0062120085. (C)
Authors: Chris Rylander
For Mom and Dad
T
HERE I WAS IN THE PARKING LOT OF MY SCHOOL, MINDING
my own business, when some mysterious dude shows up and hands me an even more mysterious package. Okay, so I wasn’t so much minding my own business as I was putting the finishing touches on the fourth biggest prank in Erik Hill Middle School history. But the point was the same—I was busy. I didn’t really have time to talk to this guy who’d just run up to me as if he were in the middle of a race with his own shadow. Sweat poured down his face and he was breathing so hard I thought he was going
to literally cough up a chunk of his lung onto one of my brand-new sneakers.
The sweating and panting itself wasn’t all that strange—I mean, lots of weirdos like to go for runs. But just not usually in a black business suit and tie at 2:55 in the afternoon on a 100-degree day with a sun so blazing that lizards were melting on sidewalks all over town. At least his black sunglasses actually fit the sunny situation.
“Hey, kid,” the guy said.
I tried to ignore him, because like I said, I was busy. But he was persistent.
“Hey!” he said again, frantically grabbing my arm.
“What?” I asked.
“Take this.”
Suddenly I was holding a package. It was about the size of a shoe box but only half as thick. And it was wrapped in plain brown paper with no markings of any kind on it and clear tape holding the folds in place. The wrapping was tight and neat, the same way my mom likes to basically suffocate Christmas presents when she wraps them. It was clean, too, except for the damp spots where his sweaty fingers had touched it.
My first thought was that someone was playing a prank on me. I should know; I’d done my share of them
over the years. In fact, counting the one I was about to execute, I would now be responsible for the all-time top five pranks in school history. But there was something about the guy’s desperate and almost terrified look that kept me from laughing at him and handing the package back.
“What am I supposed to . . . ?”
“Just listen,” he said, while glancing over both shoulders quickly. “You must guard this with your life; the fate of the world depends on it. And whatever you do, don’t open it!”
“What?”
He flipped a finger under the lens of his sunglasses and wiped away a stream of sweat. “You must deliver this to Mr. Jensen. It must go
only
to Mr. Jensen, you understand? Trust no one.”
He didn’t get a chance to say anything more because at that moment the school bell rang. Our school still had a bell on the outside of it that rang every day at 3:00 when school was out. And on this particular day, it also signaled my friend, Dillon, to initiate the first phase of the prank. So when the bell rang, chaos broke out.
I turned back to the guy to ask him again what I was supposed to do with the package, but he was no longer
there. He was running away from me, across the parking lot toward Sixteenth Street. He ran right by the stream of goats that was headed toward the school’s front entrance. And now two guys with painted white faces were chasing him.
I didn’t have time to wonder who he was, where he was going, or where the guys with the white faces had come from. Because shortly after the bell rang, kids started filing out of the school. That was my cue to get the heck out of there.
Also, that’s when the herd of fainting goats reached the front entrance of the school.
If you’ve never seen a fainting goat in action, you’re missing out. They’re one of the few things in North Dakota worth seeing. Basically it’s this breed of goat that faints when they get scared. And they serve no other practical purpose, even to a farmer, which in my book makes them about the most perfect animal in the world. All they do is eat grass and faint.
But today they had an actual purpose. Or several. For one, hundreds of goats running and fainting all over a school lawn at 3:00 was just plain hilarious to see, especially when your school’s mascot is Gordy, the Fighting Billy Goat. But more important, the chaos they’d create
would provide a big enough distraction for me to execute the real prank. One that involved something very simple: glue.
That’s right, glue. I mean, gluing a teacher’s computer mouse to their desk was a classic. Nothing new there, I get it. But what about if it were taken to a new, ridiculous level? Such as supergluing every single door in the school shut? Including the principal’s? And that would be only after gluing down all the items on his desk, of course. Plus we’d glue all the items on all the other teachers’ desks. And all the lockers in the locker room, all the science supplies in the storeroom, all the mops and brooms in the maintenance closets, everything. Basically the whole school would be on Glue-Down. Incapacitated when the day started tomorrow. That’s what made the goats so purposeful today. Simply pulling the fire alarm wouldn’t work since teachers had to then make sure that all kids exited the building before they did. But a whole herd of fainting goats? Well, for that, the school would simply empty altogether in an attempt to control the situation with no regard for who snuck back in or stayed behind to do whatever their hearts desired.
So, basically, it was pandemonium . . . or goatemonium is probably a better word for it. There were goats
running and yelling, kids running and yelling, and then the goats started fainting. Teachers started coming outside to see what the commotion was, which led to more yelling and goats fainting. I even saw one goat chewing on a teacher’s pant leg right before it fainted, the pants still clutched in its jaws as it went rigid and fell over.
Everything was going exactly as planned. My best friends, Dillon and Danielle, and our usual accomplices, Zack and Ethan, were probably already splitting up into the various areas of the school, gluing stuff down wherever they found it. And I should have been inside already, too, helping them with Principal Gomez’s office before he got suspicious and headed back inside the school himself.
But I wasn’t inside gluing.
All because of the sweaty guy in the suit. I was still standing there, mostly watching the pale-faced guys chase the sweaty dude in the black suit. Right at the corner of Sixteenth and Burdick the two pasty weirdos caught him. One tackled him right onto the pavement. And I saw, even as kids laughed and screamed and goats were fainting all around me, their legs sticking straight up in the air like upside-down tables, that a black sedan had stopped next to the three men. Another guy in a suit
jumped out and helped the pasty dudes shove the former package bearer inside the car.
That’s also when I saw the guns in their hands.
And one of them looked right at me before he got into the car. I could have sworn, even at that distance and even among the fainting, petrified goats and screaming kids and parents honking their car horns and teachers trying to calm everyone down, that he saw me holding the package. But then they all piled into the car and it sped off and I was left there, holding this thing and staring right at the principal, who had come out of nowhere.
Mr. Gomez scowled at me in that way that only principals can.
“Mr. Fender. My office. Right now.”
A
S I FOLLOWED MR. GOMEZ IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS OFFICE
I could only hope that my friends were either finished gluing in there or would see us through the office window before it was too late. The plan was to rendezvous at Gomez’s office just a few minutes after the goats were let out, to make sure we got his office done first.
I know it may seem like a lot for a prank—gathering up a whole herd of goats and orchestrating their release onto the front lawn just as the school bell rang—and all so my friends and I could coat the school in glue. Isn’t that
a long way to go for a few laughs? Sure, I guess it is. But at the same time, what’s the alternative? Another boring small-town North Dakota day, that’s what. Another day riding the bus to school, watching kids who pretty much all look and act and dress the same, talking about the same stuff they did the day before, going to and from their classes all so they can finish middle school, go to the same high school, go to one of the two large state universities, just so they can end up right back here in town working the same boring jobs as their parents, and then have kids of their own and start the whole thing all over again.
It’s the same routine people here had been following for generations.
That
was the alternative to fainting goats and glue.
Someone had to make life interesting around here, to break up the routine of a North Dakotan existence. And I guess that someone was me. So, yeah, a day filled with goats and glued doors and staplers and pens would be totally worth it compared to just another day. I mean, sometimes even my pranks weren’t enough. Which is I guess why they just kept getting bigger and bigger. Heck, by the time I graduated eighth grade, I’d probably have to resort to filling the entire school with foamy soap suds,
escaped mental patients, and ravenous grizzly bears wearing slippery shoes just to make things seem slightly more exciting than a teeth cleaning at the dentist’s office.
Gomez and I arrived at his office and I held my breath as he reached for the doorknob, expecting it to already be glued shut. It opened without any resistance. So they hadn’t gotten to his door yet. I was both utterly relieved and bitterly disappointed. It had taken a lot of planning and work and favors to get a whole herd of fainting goats to the school. And now, despite how funny it had all been, I wouldn’t even get to see the real payoff. But at least my friends had gotten away without getting caught. They must have seen Gomez apprehend me from his office window and had taken off. Hopefully they were still inside the school gluing all the other stuff we planned while the rest of the school staff was outside trying to somehow regain control of wild herds of goats and kids and parents.
Principal Gomez’s office is always smaller than I expect. I remember that was the first thing I noticed when I made my first visit there last year as a sixth grader. Since then, I’d sat in the small chair across from his desk tons of times, so I’d gotten used to the claustrophobic death trap that he called an office.
After glancing out his window at the herd of fainting goats on the school’s front lawn, Mr. Gomez sighed, shook his head, and sat down.
“What is that, exactly?” he said, nodding at the brown package sitting on my lap.
I shrugged and placed it on the chair next to me.
“Open it,” he said, while wrinkles of paranoia formed on his sweaty forehead, just above his beady and suspicious eyes.
Mr. Gomez was one of the most paranoid people I’d ever met. I could only imagine how it was at his house—he probably grilled his wife with forty questions every time she sneezed. “What was that? A secret message? A signal? Are you plotting something? Who are you working with?” Then she’d roll her eyes like always, and say, “It’s just dusty. Why don’t you ever clean around here?” And he’d say back, “Because the dirt, it keeps the
ants
away. Don’t you know they’re trying to get in here and steal our food? You can’t expect me to just let the ants run the show, can you? Are you in cahoots with the ants? Is that it?”
Okay, he probably wasn’t that bad, but it still wouldn’t surprise me. He did like to use the word
cahoots
a lot, though. Which always made me laugh.
“Well? Open it,” he said, his eyes shuffling continuously back and forth between me and the package as if one of us might get away if he took his eyes off us for longer than three seconds.
And whatever you do, don’t open it!
The guy in the suit’s words echoed in my brain. I’d seen plenty of James Bond movies. Visions flooded my mind of me opening the package and releasing a deadly yellow gas that would infect the whole school in under ten seconds and then quickly spread to neighboring towns. I wasn’t as paranoid as Gomez, but I also wasn’t going to be the guy responsible for destroying the country, that much was for sure. Even if it would be kind of exciting for something that big to happen around here.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
I had a dilemma. I couldn’t tell the truth, obviously. Somehow the words
it might be deadly
didn’t seem like they’d go over too well with Mr. Gomez. And also saying something like
some strange guy gave it to me outside and I don’t know what’s in it
didn’t seem like it’d work much better. In fact, almost everything I could think of would only make him more likely to make me open it.
Mr. Gomez scowled and squinted at me so hard that
his eyes seemed to shrink back inside his head as if they were running from something. I needed to think quickly. This was headed in the wrong direction.
“It’s my science project,” I blurted out. “We had to study the habituation of compound odiferous emissions; and so my project studies how seven-week-old rotten eggs will interact with dog poop in a confined and sealed space. A virtual vacuum, you see. So, if I were to open it now, not only would it ruin the results, but the noxious fumes may just kill us both.”
Mr. Gomez made a face. “That’s disgusting. Who is your science teacher? I don’t want—”
But he didn’t get to finish his sentence because the phone rang. He grabbed the receiver and tried to answer—but it didn’t budge. He pulled harder and the whole phone lifted up off the desk, still ringing. I tried desperately to suppress a laugh. Apparently Dillon and Danielle had at least gotten started gluing stuff in here.
Mr. Gomez glared at me, and I could tell he knew that I was somehow responsible for this. He put the phone down and held it there with one hand and then gripped and yanked hard at the receiver with the other. There was a crack as the glue bond broke and the receiver shot up and hit him in the face.
He turned red and rubbed his nose before putting the phone up to his ear.
“Yeah?” he practically yelled, clearly annoyed. “I don’t know . . . round them up. Put them . . . put them in the faculty lounge for all I care. Just get them off the school lawn!”
I had almost forgotten about the goats.
“Call animal services!” Mr. Gomez screamed into the phone. “Make them into goat curry. . . . I don’t care! Just get them off school property!”
There would be no need to call animal services. The goats were from Dillon and Danielle’s uncle’s farm, and their older cousin, Brad, would show up soon with a trailer to pick up the goats and spin some story about how he was driving them through town and happened to be parked nearby when the trailer latch suddenly broke and the animals ran free. I was lucky Brad had such a good sense of humor. Not many twenty-two-year-olds would loan out a whole herd of fainting goats for a prank. But he had a history of his own with Mr. Gomez from back in the day, and I guess some grudges ran longer than your standard three years at Eric Hill Middle School.
Through the window behind Mr. Gomez, I saw people running back and forth across the school lawn,
still chasing a few last goats. It was funny because fainting goats really aren’t all that hard to herd places, but I suppose these teachers were used to herding kids, not goats.
Mr. Gomez slammed down the phone and glared at me.
“Now, you want to tell me how you managed to get those goats here? And why my phone was glued together?”
“What goats?” I said.
“Ah!” He yelled in frustration. “You know which goats, Mr. Fender.”
Of course he knew it was me. It was always me. But like usual, he didn’t have any proof. We’d both been through this drill before: He’d call me in here and yell at me for a while; I’d stay firm and plead ignorance; and then he’d give me two weeks of detention. Without proof he couldn’t suspend or expel me. Technically he couldn’t give me detention either. But I just took it, every time. I mean, I was actually guilty, so why would I argue too much with detention? It was better than expulsion. It was kind of like an understanding between Gomez and me. A plea bargain of sorts. We both knew I was guilty, and we both knew he could never prove it, so instead of getting parents and other administration involved,
we always just settled on twenty minutes of me being shouted at and two weeks of detention. It had become like everything else in this town: just another boring and meaningless routine that played itself out over and over again.
At least he had forgotten about the package.
“I’ve never seen those goats before,” I said.
“We both know that’s a lie! I’m tired of this, Carson. When are you going to learn your lesson? Huh?”
It went on like this for a while. Him lecturing me, and me denying everything. Then he got angrier and yelled, and then a little calmer. And then he went through his usual paranoia stage where he assumed that this prank was just a diversion for a larger one that was happening elsewhere in the school right at that moment. (Which, to be fair to Mr. Gomez, was precisely what was happening.)
And then we were near the end.
“That’ll be another two weeks detention, Carson,” Mr. Gomez said, breathing heavily and writing something down. (He’d had to pry the pen and notebook off his desk.)
“For what?” I said, playing my part like always. “I didn’t do anything.”
“You want to make that three?”
I knew it was a bluff—it always was. He didn’t want to push his luck. I could fight back, after all, and tell my parents, and then the superintendent would get involved and it would be a huge mess. Neither of us wanted that. So I played into his bluff like always.
“No, sir.”
“Good. You may go now.”
And just like that, it was over.