Deborah Halverson - Big Mouth

Gardo jumped up on the bench and pointed their way three times. “Are… YOU …Thuff Enuff?”

The tallest one flipped us the bird.

I waved at him with both arms, real exaggerated, a bird in each hand. “I AM!”

Ha! Unless that kid has three hands, I win this round.

Gardo high-fived me again as most of the pea-greeners scowled and wandered off like good little underclassman. They left the goop-splashed kid to fend for himself with the Nature’s Nectar napkin dispenser.

Laughing, we climbed down and attacked the rest of the pizza.

Lucy didn’t eat anything more, though. She just fingered the colored tabs on her binder silently. We probably embarrassed her too much. Again. She could get oversensitive about that kind of thing.

Gardo ran his mouth enough for the three of us, though, telling us all about how he’d kick butt at his wrestling scrimmage coming up. With all his big-man-on-the-mat talk, he lost interest in the pizza pretty quickly. Me, I was more than happy to focus my energy on the feast in front of us. Hey, I was hungry. I hadn’t had much luck with those hot dogs at lunch.

I polished off the truffles first. Clearly Gardo wasn’t going to eat them, and Lucy would have jabbed out her own eye rather than eat a truffle. Working with chocolate all the time made her lose her taste for the stuff. Aversion therapy, I think she called it. I was just glad it didn’t work that way with ice cream. After a quick check of my cell phone’s clock, I hurriedly slurped the last dribbles of Cookie Dough out of the cup and grabbed one last slice of pizza for my hustle back to Scoops-a-Million. Just fifty-eight seconds left of break. I rushed off with a hasty good-bye, with one last sad look at the milkshakes. No one had touched them. What a waste.

As I dodged my way back to Scoops, I tuned out the drone of the air conditioners, letting the sounds of my upcoming fame fill my head instead: Thuff! Thuff! Thuff! Thuff!

I couldn’t wait to be rich and famous.

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“Vomit. Puke. Throw-up.”

Ms. Maxwell’s lecture voice boomed throughout the science lab, vibrating the paper jack-o’-lantern hanging above her head. “You know the smell, now you know the name: butyric acid. Used in the manufacture of plastics, butyric acid naturally occurs in sweat, rancid butter, cod liver oil, and, yes, good old vomit.” She pulled a stained lab coat over her fitted yellow T-shirt and signaled Lucy, in the first row, to pass out the Experimentation Documentation worksheets. “You, my inquisitive young scientists, will be working with butyric acid in today’s experiment.”

Girly groans mixed with macho cheers as my class reacted to the news of another Mad Max Lab Day. What a way to follow up a two-and-a-half-day weekend! Science Concepts in Action was every bit as cool as I’d heard it would be. Last week we did an experiment where we lit potato chips on fire with Bunsen burners and measured how much grease dripped out. I didn’t eat chips for a whole day after that. The week before, we’d lobbed balloons filled with mustard off the roof to test Newton’s Second Law of Motion. What other teacher on the planet would let thirty-two eighth graders on top of a three-story building with balloon bombs? Max didn’t even get mad when the mustard splattered the fresh red paint on the walls of the school’s office. In fact, I would have sworn she was laughing behind her hand when it happened, not coughing. No wonder she was the most popular teacher in the whole school. It also didn’t hurt that she was totally hot.

Butyric acid, huh? I did know the smell. Too well. The sour memory of Friday’s hot dog episode was still fresh in my nose. And Lucy had me scheduled for eleven HDBs in twelve minutes tomorrow after school, so I had a feeling I’d be on intimate terms with the raunchy stuff soon enough.

Despite the cool gross-out factor, though, today’s Mad Max experiment was falling flatter than a pancake. Max explained the steps for the lab clearly enough, but she was cranky the whole time, snapping at us left and right. When she suddenly ripped into the guys at the table next to mine, I almost ducked under my chair.

“What’s her problem today?” I whispered to my lab partner, Linus “Tater” Tate, after she’d stormed off. “Did someone let the rats out of their cages?”

“We should be so lucky.” Tater had earned his nickname in fourth grade when he jammed four Tater Tots up his nostrils. That got him such a big laugh, he’d been doing it ever since. I guess everyone needed their claim to fame, but I just couldn’t look at Tater without staring at his nostrils. He checked to make sure Max wasn’t close, then leaned over, his hand on his office aide key ring to make sure the keys didn’t jangle. I tried to focus on his eyes. “Word is, one of the science teachers got suspended at that emergency school board meeting. Supposedly he gave his class a lecture on tomatoes, saying they’re more acidic ounce for ounce than a car battery. He said they’d burn your stomach lining right out of you if you ate enough.”

I nearly gasped out loud. “He said that ?”

“Uh-huh. He also said there are a thousand tomato bug eyes in every squirt of ketchup.”

“Really? Dang.” What was that teacher thinking? District policy strictly forbids anti-tomato talk on campus, and the school board strictly enforces district policies. Of course they’d nail him. And of course Max would be ticked off about it. That was just the kind of power trip that burned her Bunsen. If we were living in the seventies, she’d be marching around with hippie braids and a DOWN WITH THE MAN sign. “Shoot, she’ll probably be cranky all week.”

“Probably.” He went back to stirring our gel mixture. Some butyric acid splashed the bottom of his yellow shirt. He scrunched up his big nostrils. “I don’t see what the big deal is, though. So he got suspended. I wouldn’t mind staying at home for a week. It’s not like he got transferred to home ec like that teacher at Del Heiny Junior 7 last year. Now that would suck.”

“Seriously.” But then, that science teacher had refused to apologize to the school board, or to the PTA, or, worst of all, to the school’s almighty sponsor.