I almost stormed back in there and demanded a different locker. I mean, what kind of system puts kids with the last names Thompson, Falconer, and Strack in a row?
“Oh, look,” Jamie said in her fake-sweet voice. “It’s Maverick Falconer. Mavvy, did you bring the other six dwarves?”
“Hey, what’s up?” I said. Even when Jamie’s being obnoxious, I always try to be friendly.
“Everything, compared to you,” Jamie replied.
I wasn’t going to let her childish insults bring me down to her level. Metaphorically, I mean. Physically, she towered over me. I had to crane my neck to see anything above her chin.
I smiled at her, hoping she would sense how bad I still felt about the Great Three-Legged Fiasco.
“What are you looking at?” she snarled. “Are you actually checking out my front teeth—you, of all people?”
“No! Of course not! I would never look at your front teeth. Um, I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with them or anything. The dentists did a beautiful job!” Oh, shoot me, I thought.
“Thanks,” she hissed. “That’s very flattering. Of course, I wouldn’t have needed hours of painful mouth surgery if you weren’t the clumsiest kid on the entire planet!”
All righty, then.
I stepped between Jamie and Bowen and squinted at my paper, because the numbers on it were pretty small. Like I said, I needed glasses, but my mom isn’t big on things like making eye doctor appointments. She’s not even small on things like eye doctor appointments. The only way I was going to get my eyes checked was if I accidentally impaled one of them on a lawn dart or something.
Anyway, Bowen said, “Check this out!” and banged his locker with the side of one huge, hamlike fist. His locker sprang open. It was like magic. Bowen might have been, like, the Elvis of spoiled, pretty-boy rich jocks—but I had to admit he had style.
“Wow, that’s cool!” Jamie purred. Jamie didn’t even like Bowen, but she knew how much I despised him.
“I can do that,” I said, without thinking. Because, you know, I couldn’t. I had never even opened a locker using the combination.
“Go for it,” Bowen said. “Just remember, the key is to hit it in exactly the right spot. You have to become one with the lock mechanism!”
What kind of mystical Jedi ninja party-magician trick was this? Become one with the lock mechanism? Sheesh!
I took a deep breath, blew on the edge of my hand, and hit my locker the way Bowen had, a couple of inches above the spinning black dial.
Nothing happened.
Wait, no—something happened. The locker rang like a gong and involuntary tears of pain sprang to my eyes.
“I guess you just don’t have the touch,” Bowen said as he closed his locker. I could hear the laughter in his voice.
I gritted my teeth. If Bowen Gregory Strack could do it, I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t.
“I’m just warming up,” I hissed.
Then I whacked the locker again, harder.
All I got was more tears and a louder noise.
SPANG!
Jamie said, “Too bad that lock isn’t made out of teeth. You’d have it busted open in no time!” I turned to her and tried to think of a witty retort, resisting with all my willpower the urge to clasp my hand and scream. As she and I stared into each other’s eyes, I heard another gentle clink behind me. I whirled, and saw Bowen blow on his knuckles again as he swung his reopened locker shut.
“Don’t feel too bad,” he said. “Maybe you can’t get the right angle from way down there.” Then he walked away, back into homeroom.
Jamie seemed to think this was the funniest thing in the world. I did not.
When Jamie and every other kid in the class had gone back into the room and I was completely alone in the hallway, I gave my hardest punch yet. Needless to say, the locker didn’t open.
This was too much.
I snapped and started pounding on the thing with both fists. I pretended it was Bowen’s face. Or Johnny’s. Or the face of any of my mom’s other abusive loser boyfriends. I punched and punched until I had to stop because my knuckles were bleeding and I was out of breath.
That was when I noticed that it had gotten kind of dark in the hall.
A massive hand tapped me on the shoulder. I whirled and literally banged into the protruding stomach of the largest man I had ever seen in my life. He had to be at least six and a half feet tall, with super-broad shoulders, that big belly, a bushy red handlebar mustache, and wild red hair. If Santa Claus had married a Viking queen, their firstborn son would have looked like this dude.
“Interesting tactic,” he rumbled.
Holy cow! I knew that voice! I was standing face-to-belly with Mr. Overbye!
“I generally use the combination method myself,” he said. Then he turned and started walking away down the hall. I could have sworn the floor actually trembled each time one of his feet landed.
“Coming?” he asked.
Somehow I knew it wasn’t really a question.
A couple of very tense minutes later, I was sitting on a very hard chair in the school office, right next to Mr. Overbye’s desk, staring down at my oozing knuckles.
I was dead. I was so dead.
I was a tiny bit afraid I might wet myself.
Then The Bee spoke, boomingly. “The Fist Trick.”
“Um, excuse me?” I said. Then I added, “Sir?” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I thought being as polite as possible might help keep me alive a little while longer. Mr. Overbye looked up over my head for a few seconds, then sighed and began speaking again, much more softly.
“You fell for the Fist Trick. It happens to at least one sixth grader every year. The way it works is, an older student dials in all three numbers of his locker combination, but doesn’t actually pull the locker open after the third number. Then he hits the locker just above the dial, and it seems to pop open by magic. Does this sound rather familiar to you? Did an older student hit his locker and make it pop open, then challenge you to do the same thing?”
“Uh, not an older kid.”
The Bee’s eyes flicked up and over me again. Then he leaned toward me by lacing his hands together and placing his chin on top of them.
“So who was it?” he asked. His voice was almost a whisper.
“A kid in my class. Just a kid.”
“Does that kid happen to have older siblings who have attended this school?”
I nodded. Bowen had a big sister. I guessed she’d told him about the stupid locker trick.
“But you don’t want to tell me his name?”
I shook my head.
“Because you don’t want to be a tattletale?”
“No, sir, I don’t.” I wanted Bowen Gregory Strack to suffer, but I wanted to be the one to make him suffer—personally.
“Well, I can respect that . . . for now.” He sat up straight. “BUT. If this young man continues to harass you, I want to know about it. Do you understand?”
I nodded. My neck sure was getting a good workout.
“Listen, son. This school can be an easy place or a hard place.” He smiled at me in what he might have thought was a reassuring way. But considering that his mouth was wider than my entire head, the effect was mostly just terrifying. “You can make it easy by just staying out of this office. And you do that by using some common sense. Think before you act. Say to yourself, ‘Is this a smart move, or a dumb move?’ Do you think you can try to do that?”
I nodded yet again.
“Because here’s one last tip: Punching metal is always going to be a dumb move. When you throw yourself up against something harder than you are, that never goes well. Now, I am going to write you a pass to see the nurse before you go back to class. Her name is Mrs. Vogler.”
I sat up a little straighter and breathed a sigh of relief. For someone with his reputation, The Bee hadn’t been so ultra-terrible. I mean, his randomly changing voice volume was odd, but assistant prin
cipals were supposed to be odd. I was starting to believe I might be safe.
Apparently, The Bee had a part-time job as a mind reader at a circus somewhere, because he said, “Oh, don’t think you’re out of the woods yet, kid. I know what students tell each other about me. But Mrs. Vogler is scarier than I could ever hope to be.”
* * *
I walked to the nurse’s office, only getting lost twice on the way. When I got there, I kind of craned my neck nervously around one edge of the door frame.
All I saw was a teensy-weensy old lady sitting at a desk, humming a show tune and nibbling from a bag of trail mix. She didn’t look alarming at all. She reminded me of a mouse, or a chipmunk, or a sweet little . . .
Bird.
Holy cow, I knew who this was. She was the other most frightening staff member in the building. If The Bee was the world’s scariest assistant principal, The Bird was the world’s scariest school employee, period. She had been working at the middle school since the dawn of time, and apparently, her nursing methods were as primitive as you might expect from someone whose earliest patients had probably been carried in on the backs of woolly mammoths. It was just my luck that I had to run into The Bee and The Bird on my first day.
I had to get away from there before she noticed me.
“Come in?” she said. Somehow it sounded like a question. Well, like a question would sound if you played it on a tiny wooden flute.
It was too late to escape.
She asked me my name, read Mr. Overbye’s note, and leaned close to examine my injured hands. Then she straightened back up and said, “We’ll have those cleaned up in a jiffy?” Apparently, everything this woman said sounded like a question.
She bustled away into a little supply room and came back with a dusty-looking box that read GAUZE PADS on the side in huge block letters, and a spray can of Lysol.
“Hold out your hands, please?” she said.
Without thinking, I did. Then, before I could react, she sprayed the open wounds with the Lysol. I yelped like a coyote on fire.
“Oh, dear!” The Bird said. “I don’t think this is the spray I meant to use? I really need to find my reading glasses before I kill somebody . . . again? But as long as it stings, that probably means it did the trick, right? And all’s well that ends well, I always say.”
Then she smiled innocently, wrapped my knuckles in about an inch of gauze, and sent me on my way. Before I even got out the door, she was already humming and munching again.
I was pretty sure the tune was “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
Well, I almost made it to my third-period class. With the half-day schedule, I had already missed science and math, but I had a real shot at being on time for social studies until I went charging around a corner and found myself heading straight at Bowen.
Swell.
He was about ten feet away from me with a bunch of his soccer friends. I knew they were his soccer friends because they were all wearing matching black warm-up jackets. It was pretty intimidating when the whole team came at you in a crowded corridor sporting their gear, which also featured two bright yellow letters inside of an oval on the back and one side of the chest: MU. The letters stood for Montvale United. Montvale was the name of our town.
Actually, the letters were the reason Bowen hated me in the first place. Way back in third grade, when their travel team first formed, all of those guys were in my class—along with Jamie. Yup, third grade had ended up being a real standout year.
One day, they all showed up wearing MU T-shirts. So I walked up to Bowen at recess and asked, “Why does your shirt say ‘Moo’?”
He got mad and said, “Can’t you read? It says M-U!”
I said, “Of course I can read! That spells ‘Moo’! I just want to know why you are all wearing ‘Moo’ shirts. Is it some kind of cow holiday?”
I wasn’t making fun of him or anything. What did I know about his stupid travel soccer wear? I had to drop out of T-ball in first grade when my mom drank up the fifteen-dollar T-shirt fee.
But Bowen got even madder, put me in a headlock, and told me he wouldn’t let me out until I screamed “MOO!” at the top of my lungs. His exact words were, “I’ll teach you to say ‘Moo!’ ” I was like, I thought you were trying to teach me not to say “Moo!”
One thing led to another, and we ended up wrestling around on the smelly blacktop next to the Dumpster. His shirt got rotting school-lunch taco meat all over it, and after one of the lunch monitors finally broke us up, I saw that Bowen’s nose was bleeding.
Back then, Bowen and I had been the same size. It seemed almost unbelievable looking back, but Bowen had been tied with me for the title of Smallest Kid in Third Grade. By fourth grade, he had been somewhere in between smallest and biggest, and by the end of fifth, he had been so huge that he had become his soccer team’s full-time goalie. Apparently, all he had to do was stand in the goal, and 90 percent of the shots were blocked by his massive body.
Off the field, Bowen preferred playing offense. Like right now, he was holding some smaller kid’s math book up over his head. The little guy, who was probably still taller than me, was jumping up, trying to reach the book, while the whole soccer team laughed. It did look ridiculous, because the kid’s hand wasn’t even getting close.
I stood there, trying to stare a hole in Bowen’s forehead.
Bowen growled at me. “What are you looking at?”
I swallowed. Obviously, I was looking at Bowen. But now everyone else in the entire hallway was looking straight at me. I had to do something, but my whole body was frozen yet again.
Luckily, my mouth still worked.
“Just give him his book, Bowen,” I said.
“Or what? Are you going to jump up and punch me in the knee?”
For a split second, I might have considered The Bee’s words: Is this a smart move or a dumb move? But it didn’t matter.
Maybe it was the trick Bowen had already played on me that morning. Maybe it was the way he was teasing the other boy. Maybe it was the words he had used—the exact same words Johnny had said to me after he had hit my mother. Maybe it was the tone of his voice—that same superior, mocking tone I’d been hearing over and over for years.
Whatever it was, something set me off.
There’s no nice way to describe what happened next. I went nuts. I dropped my book bag, put my head down, and charged at Bowen. His team scattered like bowling pins—mostly from the sheer shock of my crazed attack. I felt a slight impact against my right shoulder, and then heard a CLANG! Too late, I dimly realized I had just knocked the little guy into a row of lockers.
Oops.
A split second later, my head and shoulders slammed into Bowen, who started to exclaim, “What—”
Then he stepped away from me, and the backs of his legs hit the lip of one of those huge garbage cans that custodians use when they’re emptying a whole hallway of classroom trash baskets. There was no way I was strong enough to knock Bowen over, but unfortunately for him, he started to lose his grip on the math book he was holding over his head, and leaned back to hold on to it.
Wha-BAM! In he tumbled.
Everybody in the hall froze in horror, including me. I have to admit I felt a brief thrill of victory, but of course I knew that Bowen was going to kill me when he climbed back out of the garbage.
Well, as soon as he got what appeared to be, um, a half-eaten banana off his head.
Bowen roared.
And then an answering roar, much louder, came from immediately behind my left ear: “What—is—going—on—here???”
You know those school administrators who just sit around in their offices all day, playing on their computers? Just my luck—apparently, The Bee wasn’t one of them.
Because when I turned around, his mustache brushed against the top of my head. It was alarming, disgusting, and just the slightest bit tickly.
This time, The Bee didn’t bother asking whether I was coming along to his office.
I already knew the drill.
I spent most of the next twenty minutes sitting on a hard chair in the office. After a little while, the small kid I had inadvertently body-slammed came in with an ice pack pressed to the side of his head. He was wincing, and reeked of Lysol. Both he and the nearest secretary kept shooting me evil glares every few seconds. Great! The office staff already thought I was a bad kid, and I had made a brand-new enemy.
And I still hadn’t even set foot in an actual class. At this rate, I would probably get into the Guinness Book of World Records. I couldn’t stand it. I turned to the kid.
“So, um, hey.”
He looked at me like I was something that had just dripped on his shoe from a lunch lady’s glop ladle. I didn’t let it stop me. “Sorry about the . . . well, the smashing-you-into-the-locker thing. I was just trying to help you out.”
He sneered at me. “Ah, you were trying to help me out. What do you do when you’re trying to save somebody’s life—blast their face with a blowtorch?”
“Mistakes were made, okay?”
He turned up his nose and said, “Clearly.”
Then we sat in icy silence until The Bee’s door opened, and Bowen slunk out, looking like he had just sweated his way through a horrible ordeal. When he got close enough for me to smell the essence of banana coming off his hair, he hissed, “We were dancing! Got that?”
What was he trying to tell me? And why? Was it a warning? Was The Bee some kind of sicko who liked to dance with sixth graders? He hadn’t tried any disco moves with me before, so it seemed unlikely.
I didn’t have much time to wonder, because The Bee immediately called me into his office. As soon as I was seated, he said, “Long time no see.”
The Secret Sheriff of Sixth Grade Page 2