by A W Hartoin
“Yes.” She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes.
Mr. Hubbert saw she didn’t like the way their conversation was going, and it gave him a little thrill of satisfaction. “Are you saying Puppy broke into the school in the middle of the night, subverting all our alarms, and picked the lock on your door to rewire your lamp? That’s quite a feat for a fourteen-year-old, even if he did skip a grade.”
Mr. Hubbert smiled as Miss Pritchett struggled to speak. She couldn’t have been angrier if he shot her dog. She hated Puppy MacClarity. Nothing could be worse than the crime of innocence and Mr. Hubbert knew it. He told Miss Pritchett to return to her office and calm down. Then he asked for Puppy to come to his office, careful to make sure Miss Pritchett wouldn’t know.
Puppy sat down, his green eyes wide below his shiny brown curls. “Hi, Mr. Hubbert. What’d I do?”
“Nothing I know of, but this thing with Miss Pritchett is getting out of hand.”
Puppy said nothing.
“Do you know anything about it, Puppy?”
“No, but it’s pretty funny.”
“Mrs. La Roche didn’t think so,” said Mr. Hubbert. “Her car was brand new.”
“Oh, yeah. That was a bummer. Mrs. La Roche is cool. Miss Pritchett has to fix it, right?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. This is driving Miss Pritchett a little…”
“Nuts,” said Puppy.
“Yes, well… She’s very upset.”
“I can’t help that. I didn’t do it.”
“Do you know who did?” Mr. Hubbert asked.
Puppy leaned back and crossed his arms. Mr. Hubbert could see the wheels turning behind those intelligent eyes.
“At first, I thought it was Luke or Caleb. I asked them a bunch of times, but they just told me not to worry about it and I didn’t. I don’t care if Miss Pritchett gets shocked so much her hair falls out. Of course, she’s horrible to me, but she’s always horrible. At least, because of the lamps, she’s miserable, too.”
“You really have no ideas?”
“Well, it can’t be Luke and Caleb on the last one. They were in Chicago with me. My friends Cole and Frank didn’t do it. Frank’s terrified of Miss Pritchett, and Cole tried to get into her office once, but he couldn’t pick the lock. My sisters know how to rewire a lamp, but they were gone, too. All of Luke and Caleb’s friends can rewire a lamp. It could be practically anybody.”
“Why don’t you do me a favor and let it be known that I’d like this harassing of Miss Pritchett to stop.” Mr. Hubbert smiled at Puppy to let him know there weren’t any hard feelings. He remembered what it was like to be a boy.
Mr. Engle-White, a kind and benevolent man if ever there was one, had been his headmaster and the person who steered him towards teaching. The young Mr. Hubbert was once so mad at him he hammered a bucket full of lemons into the tailpipe of his car. Since the headmaster didn’t leave the campus very often, the lemons rotted. When Mr. Engle-White did drive, it died after a hundred feet and the awful stink coming out of the tailpipe told the auto club what happened. The young Mr. Hubbert spent three Saturdays trimming the school’s fruit trees and one day digging the lemons out of the tailpipe with a steak knife. He always smiled when he saw a lemon. They were good times, those times at school, and Mr. Engle-White taught him not to keep a grudge. The headmaster never mentioned the incident after young Hubbert completed his punishment and once pelted him with lemons from his balcony on the courtyard. Mr. Engle-White had a soft spot for law-breakers and, as a consequence, so did his protégé Mr. Hubbert.
“I’ll tell them, but I can’t stop them,” said Puppy. “Only Abe can do that, and he’s not here.”
Mr. Hubbert dismissed Puppy and sipped his tea. Abraham Krause would’ve been the voice of reason among the students. He was the only one that could steer The Pack away from trouble. Luke and Caleb were particularly difficult to handle. Abe was The Pack’s version of Gandhi. They even called him Mahatma on occasion. The name meant great soul in Hindi. If Abe had been around The Pack probably wouldn’t have gone after Miss Pritchett quite so hard. But for all his quiet ways, Abe had managed to get himself sent to a bootcamp for troubled youth after being caught growing pot in his bathtub.
Puppy was the next best thing to Abe and Mr. Hubbert would just have to wait to see if his request would be honored. For the next two weeks it was, and Miss Pritchett assumed the awesome power of her anger had stopped the hooligan. But then she made another mistake. She barred Puppy from going on the field trip by saying he’d forged his mother’s signature on the permission slip.
Lamp number seven shocked her the next morning, and Mr. Hubbert thought about hammering some lemons up her tailpipe, not that it would do any good. He told her to back off, but she gave Puppy a detention for laughing in the hall directly after their meeting. Mr. Hubbert decided Miss Pritchett deserved what she got. He only hoped none of The Pack would get caught. He smiled at Puppy in the hall and Puppy gave him a big grin in return.
Mr. Hubbert wasn’t surprised after two weeks and four lamps later, when The Pack changed their tactics. Miss Pritchett walked into her homeroom, sat at her desk, and put on her glasses. Two hours later she attempted to take them off. Puppy and the whole class watched as she pulled and tugged, grunted and squealed. They thought she’d finally lost her mind, but an hour later they discovered the truth. Somebody had put glue on the nosepiece of her glasses.
Mr. Clarkson couldn’t tell him what kind of glue it was. It had no odor and stayed wet until it bonded with something. The bond was incredible. He suspected it was a homemade concoction and that meant the Ross twins. Luke and Caleb were chemical geniuses. They’d blown up the chemistry lab four times in the last two years, using chemical combinations Mr. Abbott, the chemistry teacher, said couldn’t be used to do much of anything. Once they made odorous green foam erupt out of their beakers onto the ceiling. They made homemade stink bombs and rockets with ease. Luke and Caleb’s talent came as no surprise. Their mother, Calla, was a textile artist and her talent with chemicals and dyes showed in her beautiful creations. Her sons claimed they didn’t learn anything from her, but they had her mind and that was enough.
After the incident with the green foam their sophomore year, Mr. Hubbert called the twins into his office. It was clear that detentions and cleaning details weren’t going to work.
“Did you know that green foam was going to happen?” he asked the boys.
“Sure,” they said.
“If you knew, why did you do it?”
“Well, we worked it out on paper, but we had to make sure we had it right, didn’t we?” asked Luke.
Mr. Hubbert couldn’t argue with that. He was a former science teacher and he understood the need to prove one’s theories.
“How would you like to take advanced chemistry at the university? You can try out your theories there.”
The twins agreed along with the condition they wouldn’t use the school lab for anything more than assignments.
A year went by without an incident until Miss Pritchett’s eyeglasses got glued to her face and Mr. Hubbert started questioning the intelligence of giving the twins access to a world-class chemistry lab.
The situation was all downhill from there. Someone used the same glue on Miss Pritchett’s chair. The school nurse had to cut off her skirt, so she could stand up. Somehow they’d figured out how to put the glue into tiny plastic balls without it hardening. They put the balls on Miss Pritchett’s parking space and when she went to drive home her car was glued to the pavement. But the best prank pulled on Miss Pritchett all year had to do with her blackboard. The story became a legend told over and over again.
It was late April, a mere month before school let out. Miss Pritchett went into her classroom to give her homeroom students a math quiz. She walked up to the board and started to write. Nothing happened. Her chalk glided over the surface without making a mark. She looked at the chalk in her hand and tossed it into the trash. Then she pick
ed up another piece and tried again. Still nothing. She tried and tried, but couldn’t write anything on her board. Miss Pritchett called Mr. Hubbert on the intercom.
Then she turned to Puppy and said, “What did you do?” in her nastiest voice.
Mr. Hubbert arrived to see Puppy backed up against a wall with Miss Pritchett screaming in his face. The girls in the front row were crying and everyone looked scared. Mr. Hubbert separated the two of them, took a deep breath, and said, “Someone, please, tell me what’s going on?”
“My board won’t work!” Miss Pritchett yelled.
“There’s no need to shout, Miss Pritchett. I’m standing right in front of you,” Mr. Hubbert said.
Then he called for Mr. Clarkson, who looked at the board and told him whoever conceived of such a plan was more than a genius.
The blackboard looked normal. It was a perfect color of grayish black with a light coating of chalk dust. There were no signs of tampering. The chalk simply wouldn’t work. They tried chalk from different classrooms. No luck. They tried Miss Pritchett’s chalk on other blackboards and it worked just fine. There was something wrong with that blackboard, but they couldn’t figure out what it was. Mr. Clarkson scraped his fingernail across the surface. Nothing. It wasn’t until he tried scraping with a screwdriver that he came up with a fine dust. Someone had painted Miss Pritchett’s blackboard with a substance that wouldn’t allow it to be written on.
Mr. Clarkson scrubbed off the stuff with a wire brush and life got back to normal. Then they did it again. Mr. Clarkson got straight to scrubbing the board, but it still wouldn’t work. He scrubbed it three times before Mr. Hubbert discovered that the chalk had been tampered with. It looked perfectly normal, except it wouldn’t write.
Miss Pritchett by this time was becoming unglued. If Mr. Hubbert hadn’t disliked her so much, he might’ve felt sorry for her, but she didn’t know when to quit. He was grateful she took so many sick days. They all needed the break because the nastier she was to Puppy, the more The Pack messed with her. She did everything she could to make the boy miserable, even though she knew he probably hadn’t done any of it. If Mr. Hubbert had been able to punish someone for the lamps or the blackboard, it might’ve gotten better, but he doubted it. Puppy was her target and she enjoyed torturing him as much as The Pack enjoyed torturing her.
Mr. Hubbert sat down at his desk and put his finger on the calendar block for the last day of school. He said a prayer that nothing would happen and he could get on with a Pritchett-free summer.
Chapter Four
I TWIRLED MY pencil and stared at the presidential faces pinned above the blackboard. Miss Pritchett stood beside the board with her favorite laser pointer (she had a large collection) and pointed the red beam at the number three written in her tiny block print. It said, “The Battle of the Bulge and its significance: describe and discuss”.
I glanced to my right. My friend Frank bent low over his notebook, scribbling and muttering.
“Dude, don’t bother,” I said.
“What?” Frank glanced up at Miss Pritchett and then at me.
“Don’t write that stuff down, man.”
Frank looked around at everyone else. He was the only one holding a pencil.
I leaned over to him. “Frank, she can’t give us homework for over the summer. She’s not even our history teacher. It’s stupid.”
“But she wrote all that stuff down. It’s due on the first day of school, August twentieth.”
“Think about it, Frank. Come on. Who’s going to check it? We’re sophomores next year. We won’t have Miss Pritchett anymore. You think she’s going to track down our homeroom teachers next fall and make sure we did it? No way. She’s just trying to ruin our summer like she ruined the whole year.”
Frank put down his pencil and said, “So you’re not going to do it?”
“There is no freaking way I’m doing anything for Bitch Pritchett this summer,” I said.
Miss Pritchett stopped lecturing. “Who said that?” She looked right at me. She rarely looked at anyone else.
“Well?” she asked.
The class sat silent, chewing their fingernails and staring at the clock. Ten minutes until final bell, but Miss Pritchett wouldn’t give up. She walked down the aisle to my desk.
“Ernest MacClarity. What did you say?”
What an idiot. The woman just wouldn’t learn. She’d had me in her homeroom for an entire school year. She’d never gotten me to admit to so much as a sneeze, but there she was glowering, trying to get me to confess with ten minutes left in the year.
She stared at me and I stared right back until the last bell’s sweet clang echoed through the halls followed by the noise of a thousand kids standing up and cheering, all except the ones in my class. They sat silent with hands clasped, waiting to be released from their year-long purgatory. Miss Pritchett was in no hurry to let us see the light. She droned on for another ten minutes about our responsibilities and how very much we’d learned from her.
I tried to sit still, but my butt itched like it was covered with a wicked combo of chiggers and mosquito bites. I wiggled and shifted my weight from side to side. I tried to think of anything but a good scratch. I glanced to my left at my friend Cole, who stared straight ahead. His eyes were glassy and unseeing. A dollop of drool perched on the edge of his bottom lip and threatened to drop. Cole had the marvelous ability to sleep with his eyes open. It was a wonder Miss Pritchett never noticed. She liked to tell me that I should be more like Cole and I sincerely told her I wished I could be.
The drool dropped off Cole’s lip and landed on his desk with a wet splat. Melody Harper, my sometimes girlfriend, sat on the other side of Cole. Her body shook with suppressed giggles and she clamped her hand over her mouth. To my right, I heard a whisper, “Don’t.”
Frank sat rigid, looking more terrified than usual. He didn’t look at me, but every inch of him begged for salvation.
That’s it, I thought, and I stood up.
A slow gasp rose up from the class like steam from a boiling pot and swirled around, making me feel more emboldened and sure. Miss Pritchett stopped mid-sentence and smiled malevolently at me.
“That’s a detention, Mr. MacClarity. Sit down.” She spat my name like it soiled her lips.
“School’s out,” I replied.
“That’s two detentions. Care for a third? Now sit down.”
I gathered my books and said, “You’re not my teacher anymore, Eleanor. You can’t give me more than a nasty look and I’m used to them anyway. See ya.”
I marched to the door, and walked out of the room. Behind me I heard the rest of the class standing up. Miss Pritchett shouted meaningless words at them about authority and how she decided when school was out not some frigging bell. But I knew they wouldn’t listen, because I was right. The respect Miss Pritchett craved hadn’t been earned. They wouldn’t have walked out on any other teacher in school, no matter what I did.
I stuffed my books in my backpack and walked in the direction of the auditorium. Before I reached the door, Cole caught up with me and grabbed my shoulder.
“You’ve got some nards, dude. I can’t believe you did that. It was awesome.”
“You did it, too. You walked out,” I said.
“Not until you did. You’re gonna get like class president or something next year,” Cole said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
Cole elbowed me in the ribs. “Yeah, you did. Half of us would’ve failed math, if you didn’t post your notes on Facebook. Do you think Mr. Hubbert knows about that?”
“It’s not like I gave test answers or something.”
“You practically did. Your notes kicked ass. You are so getting president.”
“As long as I don’t have Miss Pritchett for anything, I don’t care what happens.”
“Oh, yeah. What a bitch!” Cole pumped his fist in the air. “That was awesome.”
Cole and I walked into the auditorium to see most of the
other students settled in their seats. Music blared out of speakers on the stage, drowning out all conversations.
Cole and I stopped short. The song wasn’t anything like what I expected. The school board liked their music classical. This time the song was the one my classmates picked as our theme song, and it rocked the auditorium. We texted lines to each other after a bad day with Miss Pritchett. We murmured it under our breaths during tests and detentions. It gave us strength to get though another day.
“Headstrong, we’re headstrong. Back off, I’ll take you on,” sang Trapt.
Cole punched me in the shoulder. “Mr. Hubbert rocks.”
“How do you think he knew?”
“He knows everything.”
I looked up at Mr. Hubbert seated on the stage with his wife, the rest of the teachers, and the school board. Mrs. Hubbert wore a bright green turban that I recognized as Aunt Calla’s work.
Mr. Hubbert shook his head at me, his face tired and lined, but he didn’t seem mad at our lateness, only worn out. I shrugged my shoulders. I wanted to tell Mr. Hubbert I couldn’t help Miss Pritchett’s insanity, even though I knew I could, at least a little bit. I could’ve got The Pack to back off if I’d wanted. But I didn’t want to and I didn’t know why. I could’ve gone brain dead in class like Cole, but something about Miss Pritchett brought out the kamikaze in me.
The rest of the class came in behind me and stood shuffling their feet in embarrassment.
“Will Miss Pritchett’s homeroom please take their seats?” said Mr. Hubbert into the microphone.
I led the way to our block of seats and sat down. The rest of the crowd started to settle when I heard a door fly open. Terrific. It was Mom and Aunt Calla, late as usual.
Mom’s voice floated over the crowd making excuses without sounding a bit apologetic. I turned back to the stage, my face hot and red, as Mom and Aunt Calla picked their way through the crowd to some empty seats. When they settled down, Mr. Hubbert made a speech about what a wonderful year it had been and gave out the awards.