“But there’s still recess for another three minutes,” Vince said, keeping that dumb grin spread all over his face like butter on toast.
“Go!” Dr. George yelled.
Vince glanced at me, shrugged, and wandered off down the hall.
I made a move as if I was also just leaving, but Dr. George grabbed my shoulder with his crusty old hand. He grabbed it harder than any adult should ever grab a kid, and my knees almost buckled at the pain of his fingers digging into my arm.
“Get in there,” he said, motioning toward the bathroom with his other hand.
“But I just finished. Why would I—”
“Now, Mr. Barrett,” he hissed.
I let him guide me back inside the bathroom. He stopped in the middle and looked around as if he’d never been inside a bathroom before. I was afraid he was going to ask me for instructions or something.
“What’s going on in here?” he asked.
“Uh, probably some kids using the bathroom,” I said, rubbing my sore shoulder.
He raised his hand, and for a moment I thought he was going to slap me, so I flinched. Then he laughed and merely rubbed his stiff fake hair and sighed. He coughed and then jabbed his finger in my chest. Hard. His old bony pointer finger slammed into my sternum with enough force that I thought I heard my chest crack in half.
“You are a liar! I know you’re up to something,” he said, jabbing me with his finger once for every other word.
“I don’t know what to say, sir,” I said, trying to hold back the urge to poke him back right in his bulging eyeballs like in this old Three Stooges movie I saw once.
“Start by telling me what you were doing all the way down here. This bathroom is nowhere near your classrooms or the playgrounds.”
I shrugged and looked at my feet.
“Well?” he asked.
I started crying. Not for real. It was just a ruse, of course. Being able to cry on demand is a pretty powerful tool when dealing with adults. But my aching shoulder and chest certainly didn’t hurt my ability to cry right there on the spot.
“I’m too embarrassed to go in the other ones.” I sobbed. “I get . . . shy in bathrooms where a lot of people go, okay?”
I could feel Dr. George’s old, wrinkle-shaded eyes staring at the top of my head. He said nothing for the longest time. Finally I peeked up at him.
He was smiling. I’d never seen him smile before. On his face a smirk looked about as natural as a blind, three-legged giraffe on stilts and roller skates would look trying to play centerfield in a major league baseball game.
“You think I’m going to buy that?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Well, I don’t, so cut the crap,” he said, once again jabbing his finger at me to emphasize his words, only this time it stopped just short of my face. This guy sure loved to use his finger to make points. I wondered if he’d even be able to communicate with other human beings without it.
I didn’t know what else to say, so I just looked him right in the eyes. It felt like I was looking into an emotional desert, a place where there is nothing but dry, hot, mean sand. He squinted and shoved past me.
He pushed back the swinging door to the trash can where all of my money and records were stashed and looked inside. He leaned down and moved his head from side to side, so he could see in at all angles. Then he reached down in and pulled out a mashed ball of paper towels.
Dr. George scowled and stuffed them back inside. He wiped his hand on his suit pants. I tried not to breathe my sigh of relief too loudly. I’d stashed some damp paper towels on top of my stuff for extra cover, but what if he’d reached into the trash can just a little bit deeper?
Then he moved to the first stall and pushed the door open. When he saw that it was empty, Dr. George moved to the second stall and then on to the third, the very stall in which Joe sat on a toilet with my small desk and chairs resting on his lap. He was probably dying from the weight and panic. The door didn’t budge when Dr. George pushed.
“Occupied,” Joe’s voice rang out.
“Who are you? I demand to know what’s going on!” Dr. George said.
“Uh, do you really want to know what’s going on in here?” Joe said.
“Stop this foolishness! I know trouble when I see it. Now what are you two up to?”
“Dude, there’s only one of me in here, and I’m telling you, you don’t want to know what’s happening in here,” Joe said. The desk must have been getting heavy because Joe’s last few words strained as if he was being choked. Under the circumstances it actually sounded authentically gross, if you know what I mean.
Dr. George must have heard it, too, because his scowl disappeared and he looked uncertain for the first time.
“I still want—” He was cut off by the recess bell.
“Sir, that’s the bell. It means I have to go back to class. Can I please go?” I begged while dancing impatiently.
“I know what that bell was.” Dr. George sneered as he glanced at his watch and then walked toward the bathroom door. “I have an important meeting right now, but I’m going to find out what sort of racket you’ve got going on in here, Mr. Barrett. You’d better believe that. How does one more day of detention sound in the meantime?”
“For what?”
“Okay, you want two?”
I kept my mouth shut, figuring that there was no response I could give that wouldn’t result in more detention.
With that he nodded and showed me his teeth in what I can only imagine was another attempt at a smile. Then he was gone. I waited a few moments to make sure he wasn’t coming back and then I quickly helped Joe put the desk back. Fred came back, and I hooked up the DVRs again and then locked the bathroom from the outside.
“What are we going to do, Mac?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but you guys better get to class. We can’t all be in detention today. We still have a business to run.”
Chapter 14
Monday—Lower Grade Playground
At lunch that day we decided to just close up the office. Joe hung the “Closed for Repairs” sign on the door so kids knew that we’d be out indefinitely. We needed to lay low right now, at least until we could figure how to get Dr. George off our tails.
I let Fred do whatever he wanted for the rest of the day and sent Joe on a few errands for some of the customers I’d seen the past few days. Vince and I went outside to the playground to brainstorm.
“Before we get down to business, I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Okay, shoot.”
“What’s the Cubs’ longest winning streak in team history?”
“You realize that I’m not a moron, right?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Could have fooled me, Joe Blanton lover.”
Vince scoffed theatrically and then kicked some pebbles down the hill. We were headed to the new playground by the Shed for privacy reasons. We couldn’t be too careful.
“Twenty-one games. They did it twice, once in 1880 and again in 1935. Both currently stand as tied for the second-longest winning streaks in baseball history.”
“Wow, that was so much more information than I asked for. Thanks for wasting ten seconds of my life, Mr. Show-off,” I said.
Vince laughed as we reached the playground and sat on the swings, but his laughter sounded pretty vacant. I was pretty sure he was thinking the same thing I was.
“So,” I said, “are we ever going to get to use the office again? I mean, now that we know George is onto us, it may not be safe to open up shop in there.”
Vince shook his head. The look on his face seemed about as bleak as the gravel under our feet, which was destined to sit there forever getting trampled by kids.
“What are we going to do, Vince? Without the office we pretty much don’t have a business.”
“I know, I know. We’ll figure something out,” he said. “Or I mean, you will, right?”
“Hey, hey, I’m not Joe Blanton. I c
an’t work miracles,” I said. “But maybe even more important is figuring out more about the SMARTs. I hope Tyrell comes through for us, because if our school doesn’t pass those, then there’ll definitely be no business for us.”
Vince nodded solemnly, and I started getting too bummed so I decided to change the subject.
“Did I tell you yet that I got to dance with Hannah?”
Vince’s jaw dropped. Then he composed himself. “Whatever. I’m not that stupid.”
“No, seriously, Vince. In gym class we did dancing, and I got paired up with her. She was actually really nice.”
Vince shook his head and kicked at the sandy gravel under his feet. It made me nervous that he wasn’t saying anything. Then he sighed.
“Well, she’s a liar. Remember that, Mac? So don’t get fooled. She was probably just, like, selling her lies, you know?” Vince said.
My first impulse was to call him a liar and then kick sand in his face, but the more I thought about it the more I realized he was probably right. She was blinding me, making me into an idiot by being nice to me. And I’d fallen for it like a chump.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. It was still weird, though. But at least I now know for sure that something really strange is going on around here. I mean, the fried school lunches, the weird gym classes, someone dumping poop into kids’ lockers, kids not getting punished for fighting, and on and on. I mean, for all of this stuff to be happening at the same time . . . well, it all had to be related somehow. Didn’t it? I mean, all of this stuff adding together is so bad that they even brought in Dr. George to try and fix it.”
Vince nodded slowly. “Yeah, it all must be related. But why? Why would anyone do this, and who would have the power to do all of that stuff?”
“Definitely a school employee,” I said.
“Oh man, Mac!” Vince said. “I can’t believe I never connected the dots before.”
“What?”
“What other major event occurred right around the time these weird things started happening? Right before George showed up to fix everything?”
It hit me. Mr. Kjelson. Mr. Kjelson started here just a few months ago.
“Coach Kjelson,” I said, not wanting to make that connection. “Maybe Hannah actually has been right all along. That still doesn’t explain why she lied about dating Mr. Kjelson’s son, but still . . .”
“Exactly,” Vince said, shaking his head slowly with a look of pain on his face. It was always a tragic thing to discover a fellow Cubs fan might be up to no good. Especially a guy as cool as Kjelson had seemed to be. “I mean, that can’t just be a coincidence, can it?”
“I don’t think we can afford to assume it is,” I agreed. “So now we need to figure out if Kjelson is somehow behind this all. And why would he want to take down the school? All this in addition to finding a way to take down George before he shuts down our business and trying to figure out how to make sure we all pass the SMARTs. Great.”
Vince didn’t have much to add so he just kept shaking his head, still mourning the possible corruption of a Cubs fan.
“Right. What should we do about George?” Vince asked.
“We need some dirt on the guy. Maybe Tyrell can dig up something on him, or we could do some espionage work ourselves and see what we can find in his office or something,” I said.
“Isn’t that going to be dangerous?”
“What choice do we have? We have to do something.”
“Good point,” Vince conceded.
“Anyways, you help out Joe after school with some of the other customers. At detention I’m going to confront Hannah and see why she lied to us. There’s something more to all of this, and I have a bad feeling about it.”
Vince nodded and looked at his feet. “Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s cool.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know. I just thought we could maybe do a dual interview. I kind of like that girl for some reason,” he said. “Besides, she already fooled you into a false sense of security once today.”
I laughed and said, “Hey, stay focused, Vince. We have other customers, you know? Customers who have actually paid us. We need to focus on them. Plus, don’t worry about me; I’m onto her tricks now.”
Even as we walked back toward the school, I kept wondering why I was so worried about Hannah. Really, I should have been handling the other problems for paying customers. And why couldn’t Vince come with me to talk to Hannah? He’d always handled her better than me anyways. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t really come up with any answers to those questions, and that bothered me most of all.
In class that afternoon Mr. Skari announced that the whole school would be taking the SMARTs the next day. Which gave me basically no time to figure out how the tests worked and whether I needed to intervene and also how I would even be able to do that. Most everyone in the class groaned after the announcement and I did, too, but for slightly different reasons.
There was still a chance that Tyrell could come through with some info for me. After all, the day didn’t end when school did, but it was a long shot. I mean, Tyrell was good, sure, but was he that good? Could anyone be that good?
And thing was, the way Mr. Skari acted next convinced me more than ever that I needed to do something. Ever since last Wednesday we’d been doing nothing but SMART-based worksheet packets and taking practice tests. And now he was up front announcing to all of us that we’d done all right on them—but that that wasn’t enough.
“This last round of practice tests went okay but barely. It would be much better if we had another week to hone your skills.” There was a glimmer of desperation that I’d never seen in him before.
Mr. Skari was a big dude, bigger than my dad, maybe the tallest guy I’d ever seen in person. But he also was pretty calm, laid back about most things, except for staying on schedule, of course. Which is part of why I liked him as a teacher: he wasn’t tightly wound like a lot of the other teachers. Except for now, when dealing with these SMARTs, he was acting like he was more tightly wound than a fishing reel with a twenty-foot, three-ton shark on the other end.
So he really pushed us hard the rest of the day, which stunk because Mondays are bad enough as is. But if anything, all he did was make the already panicked kids so panicked that I thought for sure a riot was going to break out or at the very least some heads would explode.
I decided to stick around after class to ask about the SMARTs. See what he might be able to tell me. I had detention from the incident with George that morning in the fourth stall, but since Mr. Skari was a teacher, he could write me a late excuse note.
“What can I help you with, Baretta?”
I have no idea why Mr. Skari sometimes called me that; he was always making up weird nicknames for kids. Some kids thought it just made him weird, but most of us liked it. Anything abnormal that teachers did usually was a good thing. It kept school more interesting, because otherwise it got old and boring after, like, the second day of school every year. Mr. Skari already stood out because it wasn’t every day you came across a six-foot-six-inch-tall elementary school teacher.
“Why are these tests so important?” I asked. “I mean, even you teachers seem pretty worried.”
“Well, it’s because they’re a reflection of how well the school is doing. To all of the most important people. The people who make decisions about the school and its staff.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I understood completely. He made it seem like this test was all that mattered, like all of the other stuff we did all year long was just for show and counted for nothing.
“I heard that this test could get the school closed down. Is that true?”
“Oh.” Mr. Skari smiled hollowly. “Well, don’t worry about that kind of stuff. Just do the best you can.”
I let it go, but his answer worried me. Or I guess I should say his lack of an answer worried me. He maybe thought I was too young to notice that he’d dodged the question, that h
e didn’t really deny it, but I practically invented question dodging so I didn’t miss it. Basically he had just told me the answer was yes without really saying anything at all.
“Who grades the tests? Like, how do they work? I mean, if they’re so important, then shouldn’t our teachers be grading them?”
At this Mr. Skari actually laughed. “I think I have some stuff to do, and if I’m not mistaken, I have it down here that you’re actually supposed to be in detention right now.”
I also wasn’t too young to know what this was: an end to the conversation.
I nodded, and he handed me my late pass. I left not really feeling better at all, even though I’d found out plenty. In fact I felt worse because I now knew that these tests were just as important to the Suits in charge of this place as we’d all feared. And our window to do something about them was closing fast.
Chapter 15
Monday—The Detention Room
I was surprised to see that Hannah was not in detention. I sat by myself in the corner and tried to keep from staring at the door the whole time. I kept expecting her suddenly to show up looking too calm to be late for detention. I was actually pretty excited about confronting her. I wanted to see how she would talk her way out of this one—the fact that I knew Kjelson didn’t even have a son.
But she never showed up.
Luckily, though, I had a pretty good idea where I might find her.
Outside of attending school assemblies and plays for fun, I’d only been in the Olson Olson Theatre a few times before. Once was for an eighth-grade orchestra recital that I’d needed to attend for business purposes, and the other time was when I was in a play myself in the fourth grade. And after that experience I vowed to never be in another play again, even though our school was actually pretty famous locally for having the best school plays in the state.
The play had been called Medicare and You. A local theater company had been in charge and not the school’s usual drama teacher. They wanted us to perform it for some senior citizens they bused in from a local retirement home, and they used some of our fourth and fifth graders in it, since old people like to watch little kids perform plays, I guess. I played this character called Donald Deductible. I had no idea what anything I said in that play meant. It was probably the most confusing play in the history of the world. I’m pretty sure I played a good guy because I had to keep hugging Billy, who played a retired person. They had him all decked out in creepy wrinkle makeup; it was horrifying. He looked like some kind of midget witch with a bad case of acne. But I don’t think any of the other characters seemed like good guys, especially this one called Coverage Guidelines Gus. He was the worst, I thought. Anyways, I don’t think the old people liked the play too much either, because by the end half of them were snoring and one old lady started screaming something about being stuck inside of a donut hole.
The Fourth Stall Part II Page 10