My brain was suddenly charged! The erasable pen was what he had been using all this while. How could I have been so blind?
“I need to get my hands on Leonard’s test papers,” I muttered.
“What did you say, Darryl? Are you done there?” Madam Siti’s eyes fell on me. My page was blank except for a few numbers sparsely distributed. They did not even make any sense.
“Darryl De! You definitely have to stay back!”
“I know,” I said sheepishly.
“BRRIIIIING!” Our favourite sound brought everyone to their feet. We flung our test papers to the group leader with the greatest accuracy and rushed headlong out of the class. I stopped Leonard just as he was about to head out.
“Hey Leonard, can I borrow your Math and Science CA1 test papers please?”
“What for?”
“Corrections.”
“Hmmmm…” He thought for a while. “And why should I be helping you, loser?”
“Cos, I have something you would love.”
“Really?”
“You and Justin can have an icy can of Coke and a huge packet of potato chips. Each. For recess.”
“Really?! Deal!” he said. I took them out from the orange plastic bag. Leonard saw that the offer was for real. Without hesitation, he dug through his bag for the papers and slammed them on my chest.
“Ooooooooo! Have a lousy recess, Darryl De, doing corrections! Loser.” Justin rushed to grab his Coke and chips. He clicked open the can of Coke, and it let out a tempting fizz.
The two boys sauntered out of the class. With Coke and potato chips in their hands, they vanished, without a care in the world. Justin was so distracted by his Coke reward that he had forgotten all about his water bottle.
At that moment, Janice waddled out of the class and caught my eye.
“Now?!” she asked.
“Yes, now is the only time,” I said. “Please? I need you to help me with something.”
“Oh. Alright then. I guess this will have to wait.” She crushed her double coated chocolate donut back into her pocket.
“You didn’t have to lie, you know?”
“About what?”
“About not bringing your calculator to school today.”
“But I had to,” I said. “It was the only way I would get to stand behind the class to catch the cheater bugs.”
“Clever!” she smiled.
“So the pen and eraser that Mundi found yesterday belong to Damien?” she asked.
“Yes. I recognised them the moment I saw them.”
“How?”
“Damien loves to draw a smiley face on all his stationery. And the pen and eraser both had one.”
“How come you didn’t tell us?”
“Well, we used to get along really well, Janice. Then he grew taller. And he joined the basketball team. He loved sports and I… well, just couldn’t catch up with him. Besides, I am always writing poems and it’s too embarrassing for him to be around me.”
She sighed. “So what are you going to do about his cheat pen and eraser?”
“I will pass his pen and eraser to Mr Grosse, but I will never divulge whom they belong to. Can you keep this a secret? Promise?”
Janice sighed again. “No wonder he does well in all the tests.”
Just then, Clandestino and Mundi trooped back from the toilet.
“Just in time,” I said. “Thanks for the two cans of Coke and potato chips, Clandestino!”
“Not a problem!” he said. “I got them at a sale… as they are almost expired!”
We exploded with laughter.
“Yeah, Leonard and Justin were drawn to the treats like fish to bait,” Janice added.
“Happy to help, guys!” he said.
“Did you get the test papers, no?” Mundi asked.
“Oh yes, I am on to something else,” I said. “We have to be quick.”
“Let me see!” Janice said. Flipping through the pages, she wore her most serious monitress face. She held up Leonard’s test paper to the rays of light that filtered into 5B.
Out of the 25 questions on the test, there were at least five MCQ blanks that had two numbers. Except that one number was an almost-invisible imprint.
“I can see the imprints, but this doesn’t make sense. We erase our answers and rewrite our answers all the time,” she said.
While we were scrutinising Leonard’s paper, Clandestino yelled, “Is this Justin’s?”
He held up a used Coke bottle like a trophy.
“Yes,” I said. “Justin has been hanging on to this for dear life.”
“Wait a minute… This part doesn’t look right, no?” Mundi uttered.
“Yeah,” Clandestino agreed. “Look at the wordings in the ingredients. Those are not ingredients at all!”
“Smelly cheater bugs. No?” Mundi was repulsed. I ran up to the two boys.
“Let me see,” I said, grabbing the bottle for a closer look. Listed under “Ingredients” were math and science definitions. It was like Primary 5 Math and Science for Dummies condensed in a little paper.
Everyone gasped, except for Mundi, who was still shaking his head in disgust. The bottle had every definition needed to survive a Math and Science test!
“I will keep this!” Clandestino said. “This definitely has to go to Mrs Priya. Along with the cheat pen and eraser.”
Janice’s eyes were still fixed on the test papers. She marched up, unconvinced. “So! Darryl? Evidence of cheating on Leonard’s test papers?”
“Yes, but we’d better put them away. I can hear them coming back now,” I said. “They are about one minute away.”
“That means they are on the way up 40 steps. No?” Mundi said.
We all stared at Mundi, amazed that he had actually counted the number of steps from ground floor to class.
“Quick, everyone, everything back in its place!” I said.
“I’ll get it,” Clandestino said. Swiftly, he grabbed the Coke bottle. Like a professional basketballer, he aimed it at Justin’s bag. Bending his knees, he flicked his wrist. The Coke bottle landed perfectly inside the bag. Like it had never been touched. Perfect.
“We will continue tomorrow.” I grinned.
CHAPTER 9: WILL THE REAL LOSERS PLEASE STAND UP?
That night I was kept awake, too thrilled from the discoveries of the day… and something else. Why did Damien have to resort to that?
It was 1am. I removed my earphones from my ears. My ears caught the sound of something familiar.
Click, clack, click, clack, click, clack. Someone was on the keyboard typing away. I slunk into the living room. I heard a “hee hee, kee kee”.
“Boo!” I pounced.
“Sssssssshhh!” came the reply.
“Caught you! What are you doing here at this hour, Sophia? You had better sleep. Mum’s going to kill you if she knows.”
“Sssshhh!”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Watermelon.”
“You mean the Annoying Watermelon?”
“No!! Just Watermelon. Now go away.”
I caught a glimpse of the screen. There was a chat going on between Sophia and Watermelon:
Sophia: You are soooo cool, Watermelon. LOL
Watermelon: You are too cute and pretty to be true too! LOL. I wish I could see you in person.
Sophia: Let’s meet! For REAL this time.
My goose pimples were rising from the mushiness of the chat content. They were mushier than Grandma’s gross porridge.
“Hey!” Sophia elbowed me while trying to block the screen at the same time. Then, she typed “BWOM”.
Instinct told me to be brotherly. “You’d better be careful. You know that there are many perverts out there.”
“He’s not a pervert. He is always helping me with my Math and telling me jokes.”
“Okay… as long as you….”
“Darryl?? Sophia!?” Mum’s voice stirred the midnight air.
“Oh no!”
“Oh no too!”
I sped off to my room. Sophia slammed the laptop shut and skittered after me.
We dived into our beds, buried ourselves in a shallow grave of pillows and blankets and froze.
“Darryl?!” Mum checked again from her room.
Sophia and I played dead.
When we sensed her let up, I whispered, “Pssst! By the way, what does BWOM mean? I have never heard of it.”
“It means Brother Watching Over Me.”
“What?! Okay, goodnight.”
“Goodnight. If you ever leak a word to Mum, I will…”
“I know! I know!” I said. “Promise!”
Sophia giggled herself to sleep that night. I was now more awake than I had ever been. Was Sophia, my 12-year-old sister, falling in love?
The next day, the members of Operation Pants on Fire decided to meet early in school. The cool foggy air made our sleuth operation even more surreptitious. We had arranged to meet in the hall, the busiest place, so that our meeting would look less suspicious.
“Hey, did you bring the erasable pens?” I asked Clandestino. He had a store of pens at home since he was a pen ninja.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Okay, great! I’ve got the paper,” Mundi said, whipping out a clean sheet of A4 paper. “This paper has the exact same texture as those used for our test papers. No?”
“Good thinking, Mundi,” Janice said. “Let’s see…” she said as she placed the piece of paper on the floor. We all huddled very close together on the floor, a piece of paper at the centre of our circle.
“This is unbelievable, no?” Mundi piped up.
“What Leonard does is this…” I wrote down a few numbers on the paper with a blue erasable pen. After that, I erased the numbers and went over them with a different number using the same pen.
“Three seconds!” Mundi cried.
“What three seconds?” Clandestino asked.
“Three seconds you took to erase the number and write the correct one. If the cheaters did that for five questions, they would need 15 seconds. No?”
“Which is the amount of time it takes for Miss Jacobs and Madam Siti to do class control!” I added. “Brilliant!”
Clandestino scratched his neck in doubt. “That’s it? Justin and Leonard could have erased their answers during the test itself.”
“No! No! Justin and Leonard are always claiming they have been marked wrongly. Does anyone else do that?” I said. My three friends stared at me.
“How many times have you seen Leonard and Justin running up to our teachers telling them they have been marked wrongly?”
“Almost all the time!”
“Yes.”
“Are-are-are-you saying that Leonard and Justin used an eee-eee-erasable ink pen during their test… And-and-and they would erase their wrong answers when the papers were given back…” Janice said excitedly (I thought she was about to have a heart attack).
“Then-then fill in th-the-the right answers with the s-sa-same pen and claim that they have been ma-mar-marked wrongly?” she continued.
“Yes!! That’s it!”
“OH!” Her eyes widened.
“Yes, oh,” I said. “With 300 scripts to mark in a week, teachers are bound to make mistakes and these guys know it.”
The four of us looked at each other under the darkness of our huddle. All of a sudden, I heard laughter.
“Wait here,” I said. Looking around, I saw that class 5B had gathered at the entrance of the school hall. What in the world?
“Quick! Let’s go check that out!” Clandestino urged. He got up. I caught him pawing the floor with his feet. And then all of a sudden, he powered off! Whoosh! He vanished quickly, speeding off so fast that a cloud of dust trailed behind him.
The next thing we knew, the cloud separated and revealed him standing at the entrance of the school hall with the rest of the class.
“He took 1.4 seconds, no? Mundi exclaimed. “To run from here to there!”
“Gosh! I never knew he was THE SPEED.”
“He’s incredible!” Janice added. “Let me try!”
She was about to paw the ground with her feet too when we all chorused, “No!!!”
“Let’s just hurry!” I yelled.
We tore off, secretly racing against each other. When we arrived, Clandestino was not in a good mood. His fists were clenched and he was all red, staring at something on the wall. Up on the school’s notice board were four pieces of paper, each with our names on them.
Everyone was laughing. Leonard and Justin were beaming! Janice fled from the scene, eyes brimming with tears. Mundi stood there, blinking profusely. He didn’t know what to do.
“Justin and Leonard!” I yelled. “That’s enough from you both.” Marching up to them, I didn’t think I had ever been angrier.
“Ooooooh. Scary.” Leonard sniggered. “How do you like our poems?”
Justin immediately blocked Leonard from me. “Can I help you, Dirty Darryl?” He grabbed my shirt and wrung it, baring his knuckles.
Glaring at the both of them with gritted teeth, I was about to punch Justin. Just then, I heard the air stirring up from behind me. It was the familiar sound of two spinning blades. “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!” Before I could turn around, two objects whizzed past me, one after another.
“Bull’s eye!” Clandestino muttered. The two pens were lodged on the notice board behind where Leonard was standing. One on his left and one on his right. They had missed Leonard’s ears by a hair’s breadth.
Leonard was momentarily stunned. This angered Justin even more. Damien slowly backed away.
“I have had enough of you, Nosey! Do you have to stick your mucous nose into everything?” Justin tightened his grip on my shirt.
Mundi was very uncomfortable. “Er, boys, boys. Assembly is starting in exactly five minutes and 43 seconds. No?”
By this time, a group of students had gathered around us.
Leonard goaded, “Hit him! Hit him!”
“Run, Darryl, run,” Damien whispered. Justin was gripping something in his pocket and I could hear the unmistakable clacking sound of a penknife being extended.
“You think I am scared of you?” Clandestino challenged. That was a really wrong question in my opinion.
There was fire in Leonard’s eyes. “You know how Mundi got the scar on his hand?” he asked.
“You will be next!” Justin threatened, whipping out his penknife.
All of a sudden, a loud and clear voice rang out, “Children! Stop this now!”
Everyone immediately dispersed.
“Mrs Priya! The principal!” Leonard panicked.
“Quick, let’s go!” Justin pulled Damien and ran. “This is NOT over.”
Mrs Priya yelled again, “I am going to call your parents, Justin and Leonard. I will tell them what you have done. Don’t think I didn’t see you putting those poems up.”
The three boys ran for their lives. They didn’t dare look back.
“Where is Mrs Priya?” Mundi looked all around him. She was nowhere to be seen.
“Is she upstairs?” Clandestino said, retrieving his pens from the notice board.
“Here!” Janice emerged from behind a pillar.
“It was you, as Mrs Priya, no?” Mundi whispered.
“Yup, me!” Janice exclaimed. “The real Mrs Priya would never have known that it was Leonard and Justin who put up those poems.” Her face was still stained with tears.
“Don’t cry, Janice,” Clandestino comforted, ripping down the poems.
“It’s time we report to Mrs Priya and Mr Grosse all that we have found,” I said.
After school that day, we showed our findings to Mrs Priya. Janice was chosen to be our spokesperson since she was a girl and teachers tended to be less harsh on girls. We gave Mrs Priya some names, but held some back. Mrs Priya was awed by our discovery at first, but the more she found out, the angrier she got.
“Kids nowadays,” she said, sha
king her head. “They ought to be taught a lesson.”
“Heh,” we agreed nervously.
“So the only culprits are Justin and Leonard?” she asked. “Any others I should know of?”
The four of us remained silent.
“Erasable pens ought to be banned during exams. Soft drink bottles too!” she said. “Very well done. You don’t know how these findings will change things so much in Brightstar Primary School.”
We grinned sheepishly again, still tongue-tied. “Please keep up your good work. The operation is not over. I urge you to find more culprits and uncover their cheat methods,” she said.
“Yes, Mrs Priya.” We bowed.
Over the next few days, Mrs Priya and Mr Grosse began their investigations. All the other teachers were informed of the cheating methods of the students and extensive checks were made on everyone. With our leads, they discovered that there were a few other students cheating.
Justin and Leonard were among the first to be punished. They were shocked on learning they had been discovered. For a week, they had to spend every day after school writing lines: Honesty is the best policy. What was worse, they had to retake all their common tests! In Mrs Priya’s office! Standing up! Shiver, shudder.
On the other hand, we, the “chosen ones” of Operation Pants on Fire, had the best time of our lives. Mundi began to find his voice and enchanted us with stories from India. We listened and it opened up a whole new world of black tea, curry and eating with hands.
Clandestino amused us with his quick hands and feet. We, in turn, taught him how to blow his nose. Apparently, his mother never taught him how to do that as she felt it was rude and uncouth to blow noses in public. That was why he was blocked up all the time, nose-wise.
Janice also taught us all we needed to know about donuts. Best of all, the lessons came with free donut samples! We had free donuts for recess. Janice looked happier than I had ever remembered. I think it had to do with the fact that she finally had friends.
On my part, I realised that every kid, no matter how weird, disgusting or ugly, has a gift. Most of the time, we are too busy with our own lives to discover the good in our friends. Yes, we became very good friends – Janice, Mundi, Clandestino and me. Together, we made quite an awesome team, I felt. But there was just one shadow hanging over us: How were we ever going to beat Justin, Leonard and Damien in the upcoming Basketball Challenge?
Extraordinary Losers 1 Page 6