Wise Acres

by Dale E. Basye

  The teacher paced before his portrait with long, youthful strides. The once-smooth face of the man in the painting was now lined and furrowed.

  “In a time where everyone can express himself, expression ceases to be valuable as an art form,” Mr. Wilde explained in his low, languid voice. “Everyone who can send one of your electronic messages fancies himself a writer … and most every one of them is wrong.”

  Milton was having trouble concentrating. The constant hiss of whispering, sideways glances, and snorting explosions of mocking laughter was making him paranoid. Any one of these kids could be another fallen angel, paid by Principal Bubb to give Milton a close shave with a razor-feather. Even if no one in the classroom was presently plotting to off him, Principal Bubb could be, right now, hiring an angelic assassin.…

  “Through publicity, promotion, and propaganda, however, you can help shape the world for the rich and powerful—exchanging your wicked ways with words for a decent salary,” Mr. Wilde continued.

  Moses Babcock eyed Milton intensely, as if he were a puzzling new form of bacteria that he was examining under a microscope. Milton wiped away the nervous beads of sweat forming on his upper lip.

  I’ve got to think of some way out of this before I completely lose it.

  “In fact, you have been handed an opportunity to reshape public opinion for our very own Principal Bubb.”

  “Principal Bubb?!” Milton blurted.

  The boys stopped their whispering and stared at the new kid with dubious interest.

  “Yes, Mr.”—the teacher glanced down at his class roster with his gray, heavy-lidded eyes—“Fauster. She is looking to remake her image, and since you sassy young men think you’re too smart to be taught, my fellow teachers and I have decided to make this a competition, to see if you are all as smart as your mouths. Now you can file those sharp minds against one another, making them even keener.”

  “A contest?” Moses said, leaning forward in his seat, but not to the extent that he appeared fully engaged by an authority figure. “What will the prize be … sir?”

  Mr. Wilde curled his delicate lips. “The prize, Mr. Babcock, will be … decided at a later date. Let us just say that the top entries for whoever can create the best public relations strategy will receive extra credit, certain privileges, and special … consideration … by Principal Bubb.”

  Moses Babcock laced his fingers behind his neck and leaned back on his stack-of-books seat. “It seems a shame to make it a formal contest,” the boy said, staring admiringly at a cardboard mountain pinned to the wall. “That would just get everybody else’s hopes up. If you get right down to it, it’s really no contest at all.”

  The cardboard mountain had several photos of students taped across it, with Moses Babcock’s picture at the top. Mr. Wilde rolled his eyes.

  “Yes, Mr. Babcock, we all know that you are currently at the top of Mouth Brashmore, our symbol of student achievement. But that doesn’t automatically rule out any of your fellow classmates having a fair—”

  “I’d like to enter,” Milton said.

  The class grew as quiet as a ninja’s fart.

  Mr. Wilde fought back a smile. A grimacing old man stared back from the portrait behind him.

  Moses wrested his lips into a smile, though his eyes burned with icy malice.

  “No offense, Milton,” Moses said, “but I haven’t heard you utter one clever thing since you’ve been here. I’d be happy, though, to help you.”

  “I’m good,” Milton replied nonchalantly. “And I can name all of the clever things you’ve said, Moses, on the finger of a boxing glove.”

  There was a brief, thick pause, then suddenly an explosion of laughter. Milton could practically feel the subtle shifts in status rippling throughout the room.

  Moses glared at Milton before, again, wrenching his scowl into a practiced smile. “Well played,” he said, the words falling out of his mouth like ice from an ice machine. “I look forward to more of your contributions.…”

  Mr. Wilde strode toward Milton with a swish of his pinstriped trousers and handed him a sheet of paper. “There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Babcock that a little reincarnation wouldn’t cure,” the teacher whispered warmly before handing out instructions to the other dozen or so boys who had raised their hands to enter the contest.

  Milton scanned the worksheet.

  Public Relations Problem:

  Principal Bea “Elsa” Bubb

  Situation Analysis: Principal Bubb is, to put it mildly, disliked. To put it mediumly, hated. To put it spicily hot, detested with unquenchable rage and loathing. Worse yet, she’s not respected. Her weakness as an authority figure is the sole issue that the demonic and divine can agree upon. This public relations campaign must heighten positive underworld awareness and support of Principal Bubb as a valuable educational resource. Good luck: you’ll need it.

  Milton wasn’t sure why, exactly, he had decided to enter the contest. He supposed it was a knee-jerk reaction to that mean-jerk-reactor Moses, wanting to one-up the smug boy who had been masquerading as an ally. But perhaps most of all, Milton craved the hypnotizing routine of schoolwork. His mind needed a break from worrying about eternal torment, assassination attempts by fallen angels, and how filthy his sheets and pillowcase were likely to be.

  Milton tapped his chewed pencil on his stacked-book desk to the sound of frantic scribbling around him.

  Remaking the principal’s grotesque image into something likable was a daunting, if not impossible task. And Principal Bubb was the last creature in all of creation that he wanted to help. But perhaps Milton could come up with something that would both help the principal and make Heck a better place.…

  Milton stole a glance at Moses, who was busy writing down his strategy. The boy seemed too skinny to be a fallen angel commando and didn’t seem to be hiding a flaming halo or a pair of deadly wings feathered with keen blades. But he did seem to be the type of kid who would love nothing more than to stab you in the back.

  Then it hit Milton. He jotted down his thoughts before common sense evicted them from his head.

  Strategy:

  What would help heal the rift between down here and up there? Angels! Fallen angels that have been forsaken. Tough angels that can help keep Heck safe for all. This, combined with a kinder, gentler image, will make Principal Bubb a likable yet not-to-be-trifled-with figurehead for juvenile rehabilitation.

  D-Press Release Example:

  Principal Bubb Makes Netherworld

  Security a High-Profile Priority

  HECK: Principal Bubb has recruited a band of fallen angels to act as Heck’s personal security force. This, she says, will help to protect her students and employees from an increasingly dangerous and unstable underworld.

  “I have thousands of years of experience but am also sensitive to the winds of change,” Principal Bubb says while playfully tousling the hair of one of her beloved students. “I can make Heck a safe, fun, and effective place: thanks to the recruitment of the fallen, whom I have dubbed Heck’s Angels. This will free me to fill the underworld with compassion and tolerance.”

  Tactics:

  • Hiring of fallen angels to serve as Principal Bubb’s security detail, their involvement overseen by an independent committee to reinforce the principal’s regime as thoroughly accountable and trustworthy. Have students assess her performance on a regular basis. Make her own position an electable one, showing her confidence.

  • Appearances at high-profile events to increase Principal Bubb’s visibility, ideally events where she is associated with security and child development.

  • Day of the Darned: a Netherworld-wide child appreciation day, with lavish parades (everybody loves a parade) and a grand prize: allowing one lucky student to graduate “upstairs.”

  • Articles in popular underworld magazines such as Dead People, Out of Time, Better Crypts and Cemeteries, Reaper’s Digest, and Next-of-Kin Circle.

  Milton smirked to himself as he handed
in his paper to Mr. Wilde.

  The principal was obviously desperate if she needed to enlist the help of students to save her ample butt. And his public relations strategy—Milton had to admit with a rare lack of humility—was brilliant. If Bubb was officially aligned with the fallen angels, she wouldn’t be able to use them in any sort of illicit, underhanded way. They would be far too visible to do things like, oh, I don’t know … covertly murder Milton. This would open Principal Bubb up to a whole new level of accountability.

  Sure, the last thing Milton wanted to do was actually help Principal Bubb, but this campaign—if Milton won the contest and the principal actually went for his crazy idea—could solve Milton’s “not having his throat aired out by a fallen angel’s razor-feather” issue and help every kid in Heck by making the place somewhat “less completely awful in every way.”

  The class bell tolled. Mr. Wilde took his portrait from the wall—the decrepit man in the painting now a withered sack of skin rattling with brittle bones. The teacher shook the painting vigorously like an Etch A Sketch, with the subject—Mr. Wilde—regaining his bloom of youth.

  Mr. Wilde wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “That was close … you students age me so,” he mumbled.

  Moses Babcock glared at Milton as he and the other boys handed in their entries. The boy quickly scribbled something onto his palm with a pen, then walked over to Milton.

  “Best of luck on your strategy,” Moses said, squeezing Milton’s hand and vigorously shaking it as if he were pumping water from a well. The boy’s eyes simmered with contempt as he let go of Milton’s throbbing hand and stormed away.

  Maybe he’s just intense, Milton thought. Maybe Moses means well and just comes off cold and confrontational.

  Milton stared at his palm. On it was a word written in fresh ink.

  LOSER

  Milton sighed.

  Or maybe I just made my first enemy here in Wise Acres.…

  8 · LIVIN’ (AT) LARGE

  DALE E. BASYE grimaced as he pushed away the emptied tin of cat food in disgust.

  That Simply Scrumptpuss Fisherman’s Stew tasted like it was made with real fishermen, he thought, scratching at his patchy beard.

  So much had happened in the last few months. Far too much. Ever since that creepy kid, Damian Ruffino, had exploded like a big, bully of a zit on the Avalawns golf course outside of his former McMansion in the United Estates of Nevada, Dale had become a fugitive: on the run and on the lam.

  Mmmm … lamb, Dale thought, patting his growling stomach.

  It’s not like it was Dale’s fault. Not really. Not completely. Damian, that pushy, pimple-faced preteen, had actually tried to blackmail him.… Okay, blackmailing him for unabashedly stealing the boy’s idea about an h-e-double-hockey-sticks for children—where the souls of the darned toiled for all eternity, or until they turned eighteen, whichever came first—and turning it into a hugely popular video game. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Three rights, though, make a left, driving-wise. Dale had learned this because Las Vegas—or Lost Vague-us, as he had called it while trying to navigate its confounding cat’s cradle of streets—was designed so that most every thoroughfare cunningly led you into the open, pickpocketing arms of a casino. So many roads trying to lead you to ruin. And Dale, it seems, had been speeding to ruin on the expressway.

  Damian’s gruesome death had—regrettably—happened several yards away from Dale after a lively argument that—unfortunately—occurred in front of a group of nosy witnesses playing through to the next hole and—regrettably, unfortunately, and super-sad-to-say—was captured in its entirety by controversy-hungry anchorwoman Biddy Malone and the KBET: The Only Sure “Bet” in Las Vegas news team. The news crew had been covering the AGHAST (Adults Galled by Heck and Such Things) protest outside of Dale’s home after his Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go video game had reportedly turned many a teenage mind to mush.

  It didn’t matter, though, that Dale had had nothing to do with Damian’s one-boy meat-splosion. What mattered was that it had happened on TV, and if something happens on TV, then it’s true, or at least trueish. And considering that Damian left behind very little to actually autopsy, former-author-turned-video-game-tycoon-turned-convict-to-be Dale E. Basye was just one wrong move away from making the nightly news yet again.

  He had been forced to give up everything, to leave his entire life behind him. Or, more to the point, Dale was now forced to live fifty feet behind his old life, having holed up in his former garden shed.

  His ostentatious three-story McMansion had been quickly emptied by his wife—not his real wife but his covetous trophy wife, former Uzbek supermodel Goldie Grrr—and the house had been put up for sale.

  How Dale longed for his family, his real family, the one he had lost when his success had grown faster than his ability to handle it properly. But his prospects for regaining his former former life—the life he had spent in Portland, Oregon, as a struggling children’s author writing cheeky, groan-inducing books impervious to most every book list imaginable—were as empty as the house he now stared at forlornly through the window of his dingy garden shed.

  Suddenly, something stirred inside the mansion. A hawk-nosed man with sandy, feathered hair and a polo shirt tucked into his chinos walked past the second-floor kitchen window.

  “Phelps Better?” Dale muttered as he watched the unaccountably aggravating vice president of engineering for Virtual Prayground Technologies, the company that had purchased the exclusive video game rights to Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, strut through Dale’s house as if he owned the place.

  A blond woman with a surgically tightened face teetered across the front yard on her high heels and, with a ladylike grunt, removed the FOR SALE sign from the expensive, imported dirt.

  “Just bought my house?” Dale continued, drinking water that he had collected from his overly ambitious sprinkler system. “But why?”

  The beady-eyed man opened the refrigerator and stared at his reflection in the mirror that Dale had installed so that he could see what he looked like when opening the refrigerator. Dale grabbed a pair of binoculars and brought his former kitchen into sharp focus. Phelps grinned at his own image, surely the only creature to ever do so. He took out an emery board from his back pocket and then proceeded to file down two little hornlike nubs sprouting just above his temples.

  “His horns,” Dale muttered. “They’re real … not the trendy body-mod he claimed he and the other engineers on the Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go development team got for ‘brand cohesion’ or whatever. But something that actually grows out of his freakin’ skull.”

  Phelps pulled out Dale’s last can of Rojo Toro—an experimental Mexican energy drink originally used to keep stolen organs fresh on the black market—and slammed the door with his hip. He tapped his Bluetooth headset and took the spiral escalator to the main level.

  “Aleister?” he spoke into his headset, strutting out onto the patio looking like a Borg on Casual Friday. “You should answer the phone with your name so that people know who they’re talking to. That’s a Better way of doing it. Get it? Like my last name?”

  Phelps brayed like a mule, his eyes disappearing into crinkled slits.

  “I’m in it now. Basye’s house,” he said, mangling Dale’s last name like most everyone did, making it sound like some kind of French skin disease. “My house now. Bring the team over tonight and we’ll go through it, top to bottom, and try to find some clue to his whereabouts.”

  Phelps tilted back his can of Rojo Toro.

  “I’m really worried about the guy—”

  Wow, maybe I misread Phelps, Dale thought.

  “—not!” Phelps cackled, brushing back his feathered, parted-in-the-middle hairstyle that hadn’t changed since the mid-1970s. “So we can kill him, of course!”

  Dale swallowed, but the horrible cat food aftertaste seemed to claw its way back up his throat.

  “He knows too much,” Phelps continued. “Not as much as me, though, b
ecause I’m Better at everything. Get it? My last name? But he knows more than is good for him. If the police catch him, he’ll start blabbing and it’ll become a ‘thing’ … a thing we can’t control. And I’m all about control,” he said as he fished out his iSlab from his chinos and began tapping out a note to himself.

  What could I possibly know that could be so important to him?

  “He doesn’t know that what he knows is important,” Phelps said. “That his book … the game … that it was all real.”

  Real? But that’s impossible.…

  “Or as real as that kind of thing can be. But soon everyone will know, and it’ll be too late for them and just right for me. I’ll show my dad what I’m capable of. And then he’ll be proud. Get it? He’ll. It’s a joke, only Better, because I said it.”

  His dad? Why would someone go through all of this trouble to impress their dad?

  “And once I get my dad’s attention, I’ll make him pay for leaving me up here,” Phelps Better said as he pulverized his empty can of Rojo Toro in his hand. “Dearly.”

  At this point, Dale realized that running away from his old life wouldn’t be enough to survive. He’d have to run away from life itself to truly be free of the mess he’d made of things. A total do-over. Every adult’s dream come true. But first he’d have to convince the world, and especially Phelps Better, that he was no longer of this world … or die trying.

  9 · TEACHERS’ PET PEEVES

  MILTON SAW HIS sister kneeling just outside of the Teachers’ Lounge, pretending to tie her shoe. After a moment’s babbling, the room went as silent as a mime’s wake. Marlo was peeking through the crack between the slightly open door and the doorjamb. Milton could see a group of forlorn teachers sitting miserably around a crooked table covered with coffee ring stains.