Aldo is halfheartedly eating a bowl of split pea soup while gazing over at Kiana, who’s a few tables away, sitting with Mateo and Parker. That’s the rest of SCS-8 except for Elaine, who eats alone, surrounded by a buffer zone of empty tables. People have been keeping their distance from her ever since she chucked this kid into the salad bar. Even in the lunchroom, Elaine rhymes with pain.
While Aldo’s staring at Kiana, I reach over and dump half a shaker of black pepper into his soup. I can’t help it. It’s almost not my fault.
Rahim snickers and doodles a napkin sketch of Aldo with smoke coming out of his ears.
Meanwhile, Kiana catches Aldo looking at her. Embarrassed, he picks up his soup bowl and guzzles what’s left of it, pepper and all. A split second later, a green geyser of pea soup sprays across the room, propelled by a scream.
“What did you do that for?” he rasps.
I can’t answer because I’m laughing too hard. So is Rahim. When Aldo sees the napkin sketch, he stabs it with his spoon, which snaps in half.
That gets us a caution from the lunchroom monitor, who raises the quiet alert level from green to amber on the traffic signal at the front of the cafeteria.
“You’ve got to tone it down, man,” I manage, fighting to control my laughter. “Everything makes you fly off the handle.”
“Not true!” he bellows in my face, and the traffic signal goes to red.
Now nobody’s allowed to talk for the rest of lunch, and it’s all Aldo’s fault. Rahim and I exchange a fist-bump under the table.
Afterward, when we’re walking back to room 117—I mean everybody else is walking; I’m thumping on my crutches—I can’t resist rubbing a little more salt in Aldo’s wounds. “Kiana was watching you the whole time,” I assure him. “She probably thinks you’re nuts or something.”
“Did I ask you to put a pound of pepper in my soup?” he demands.
“Okay, but you don’t have to get so mad about it. You’re mad at me; you’re mad at Rahim; you’re mad at the cafeteria for changing the chicken nugget recipe; you’re mad at Ribbit—”
“I’m not mad at Ribbit,” he mutters.
“You said you were before.”
“Yeah, well, I changed my mind.”
“Fine,” I agree. “Everything makes you mad except Ribbit.” And I stop bugging him because I keep thinking about Mr. Kermit, fighting with the office to get me in the pep rally.
Back in room 117 with the rest of the class, we can’t help noticing a bright green vuvuzela, bent double, sticking out of our teacher’s trash can.
“If Ribbit thinks he can get rid of all those things one at a time,” puts in Rahim, “he’s in for a really rough Spirit Week.”
“I can’t understand what makes him tick,” puts in Kiana. “Most of the time, he never opens his mouth, but blow a vuvuzela and he’ll scream you an opera.”
“They make him mad,” I say, with a wink at Aldo.
“He’s the Grinch!” Mateo pipes up suddenly.
“I thought he was Squidward,” Parker reminds him.
Mateo shakes his head. “The Grinch—definitely. The Grinch hates Christmas because he can’t stand the noise. Well, Mr. Kermit hates Spirit Week because he can’t stand the vuvuzelas.”
“Everybody hates something,” I retort. “I don’t like lima beans—am I the Grinch too?”
“It’s not just what you hate; it’s why you hate it,” Mateo replies seriously. “Indiana Jones hates snakes because he’s afraid of them. Superman hates kryptonite because it’s his weakness. The Wicked Witch of the West hates water because it makes her melt. But Mr. Kermit and the Grinch are both haters for the same reason—noise.”
Ribbit comes in, and the first thing he sees is all of us staring into his wastebasket at the broken vuvuzela. He seems annoyed at first, but then his expression changes to one of sympathy. “I have some bad news about Spirit Week—”
“It’s okay, Mr. Kermit,” Kiana interrupts. “We know you tried your best to talk the principal into letting us be a part of it.”
“Let me tell you about spirit.” The teacher comes alive, making eye contact with each of us as he speaks. “No one can command you to have spirit—not principals, governors, presidents, or even kings. There’s no spirit switch in your brain that can be flipped on or off. Spirit isn’t a week you can put on your calendar. It doesn’t come from posters, or streamers, or rallies, or funny hat days. And it definitely doesn’t come from making an ungodly racket with a cheap plastic instrument of torture that was invented purely for disturbing the peace!”
It’s the most he’s said to us all year. I can’t explain it, but it feels like a kind of breakthrough—although what we’re breaking through to, I have no clue.
Maybe it’s this: in all my years in school, I’ve never heard a teacher say something that was so completely, totally honest.
Twelve
Parker Elias
I kick off Spirit Week by getting arrested.
I’m on my way to pick up Grams on Monday morning when this cop pulls me over because my taillight is out. The problem is this guy is new, and when I show him my provisional license, he thinks it’s a fake ID. So he takes me into the police station, and by the time the desk sergeant straightens him out, I’m late for picking up Grams.
She’s not waiting outside her apartment building, but when I run upstairs and knock at the door, nobody answers. I drive around the neighborhood, and sure enough, there she is, walking along the main drag.
I pull up alongside her and lower the window. “Grams, where are you going? Get in the truck!”
She keeps on walking and never even glances in my direction. Way back when she was growing up in Israel a million years ago, her mother taught her never to get into a strange car. She forgot most of everything else—including the grandson who’s supposedly her favorite person—but that stuck. I have to drive half a block ahead, park, get out, and “accidentally” run into her on the sidewalk. She recognizes me now; in fact, she’s really glad to see me—but not half as glad as I am that I found her. (She could have gotten on a bus somewhere and be really lost.)
She still can’t come up with my name, though. “You look skinny, kiddo. Have you been eating?”
Sigh. Why can’t she just say: “You look skinny, Parker”?
“Hey, here’s the pickup,” I announce in surprise. “Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”
By the time I drop her off at the senior center, I’m way late. To make things worse, I get stuck behind this giant truck in the driveway of the school. I squint at the sign on the back. At first, it looks sort of like ALIEN ROT ANT GRID, but that can’t be right. Then I recognize the logo from the internet. It’s Oriental Trading, that website where you can order bulk amounts of things like joke glasses and light-up necklaces and party stuff.
I honk for them to let me pass, but they’re already out of the truck—two big guys. They open the back and start hauling these giant cartons onto the loading bay of the school. There’s no writing on the boxes, but there’s a picture, so I know exactly what’s inside. Vuvuzelas for Spirit Week. Hundreds of them. If they really ordered for every class but us, a thousand.
My grip tightens on the wheel. What do I care? If SCS-8 is being left out, it makes no difference to me if they’ve ordered noisemakers for every man, woman, and child on the planet.
Then I think of Mr. Kermit—the way he tried to make the principal change her mind, even though he hates vuvuzelas. Man, the sound of just one drives him bananas. In all these boxes, there must be enough noise power to bring down a herd of elephants.
I pull around the truck, thumping over the curb and driving across some of the front lawn to the parking lot. (That’s against the rules of my license too, but this is an emergency.) I roar into a spot, putting only a tiny scrape on the side mirror of Mrs. Oneonta’s Mini Cooper. I jump out and head for the school without even using my bottle of scratch guard. By the time I hit the entrance foyer, I’m flying.
> I sprint clear across the school, past the gym to room 117. What luck—the other kids are there, but Mr. Kermit hasn’t arrived yet. Considering he’s a teacher, he sure doesn’t seem to have a problem with tardiness—his own, anyway. If they gave late slips to staff members, Ribbit would spend his whole life in detention. (Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing for someone who loves crossword puzzles so much.)
“The vuvuzelas are coming!” I gasp.
“One if by land, or two if by sea?” Barnstorm snorts.
“This is serious,” I insist. “Oriental Trading is parked out front right now, unloading them.”
Kiana clues in. “Mr. Kermit’s going to lose it.”
“And it’s going to be hard to get any rest,” adds Rahim with a yawn.
“It’s no fair that everybody gets them but us,” Aldo complains. “I mean, I don’t want a stupid vuvuzela anyway. But it’s still annoying.”
“Ribbit’s right,” says Barnstorm. “It’s fine to have spirit if you really do—like if your team is winning the championship or something. But to have spirit because your principal tells you to—because of what week it is? That’s just dumb.”
“What does school spirit have to do with vuvuzelas anyway?” I complain. “Because they’re loud? So are car accidents.” I actually think about that a lot.
“Poor Mr. Kermit,” Kiana adds. “This is going to be rough for him. I wish there was something we could do to make it better.”
“Maybe there is,” Mateo muses.
Aldo rolls his eyes. “What—we send him on vacation to the Death Star until Spirit Week is over?”
“Of course not,” he dismisses this. “The Death Star is Star Wars. Mr. Kermit is the Grinch.”
“The Grinch isn’t real,” Kiana explains patiently.
“But what the Grinch did can be real,” Mateo insists. “He didn’t like Christmas, so he stole it. All of it—all the Christmas stuff in Whoville. Even the Who pudding and the roast beast.”
Barnstorm’s eyes widen. “Steal the vuvuzelas? There are, like, seven of us, and I’m on crutches. How are we supposed to carry that many vuvuzelas?”
“They’re in boxes,” I put in. “Big ones, but I don’t think they’re super heavy. At least, the Oriental Trading guys are having no trouble unloading them.”
“Where do we put them?” Aldo demands. “In our lockers?”
Mateo is stuck on the holiday TV special. “The Grinch loaded the Whos’ Christmas stuff on a sled to dump off the top of Mount Crumpit . . .”
“Too bad there aren’t any ten-thousand-foot cliffs around here—” That’s when it hits me. “Guys—what about the river?” If you follow the school property straight on past the athletic fields, you’ll eventually come to the banks of the Greenwich River, which divides our town in two.
Kiana shakes her head sadly. “It’s just not practical. There’s no way we could move giant boxes all that way.”
“I’ll drive them,” I say suddenly. “We just have to load them into my truck.” I can’t quite describe how I feel. It’s not that I’m so anxious to do it, but suddenly it just seems so doable. And knowing it’s possible, it feels like we have to try.
Rahim looks up from his doodles. “We’ll get in trouble.”
No kidding. If we get caught, it’s hard to imagine the school will go easy on the kids who hijacked a thousand vuvuzelas.
The answer comes from, of all people, Elaine. “We’re already in trouble,” she rumbles from her spot at the back of the room. “This class is trouble. What can they do to us—put us in here twice?”
“Let’s do it.” Kiana reaches a hand into the center of our group. “For Mr. Kermit.”
Barnstorm places a crutch over it. “I’ll show them where they can stick their spirit.”
Aldo tries to lay his hand over Kiana’s, but the crutch is in the way. “Nobody tells me what to get worked up about.”
“To the universe and beyond!” Mateo exclaims.
We all sign on, even Rahim, who is as close to wide awake as I’ve ever seen him.
“We have to hurry,” I urge. “Once the custodians start unpacking those cartons, it’s all over.”
We head for the loading bay, taking the long way to avoid passing the faculty lounge. The last thing we need is to run into Mr. Kermit heading for room 117—not that he’d ask us where we’re going.
Luckily, the halls are busy, so nobody takes much notice of us as we loop around the main foyer and backtrack to the storage rooms that connect to the loading bay.
Kiana peers around the door frame. “Uh-oh.”
Following her lead, I peek into the storeroom. The loading bay door is still open to the driveway, but the truck is gone. Just inside stand the big boxes. I count—seven of them, stacked three, two, and two. Mr. Carstairs stands next to them, the packing slip in one hand, a half-finished bagel in the other.
“Why hasn’t he started unloading yet?” I murmur.
“He’s probably waiting for help,” Kiana whispers back. “That means the other custodians could be here soon.”
Aldo curses under his breath. “How are we supposed to get the boxes with Carstairs right there?”
Mateo has an idea. “We need to create a distraction.”
“What distraction?” Kiana asks.
“I can talk to him about The Silmarillion,” Mateo volunteers. “That’s the creation story for the entire mythology of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And I’ll try to get him to walk away.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Barnstorm hisses. “We’re going to need a better distraction than that.”
“Definitely,” deadpans Elaine. She rears up a heavy black boot and brings it down full force on Barnstorm’s sneakered foot.
The scream could probably drown out all those vuvuzelas put together. It causes a major freak-out in the hall. Mr. Carstairs comes running. What he sees is the school’s injured sports hero, on crutches, howling in agony. The custodian gets his shoulder under Barnstorm’s arm, and the two of them begin hobbling in the direction of the nurse’s office.
Kiana turns accusing eyes on Elaine. “You didn’t have to do that! He could have just faked it.”
Aldo chortles. “Not as good as that.”
We race into the loading bay.
“Oh, gross,” Rahim complains.
“What’s gross?” I ask.
He points. “It says it on the boxes. They’re gross.”
Kiana throws up her hands in exasperation. “That’s not gross; that’s one gross. It means there’s a hundred and forty-four vuvuzelas in each carton.”
“That makes”—Mateo does the calculation in his head—“a thousand and eight. I thought we were only getting a thousand.” It really seems to bother him.
“Never mind that! I’ll go for the truck!” I scramble out of the loading bay and jump the three feet down to the pavement. I sprint for the parking lot and leap into the pickup. It takes all the restraint I can muster to keep from stomping on the gas. The last thing we need is for my squealing tires to attract the attention of every adult in the school. Suddenly, my perforated muffler doesn’t seem like such a great asset either. It may sound cool, but we’re trying for stealth here.
I get out and scramble onto the platform to help with the loading. You know all that stuff about vuvuzelas being light? Well, that goes out the window when you’re lifting a box with a hundred and forty-four of them. On the plus side, we’ve got Elaine, who could lift the load and the loading bay with it—and maybe the truck too.
Kiana and Mateo pile in beside me, but Aldo, Rahim, and Elaine have to jog alongside the pickup. I pull around the side of the school and then jump over the curb and start driving slowly along the grass. I glance at the rearview mirror, and see Elaine flashing me a thumbs-up. I normally try to have as little interaction with her as possible, but right now the gesture gives me heart—because I’m pretty scared at this point.
Are we crazy? Probably, bu
t that’s not the part that bothers me. My main worry is that none of this is covered by my provisional license. And if it gets revoked, who’s going to pick up Grams every morning and drive her to the senior center?
Thirteen
Mr. Kermit
No one can stop the passage of time.
I’ve tried. It can’t be done.
Case in point—every year in early October, Spirit Week comes along. It’s like death and taxes. Actually, my 106-year-old grandfather is doing a better job at putting off death than I am at avoiding Spirit Week. There’s only one word for it: inevitable.
At the sight of the truck from Oriental Trading, I head for the faculty lounge, fill the Toilet Bowl with coffee, and sit in a dark corner, steeling myself for what’s ahead. My fellow teachers cast sympathetic glances in my general direction, but no one approaches me directly. They know there’s nothing they can say. Already, those South African air horns from Hades have begun to sound in the halls. Once the mother lode is passed out, the noise will be beyond imagination.
When the cacophony starts, I resolve to close my eyes and dream of June—of early retirement, of another life beyond these walls. I’ll unwind, relax, maybe travel—avoiding South Africa, of course, and any other countries where vuvuzelas are part of the local culture. That’s the only thing with half a chance of getting me through this—the thought that this Spirit Week, awful as it is, will be my last.
I arrive at room 117 to find it empty. For a fleeting instant, I toy with the possibility that my dreams have come true, and every single one of the students is absent on the same day. Maybe they all gave each other mono. That would mean I could miss Spirit Week altogether!
The intercom interrupts that pleasant thought. “Mr. Kermit? It’s Bonnie Fox in the nurse’s office. I’ve got Bernard Anderson here with me.”
The name doesn’t ring a bell. “Bernard?”
“You know, the boy they call Barnstorm. Someone stepped on his foot, but when I asked for a name, he clammed up. I’m worried that there might be some kind of bullying involved.”
The Unteachables Page 7