The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [37]
After a few weeks the artist had drawn almost all of the school’s staff and still hadn’t been caught. It’s pretty amazing, really, especially with all the teachers on high alert. He was so good at not getting caught that all the kids started calling him the Graffiti Ninja. Not even the students knew his real identity.
After this had gone on for a while, the school began to put serious pressure on the janitor to clean up all of the graffiti as soon as possible. The problem was that the Graffiti Ninja used a Magnum 44 marker to do his drawings. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Magnum 44 marker, but they’re huge. They’re, like, almost the size of a baseball bat practically. And they smell like a billion chemicals all mixed together with gasoline. The ink is almost impossible to wash off. In fact, to this day, you can still see the faint outlines of some of the Graffiti Ninja’s work.
So the janitor was getting pretty frustrated. It wasn’t easy cleaning up graffiti all the time, not to mention all the usual stuff he had to clean around the school like toilets and whatnot. He didn’t know where to turn. And I suppose that’s why he eventually came to me. That’s why most people came to me, because they didn’t know what else to do.
I’m still not entirely sure how he found out who I was and what I did. I know he had a son who was just a few years older than me. So it’s likely that one night when the janitor was crying during dinner or something because of all the stress he’d had lately because of the Graffiti Ninja, his son told him about Vince’s and my business. That’s how I always imagined it went, anyways.
Either way, the point is that the janitor did come to me for help. And I have to say he looked pretty funny, too, with his legs folded under him like a pretzel, crammed inside the giant tire like a foot-long hot dog in a regular-sized bun.
“So what can I do for you?” I asked him after Vince gave me a nod and walked back to his post outside the tire. I touched my fingertips together in front of me like I was holding a sub sandwich and was about to take a bite.
He looked like he was trying to hide a smirk. That was okay, though. Adults never take little kids seriously. I was used to it.
“Well, I want you to find the kid who has been making those drawings all over the school. And I’d really like it if you could somehow get him to stop,” he said.
I nodded and tapped my fingers together.
“That would be quite a challenge,” I said.
The janitor was smirking again. I ignored it.
“You do know that my services are not free, yes? Especially for a favor of this magnitude.”
“Oh, oh yes. Yes, I’m well aware of that, thank you, Mac,” he said, still smiling.
“Okay, then, I think I may be able to help, but I can’t guarantee anything. I’ll see what I can do and then I’ll contact you later. How does that sound?”
“That sounds good. Thanks again, Mac,” he said.
But he said it in that way that adults sometimes talk to kids. You know, how they draw out each word and then make it high pitched on the end. Like they’re saying, “Oh, you’re so cute because you’re a kid and I know that whatever you say doesn’t really matter.” That’s kind of how he spoke to me. But I didn’t care. I knew the best way to get him to take me seriously was to just go and solve his problem.
So that’s what I did.
The first step was to call a meeting. I had Bazan and Vince round up a huge group of kids to meet me by the large tires. There were probably about ten kids total and they were all gossip girls, kids on the junior debate team, ballet dancers, kids who loved James Bond movies, nosy kids—basically everybody who I thought would be good at either gathering information or sneaking up on people.
“Okay, I’ve gathered you all here because I have a mission for you. A mission for which you will be paid very well,” I said. A murmur rippled through the kids. Grade school kids do