by Dave Barry
“Um?” said The Stinger. “That’s your explanation?”
“Um, no,” I said. Then, to make myself sound even stupider, which was not easy, I said, “I dunno.”
She sighed, then looked at Nick Bevin holding his bleeding thumb. “Did that animal bite you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, looking sincere, hurt, and brave, all at the same time.
I said, “It bit him because they were throwing it around.”
Big mistake. Both Bevins glared at me. Troy flexed his giant arm muscles in an unfriendly manner.
“Is that true?” The Stinger said to Nick. “Did you throw the ferret?”
Nick looked deeply hurt. “Absolutely not,” he said. Which was technically true; he caught the ferret.
I said, “But he—”
“No more discussion, Mr. Palmer,” said The Stinger. “You will get rid of that animal right now….”
“But where can—”
“I don’t care where. You will get it off school property immediately, and then you will report to my office.”
She turned around and stalked away. Both Bevins were looming large over me now.
“You know what I like even less than ferrets?” said Troy.
“What?” said Nick.
“Rats,” said Troy, staring at me.
At that moment Matt crawled out of the crowd. He looked up at me, saw Frank in my hands, and said, “You found him!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I found him.”
“Is he okay?” said Matt, standing up.
“He’s fine,” I said.
“Oh, good.” Matt reached for Frank. But before I could hand him over, Troy snatched him out of my hands.
“Hey,” said Matt. “He’s mine!”
“Yeah,” said Troy. “But it bit my brother. We need to find out if it has any diseases or anything.” He took off his backpack—it was an official Miami Heat backpack—unzipped it, and dropped Frank inside.
“You can’t do that!” said Matt.
“I already did,” said Troy, zipping the backpack closed.
“Give him back!” said Matt. He reached for Troy’s backpack, but Troy shoved him with his forearm, casually, like Matt weighed nothing. Matt stumbled a few steps and almost fell. His face was red, and I could tell he was about to cry.
“Please,” he said. “Give him back. He gets scared.”
“Don’t worry,” said Nick. “It won’t be scared for long.” He looked at Troy, and they both smiled. These were not nice smiles. Matt looked at me like What do I do? I shook my head.
Troy turned to Suzana, who had been quiet during all the drama, which was not like her.
“So,” Troy said, “we’ll see you around, okay, Suzana?”
“Okay, sure,” she said.
The Bevin brothers walked away. Matt started to follow them but stopped, because it was hopeless.
“What am I gonna do?” he said. “They took Frank!”
Ignoring him for the moment, I looked at Suzana. “You want to hang out with those guys?”
“Why not?” she said.
“Because they’re jerks. Didn’t you see them throw Frank?”
“They were just kidding around. Frank is fine.”
“Seriously? Just kidding around?”
“But they took Frank!” said Matt.
“Because he bit Nick. I’m sure they’ll give him back after they test him,” she said.
“You believe them?” I said. “You seriously think they’re gonna test him?”
“Yes, I do. And Matt shouldn’t have brought him to school anyway.”
I was staring at her. “So suddenly, you’re big on rules.”
She was staring back. “Wyatt, what’s your problem?”
“My problem is, I think the reason you’re defending those jerks is they’re the famous popular Bevin brothers, and you really want them to like you even if they’re jerks and they dump all over people who’re supposed to be your friends.”
“That’s what you think?” she said. Her face was really red.
“Yeah. That’s what I think.”
“Fine. You think what you want.”
She turned and walked away fast. The bell rang, which meant classes started in five minutes.
“What am I gonna do?” said Matt. “They took—”
“Matt, shut up, okay? I know they took Frank.”
Matt gave me a hurt look. At this rate, by the end of the day I’d have no friends left.
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. We’ll figure out what to do about Frank.”
“But what can we do?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Right now I have to go see The Stinger.”
Leaving Matt there looking sad, I trudged to the office to find out my fate.
My fate turned out to be two detentions and a major lecture from The Stinger. The lecture was about how maybe I was a big hero in middle school, but if I thought that that was going to get me special treatment at Coral Cove High School, and especially if I thought I could violate the rules and bring a dangerous animal to school, I was very much mistaken, because that was NOT how Coral Cove High School operated. I tried to tell The Stinger that I didn’t think I was a hero and didn’t expect special treatment, but when I opened my mouth she said, “You are not here to speak, Mr. Palmer. You are here to listen.”
So I listened until The Stinger was done lecturing me, then trudged to my first class, which was English with Ms. Padmore. This was my favorite class. For one thing, Ms. Padmore is from a Caribbean country called Trinidad and Tobago, so she has this accent that makes basically everything she says, including “Good morning,” sound funny. When she reads Shakespeare, she’s hilarious.
For another thing, this was my only class with Suzana.
Here’s what I was hoping would happen. I was hoping that Suzana would have thought it over, and after the class she’d come up to me and tell me that she’d been wrong, and the Bevin brothers really were jerks, and she was sorry. Then we’d be friends again.
That’s not what happened. When the class ended, Suzana didn’t even look at me. She walked right past me on her way out and didn’t say a word.
So that sucked.
After English, my next class—speaking of things that sucked—was Chemistry, which I hate. For one thing, the teacher, Mr. Krempler, is at least eight hundred years old, and he talks in this muffled voice, like he stuffed an entire tuna fish sandwich into his mouth that he hasn’t gotten around to swallowing yet. So most of the time I can’t understand him. And even when I can understand him, I can’t really understand him, because he’s talking about chemistry. I realize I’m only fourteen, but I’m already sure that whatever job I end up with when I grow up, I won’t need to know the difference between a covalent bond and an ionic bond, or what the atomic number of Erbium is. I seriously doubt I’m ever going to have anything to do with Erbium, or Fermium, or Einsteinium, or any of the other “iums” that old Tuna Fish Mouth is always droning about.
After Chemistry I had Trigonometry, which is another subject I seriously doubt I’ll ever need to know about later on. I was not doing well in Trigonometry. On the last test I got a D, which freaked out my mom, who checks my grades every day on the Internet. (Thanks a lot, Internet.) The day I got the D, my family was eating dinner in the kitchen and my mom said, “I see you got a D on your trigonometry test.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You got a D?” said Taylor, who is my sister, unfortunately.
“On one test,” I said.
“I never got a D in anything,” said Taylor.
“Because you’re in middle school,” I said. “You’re probably still learning the alphabet.”
“No, I learned the alphabet already. It starts with the letter A. Which is the only grade I ever get.”
Unfortunately this was true. It’s one of the many annoying things about Taylor.
“That’s right,” said my mom. “Your sister gets excellent grades. And I expect
the same from you. Getting a D is unacceptable.”
A lot of things are unacceptable to my mom.
“Well, I’m sorry,” I said. “It was a hard test.”
“Then you need to study harder,” she said. “Instead of looking at your phone all the time.” My mom blames my phone for everything.
“I do study,” I said. “I just don’t understand it.”
“If you don’t understand it, you should ask your father to help you. He’s good at math.”
My mom has been claiming for years, with no evidence, that my dad is good at math. The truth is that the last time he was helpful was when I was in second grade and trying to learn the multiplication tables. Dad was okay at those, except for nine times seven, which for some reason he always thought was fifty-eight.
But once I got to long division, my dad was basically useless, because like everybody else he stopped doing long division by hand as soon as he stopped having to take tests on it. If he needs to divide something, he does it on his phone, like all the other grown-ups in the world. So he’d stare at one of my long-division problems for a while, looking totally lost, and finally I’d say, “Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out,” and he’d say, “Good, because the only way you’re going to learn is by doing it yourself,” and then he’d go back to watching television.
But my mom still thinks he’s this big math expert.
“Eddie,” she said to my dad, “why don’t you help Wyatt with his trigonometry?”
“What?” said my dad, who was watching SportsCenter on the TV next to the kitchen table.
“Wyatt got a D on his trigonometry test,” said my mom.
“Yeah, he got a D,” said Taylor, in case anybody forgot how annoying she is.
Dad attempted to give me a stern look without totally taking his eyes off the TV screen. “You need to study more,” he said.
“I do study,” I said. “I just don’t get it. I don’t even get what it’s for. Like why do I need to know about the hypotenuse? When am I ever gonna use that?”
“It just so happens,” said my dad, “that you use it all the time.”
“I use the hypotenuse?”
“Every time you use a GPS. The GPS uses trigonometry to tell where you are.” He looked pleased with himself, like it was actually him who invented the GPS.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You use a GPS, right?”
He nodded.
“So according to you, that means you use the hypotenuse, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what is the hypotenuse?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s a…it’s a mathematical…Okay, in a triangle, when you do a triangulation, you have your three, um, sides, and you, you triangulate them, and the hypotenuse is one of the, um, factors.”
“In other words,” I said, “you have no idea.”
“Well not now,” he said. “But I did when I took trigonometry.”
He went back to watching SportsCenter.
“So you think you’re smarter than your teachers?” said my mom. “Is that what you think?”
“No! I just think they’re teaching me stuff I don’t need to know, just because they had to learn it.” Which I think is basically the whole point of high school.
“Well you BETTER learn it,” said my mom. “Because a D is unacceptable. Right, Eddie? Eddie? Tell him.”
“Tell him what?” said my dad, who was watching a guy dunk over another guy.
“Tell him it’s unacceptable.”
“It’s unacceptable,” said my dad, not taking his eyes off the TV screen.
That’s me: unacceptable.
Anyway, getting back to my horrible day at Coral Cove: After Trigonometry I had the one subject that I totally get the point of: lunch. I eat lunch with pretty much the same group of kids I hang out with in the morning before school, which sometimes includes Suzana. But she wasn’t there, so I spent lunchtime listening to Matt saying how worried he was about his stupid ferret and asking me like eighteen thousand times how he could get him back.
The worst part of lunch was having to call my mom and tell her I needed a ride home from school because I had detention. She did not take it well.
“You got a DETENTION?” she said, loud enough that I had to hold my phone away from my ear.
“Actually,” I said, “I got two detentions.”
“YOU GOT TWO DETENTIONS?”
I would have heard that if my phone had been turned off.
“Yeah. So can you come pick me—”
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
“Nothing. I was holding a ferret.”
“YOU WERE HOLDING A WHAT?”
“A ferret.”
“WHY DID YOU HAVE A FERRET AT SCHOOL?”
“It wasn’t my—”
“THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!!”
The conversation—if you can call it that—went on a while more, with my mom yelling so loud I’m surprised my phone didn’t melt. In the end she said she would come and get me, but she would be late, and we were going to have a Serious Discussion on the way home.
So lunch wasn’t so great.
The rest of the day also wasn’t great, but at least nothing else really bad happened. After school I put my backpack in my locker and reported for detention at the office of the assistant principal, Mr. Forster, who is a very large, wide, squarish man, like a UPS truck that grew limbs and a head. There were fourteen of us serving detention. Mr. Forster took roll, then handed us each a pair of latex gloves and a garbage bag. He told us we’d be picking up trash for the next hour and he expected us to come up with our bags full, and if he saw anybody goofing off, that person would get two more detentions added on. Then he assigned us to different parts of the school grounds. I got the north side of the school buildings, behind the gym and next to the athletic field.
So I trudged out there with my garbage bag and started picking up trash, mostly discarded stuff from student lunches, including some seriously disgusting sandwiches that students decided not to eat, and I didn’t blame them. After I’d been out there for about twenty minutes, the side door of the gym banged open and the football team came out, a herd of big guys wearing helmets and yelling at each other.
I wish I was good at sports. I played on a soccer team back when I was seven, but it didn’t work out. Partly this was because my mom—surprise—was one of those moms that yelled a lot. This was embarrassing, especially since she didn’t know anything about soccer, so the stuff she yelled wasn’t helpful. Like she was always yelling, “Wyatt! Kick the ball! KICK THE BALL, WYATT!!” As if I didn’t know I was supposed to kick the ball. My mom yelled at me to kick the ball even when I was nowhere near the ball. Sometimes she yelled it when I wasn’t even in the game.
The thing was, even when I did manage to kick the ball, I wasn’t any good at it. The ball usually went in some direction that was a total surprise to me, as well as everybody else. So eventually I stopped playing soccer and tried baseball, but I was even worse at that, despite the expert guidance of my mom (“HIT THE BALL, WYATT!”).
So I don’t do organized sports. But I wish I did, especially now that I’m in high school. They have pep rallies for the sports teams where the band plays and the cheerleaders jump around and everybody cheers for the athletes, and I have to admit—this is embarrassing, but it’s true—that it kind of makes me miss the way everybody cheered for me back in middle school when I was supposedly a hero.
I was definitely not a hero now. I was a loser freshman holding a bag full of disgusting sandwich remains while the football team ran past me. I kept my head down, trying to be invisible.
Which is why I didn’t see Nick Bevin reach his hand out as he walked by, yank the bag out of my hands, and heave it across the grass, sending garbage flying everywhere.
“Hey!” I said. I’m good with words.
“Oops,” said Nick.
“Cleanup on aisle three,” said Troy.
Hilarious, those Bevins.
They kept walking, and the rest of the team passed, leaving me standing there looking at a landscape of scattered sandwich parts. I grabbed the bag and started picking up garbage again, entertaining myself by imagining the Bevin brothers being dropped onto various sharp objects from various heights. I kept going until the bag was full and my hour was almost up and I smelled like the inside of a Dumpster on a hot day. Then I started back toward Mr. Forster’s office. I was still thinking about how I was missing middle school. I was also thinking about what the Bevins would do to Matt’s ferret, and whether there was any way to stop them.
That’s what I was thinking about when I walked past the door to the gym, which was open. I stuck my head inside. The gym was empty. On the far right side was the entrance to the girls’ locker room. On the left side was the entrance to the boys’ locker room.
Which was where the football players changed into their practice uniforms.
Which meant they left their stuff in there.
Including their backpacks.
Including, maybe, Frank the ferret.
I stepped away from the gym door and looked back toward the athletic field. The football team was out there sweating and lunging around and making grunting noises. It looked like they’d be there for a while. I checked the time on my phone; my mom wouldn’t pick me up for another half hour.
I hurried back to Mr. Forster’s office with my bag of garbage. He looked at the clock and said I could leave after I put the bag in the Dumpster in the parking lot. I put the bag in the Dumpster, then hurried back to the gym door. Out on the field, the football players were still grunting and lunging.
I looked into the gym. It was still empty. I crossed the basketball court and went into the boys’ locker room, which smelled like The Museum of Ancient BO. I didn’t see anybody else in there. There were six big U-shaped groups of lockers with benches inside the U’s. The first four were empty, but the fifth one had backpacks and other stuff piled all over the floor. I waded through it but didn’t see a Miami Heat backpack.
I went around and stepped into the last group of lockers, which also had backpacks all over the floors. Right away I saw a Miami Heat logo on a backpack in front of a locker at the bottom of the U. I figured it had to be Troy Bevin’s. I picked it up and was about to unzip it when I heard voices. I walked quickly back to the end of the lockers and poked my head around.