal favorite was this drawing of a history teacher named Mr. Ritter. Mr. Ritter had thick, huge fingers, and in the graffiti drawing his fingers were giant sausages. Everybody