So I just turned my back on all of them and said to Marissa and Mikey, “Come on. Let’s go check out some fish.”
“Wow,” Mikey whispered as we started to walk away. “Who was that?”
And then he did something really sweet.
And totally embarrassing.
He slipped his pudgy little hand into mine.
I could tell it was just a reflex. Something he’d done with his mom and dad and sister over the years. And part of me wanted to hold on tight and protect him, but part of me wanted to shake him off.
Like Heather needed any more ammunition?
But I held on, and I looked at him and said, “Her name’s Heather and she’s spiteful and wicked and you should ignore everything she said. You’re doing amazing on your diet, and I’m very proud of you.”
“Really?” he asked, looking up at me.
“Really,” I told him, and Marissa put her arm across his shoulders and agreed. “Really, Mikey. You are.”
Mikey took a long look back at Heather, and we wound up having to kind of drag him along. “Fish, Mikey. Remember?” Marissa said. “We’re going to look at fish.”
I actually hate the mall’s pet store. It’s got no dogs or cats or even hamsters anymore. Just fish and snakes and turtles. Oh, they sell accessories for dogs and cats, but not the actual pet.
Plus, the place smells. I don’t know why, seeing how there’s nothing to clean up after, but it still smells like someone ought to be cleaning up after something, if you know what I mean.
So, anyway, I have a pretty low tolerance for the place to begin with, but now it was even worse because I was still all steamed about Heather. And Billy. Maybe Billy more than Heather. I mean, he’s supposedly my friend. He knows how evil Heather is. What’s he doing hanging out with her?
But on top of stewing about them and hating the smell, there’s some guy running the self-service pet tag machine and the sound is driving me up a wall. No matter where I go in the store, I can hear it eeking and screeching. And after the guy’s made, like, six tags, I start wondering if there’s something wrong with him. I mean, yeah, the first time I saw the machine work, I was pretty entertained, but c’mon. This guy’s standing there with his inch-thick glasses, making tag after tag after tag. Why does he need so many tags? Does he keep messing up? Did someone dump a litter of puppies on his doorstep? Is he a tag-making weirdo? I even hang out behind him for a few minutes trying to see what he’s doing, but I finally can’t take it anymore and just ask Marissa, “Can we get out of here?”
So we grab Mikey and leave. And since we’re really near Cheezers and it’s an actual shortcut to go out that way, that’s the way we go.
Funny thing is, Mr. Vince is still there, still drinking beer. Only he’s no longer wearing the do-rag, and now it’s just him and one other guy. The guy’s big. And his face is blocky and kind of gray. Like a big piece of chiseled granite.
Mr. Vince, on the other hand, is definitely red around the edges. He’s the one talking, and he’s jabbing his finger onto the table like he’s pretty upset about something.
“I’m glad he’s not my teacher,” Mikey whispers.
Marissa nods. “Maybe he’s telling his friend about Die Dude!”
I grumble, “He oughta get over it already!” and head for the side door.
And really, as we walked through the parking lot and passed by the laughing-skulls motorcycle that was still there, I wasn’t thinking about Mr. Vince. I was too upset about Heather, and Billy, and Heather’s stupid comment. Because as much as I hated to admit it, Heather’s jab made me think about Casey. She’d said he’d moved on, and from what evidence I had, it looked like she was right.
So, no. I didn’t care about Mr. Vince.
Didn’t give him another thought.
Not until Monday morning rolled around.
SEVEN
Monday morning, it was obvious that Mr. Vince was still not over it. The only thing he said throughout homeroom was, “That was the tardy bell, people. Sit down!” He had Cole Glenns lead the Pledge and Ellie Statum read the announcements, and after that he just sat at the back of the classroom sort of hunched into the time-out chair.
All of us were a little nervous about the way he was acting. Teachers can freak you out because you never know what they’re really thinking. And when they act like Mr. Vince was acting, well, it can definitely unravel your nerves. You start wondering, Is he mad at the class? Does he have a headache?
Has he got Montezuma’s revenge?
Is he hung over?
About to hurl?
With teachers, you can never really tell.
Anyway, when the dismissal bell finally rang, I got out of there fast and ran right into Billy Pratt.
“Sammy-keyesta!” he says. “Lookin’ muy bonita.”
“Don’t kiss up to me,” I tell him. “I’m mad at you.”
“Hey!” he says, and all of a sudden he’s serious. “I just happened to run into her when I was at the mall, okay?”
“No. Not okay.”
“I can’t even stand in the same place as her?”
“No.”
“Look, she’s Casey’s sister. And he’s one of my best buds—what am I supposed to do?”
I frown at him. “After what she said about Marissa’s little brother, you should have left. Maybe even followed us. You know—as a sign of solidarity or something?” I shake my head. “It’s bad enough that kids at Mikey’s school pick on him for being fat. He doesn’t need Heather piling on! And he sure doesn’t need other people acting like it’s okay!”
“I’m sorry,” he says, which sort of throws me because he sounds so serious, and it’s not like Billy to be serious about anything.
He shrugs. “And you’re right, I should have left.” He wraps his arms around me. “Don’t be mad, Sammy-keyesta.”
I tell him, “Thanks,” and give him a quick slap-pat on the back.
He hugs me harder.
“Okay, Billy. Let go. That’s enough,” I say into his shirt.
“I’m an anaconda from Rwanda. Hug me back or I attack.”
“Oh, good grief, Billy, stop.”
“Hug me,” he says, squeezing the life out of me.
I don’t know what it is about Billy, but instead of being mad or annoyed, I hug him back and laugh. “Okay, okay. We’re good.” Then I break away and head for class, calling, “Vince is acting like the Psycho Barfer today.”
“The Psycho Barfer?” He grins. “Can’t wait!”
So, once again, Billy’s managed to put me in a pretty good mood, which helped me focus in my math and language classes. And after break I’m on my way to Mr. Vince’s class when Billy catches up to me and keeps the good mood going. “Beware the Psycho Barfer!” he hacks out, and then starts spazzing, making like he’s hurling his cookies over everyone and everything in the vicinity, including Cisco.
“Easy, man!” Cisco tells him, but when Billy doesn’t let up, Cisco pulls a mop out of his cleaning cart and plays along, pretending to clean up after him.
So it turns into a real comedy act, and a bunch of us are laughing so hard watching it that we wind up having to race through the sound of the tardy bell to make it to class on time.
My good mood totally crashes, though, when I get into class. Heather gives me the evil eye as I slide into my chair, and Mr. Vince is up at his podium looking grumpy as ever. He passes back our homework papers and couldn’t care less that mine’s nowhere to be found.
“But I know I turned it in!” I tell him. I point to the in-basket on the counter at the side of the room. “I put it right there!”
“Then why don’t I have it?” he says with a frown.
Lars Teppler interrupts our wonderful conversation by shoving his paper in front of Vince. “Why’d you give me an F on this?” He points to some scribbles in the margin of his paper. “What does this say?”
Lars is tall and gangly, and has feathery brown hair that sort of swooshes around hi
s head from right to left. It’s like his hair is in its own little universe of powerful centrifugal forces. And from the rapid whooshing of his head, I can tell that Lars is totally ticked off, so I back up.
Ol’ Scratch ’n’ Spit squints at his own writing. “It says, ‘I can’t read your writing.’ ”
Lars swooshes his head. “What?! I can’t read your writing!”
“That was my point,” Mr. Vince says like he’s oh-so-clever, even though his scribbles are never legible.
“But last time you gave me an F for not using complete sentences, and my writing was just like this!”
Mr. Vince shrugs. “So maybe next time you’ll get it right.” Then he walks away.
Lars just stands there for a minute, stock-still, until finally his head does a slow-motion swoosh and he goes back to his seat.
The class gets completely quiet, and we all just sit there staring at Mr. Vince as he messes with stuff on his desk and then pulls open one of the drawers.
And that’s when it happens.
Mr. Vince makes a horrified face and lets out a sound that no teacher in the history of teaching has made in any classroom anywhere ever. He stares inside the drawer with his eyes peeled back and his jaw dangling down, and what comes out of his mouth is a gasp and a choke and a cry and a strangled scream and a cough and a barfing sound all wrapped into one.
His eyes roll back in his head and he wobbles for a minute, and then he does something I never in a million years thought I’d see ol’ Scratch ’n’ Spit do.
He faints.
First we all jump. Then we just sit in our seats with our eyes bugged out and our jaws dangling. And then half of us rush up to him, but nobody seems to want to take charge, so we just stand there looking down at him lying on his side on the floor.
I can hear Sasha Stamos at the back of the room using the classroom phone to dial the office, and all at once people around me start jabbering.
“Do you think he had a heart attack?”
“Somebody take his pulse!”
“Who knows CPR?”
“No way I’m giving him mouth-to-mouth!”
Still, nobody actually does anything, so I’m finally the one to drop down and poke around on the side of his neck for a pulse. “His heart’s beating.”
“His heart’s beating!” Tracy Arnold relays back to Sasha.
“His heart’s beating!” Sasha says into the phone.
“Is he breathing?” someone asks. And then, like this was some magic key to respiration, Mr. Vince’s mouth snaps open and he takes in a giant, scary gasp of air.
Well, there I am, hovering right over him, so what’s the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes?
Me.
And between his scary gasp and his eyes flying open, I’m sure I look like I just put my finger in a light socket.
“Ah!” he cries when he sees me, and for a split second I think he’s going to faint all over again. Instead, he points at me and says, “You! You put that rat in my drawer!”
“Rat? What rat?”
“You think I didn’t see you laughing at me yesterday?” he rasps.
“Wait … What?”
But of course now everyone remembers that Mr. Vince had been freaking out about something inside his drawer, so they all zoom over to his desk. Tracy Arnold squeals, “Eeeew!” and it’s not the spit cup she’s eeeewing at.
It’s a rat.
A hunchy-backed, matted monster of a dead rat with eyes frozen open and lips curled up and away from its long, sharp yellow teeth.
Jake Meers has it by the tail for everyone to see. I swear the thing’s a foot and a half long from tail to nose, and dangling from around the rat’s mangy neck is a little chain with a metal tag on it.
A bone-shaped dog tag.
“What’s the tag say?” Heather asks.
Jake holds the rat higher and turns the tag, and his face morphs into a great big Uh-oh.
“Read it,” David Olsen demands.
Jake pulls a face. “It says, ‘Die Dude’!”
Suddenly Mr. Foxmore is standing beside us. “What happened?” he asks Mr. Vince as he helps him off the floor. “Are you all right?”
“No!” Mr. Vince snaps. “And this time you can’t just tell me to erase it. You need to do something about it!”
“About what?” Mr. Foxmore asks, because apparently he’s been so focused on Mr. Vince on the floor that he’s somehow missed the monster rat dangling in the air.
Jake Meers steps forward. “Uh, he passed out when he found this in his desk drawer,” he says, holding out the rat and showing him the tag.
Mr. Vince staggers toward his roll-around chair. “I’m not feeling so well.”
“Did you hit your head?” Mr. Foxmore asks.
Mr. Vince feels around for bruises and bumps, but Angie Johnson, who had a front-row view, says, “He didn’t go down wham. He more like crumpled and lay down.”
Mr. Foxmore turns back to Mr. Vince. “Do you have a history of fainting?”
Mr. Vince glowers at him. “Yeah, right. I’m just a little pansy fainter.”
Mr. Foxmore stares at him.
“No!” Mr. Vince snaps. “I don’t have a history of fainting.” Then he looks straight at me and says, “Someone’s threatening to kill me.”
“Oh, good grief,” I mutter, and excuse myself through the crowd so I can sit down in my seat and be done with his ridiculous implications.
But as I push through the semicircle of students, I notice Heather Acosta off to the side, talking to Billy Pratt.
Right away, Billy pulls a face like, Sorry! and puts some distance between him and Heather.
Still, it bugs me.
What am I, his watchdog?
Does he act one way when I’m around and another when I’m not?
Or … is there something he’s hiding from me?
And then I remember what Hudson had said about Billy, and for the first time I wonder—Is Billy the prankster?
Now, it’s not that I think a gross dead rat in a drawer is worth fainting over. Actually, seeing a grown man faint over a rat, no matter how big or ugly it is, is a little shocking. Especially since Mr. Vince has always been blustery and gruff and totally gross himself. I mean, if he’s gonna faint over the sight of an ugly rat, he ought to pass out every morning when he looks in the mirror.
But that aside, I didn’t think the rat-in-the-drawer thing was very funny.
I thought it was kinda mean.
Which put me in sort of an odd place in my head. Part of me’s thinking how stupid Mr. Vince is, how embarrassing it is that he fainted over a rat, and what a jerk he is for implying it was me, but part of me’s feeling almost sorry for him.
I mean, who puts a disgusting dead rat in somebody’s drawer?
Not somebody who loves ya, that’s for sure.
Anyway, Mr. Foxmore’s on his walkie-talkie, arranging for someone to take Mr. Vince to a doctor to get checked over, and Mr. Vince isn’t saying, No, no, that’s okay. I’ll be fine.
Nope.
He just sits and waits.
And then when Cisco arrives to roll him out of the building in an old desk chair, Mr. Vince grumbles, “This is the best they could do? Send a janitor? What am I, the garbage?”
Like, du-uh.
Anyway, when he’s gone, Mr. Foxmore turns to us and says, “In your seats.”
Everyone sits.
And fast.
Then he walks to the back of the classroom, picks up the phone, punches in a number, and says, “This is Blaine Foxmore, vice principal at William Rose Junior High School. We’ve had a death threat incident here at the school that requires a police report.… Uh-huh … Uh-huh … That is correct.… I appreciate it. Thank you.” He hangs up and silences us with one of his ninja looks. “Find something constructive to do and ignore the bells. No one leaves until I say so.”
EIGHT
When we finally hear footsteps coming up the classroom ramp, I look over my sho
ulder and who do I see walk through the door with his forearm in a cast?
The Treadmill Tumbler.
The Lavender Lover.
The one and only Officer Borsch.
Now, maybe I should have been happy to see Officer Borsch, but I wasn’t. I was embarrassed. For one thing, it had taken him almost a year to figure out that I was not a problem child.
Or a juvenile delinquent.
Or a serial jaywalker.
Well, okay, maybe I am a serial jaywalker, but it had taken him a year to learn to look the other way.
Anyway, Officer Borsch had been at our school on official business several times last year because of something that somehow involved me, and I was afraid he would take one look at me and backslide into thinking that I was at the bottom of this Die Dude business.
The other thing was that I’d somehow gone from being someone he thought was a problem child to someone who was in his wedding party.
Talk about feeling awkward.
Especially since from the minute he walked through Mr. Vince’s door, I couldn’t stop picturing him in a lavender bow tie and cummerbund.
And sure enough, when Officer Borsch spots me, his face goes all, Oh no, Sammy, now what? Then he sees Heather, and he looks at me like, Not this again! But then his expression goes totally blank, and he acts like he doesn’t even know me.
First he has a little hush-hush conversation with Mr. Foxmore.
Then he gets a little tour of the crime scene.
Then he places the rat in a big plastic bag.
And finally he clears his throat and says to the class, “Death threats, no matter how funny you think they are, are still death threats. So here’s what we’re going to do. Mr. Foxmore will release you from class one at a time. I will be outside waiting, and you will stop and answer a few questions. What you say will be kept confidential, and since aiding and abetting can have the same punishment as the crime itself, be smart and come clean about what you know.” He takes a deep breath through his nose, then says, “Holding out always backfires. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. It’s up to you.”
Now, I know Officer Borsch. I actually kinda understand Officer Borsch. And part of what I understand about him is, he doesn’t get kids.