Deborah Halverson - Big Mouth

By the time I rushed through door 306 to Science Concepts in Action three floors up, I was the one having a seizure. My white Scoops T-shirt was stuck to my back and I was wheezing and coughing and huffing like Ruffers Thuff, Grampy’s fifteen-year-old dog. Then the tardy bell blared from the speaker over my head, vibrating my entire skull. I had to grab the doorjamb to steady myself.

“Sherman, are you all right?”

I nearly screamed like a girl when Mad Max spoke.

Teachers should never stand behind their classroom doors. Ever!

Max leaned in closer and said more quietly, “In this weather, Sherman, you’ve got to be careful not to overdo it. That goes for everyone, not just you. Now go sit down and catch your breath.”

The humiliation.

I did my best not to stumble across the room. Still, I practically fell into my seat next to Tater.

“Hey there, Thuff. Whoa, buddy, are you okay?” He thumped me on the back like I was choking or something. It just knocked more air out of me.

“I’m…fine…Tater.” He kept thumping me. “Tater…Stop!”

“Okay, okay.”

When I could muster enough power to rip my stare away from his gigantic nostrils, I saw that he’d shaved his head since yesterday.

Now, I was the first to admit that on some people, bald was a cool look. But we were talking Tater here. The guy already had two strikes against him in the looks department — one for each rhino nostril. But that maze of blue veins crisscrossing his albino scalp… yikes. I’d say this for him, though, at least he didn’t have to worry about his hair anymore.

“Hello, Earth to Sherman.” Tater waved a hand in front of my eyes, his jangling office aide keys adding to my cranial pain. “Did you hear me? I said did you do the homework last night?”

“Of course I heard you.” I hadn’t. Stupid wheezing. “I hear everything. Homework. Did I do it. I heard you.”

“What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Just leave me alone, okay?” I tried holding my breath to stop the wheeze. But that just made me cough.

Mad Max banged the wall with a tibia bone from the dusty skeleton that hung by the whiteboard. “All right, people, listen up. We’re short a science teacher for a while, so we’re reassigning students to other classrooms, including this one. It might be a little crowded, but let’s make the best of it. Don’t make me dole out push-ups.” That got our attention more than the banging bone. Last week she’d made a kid do twenty push-ups for missing the trash can with a balled-up Twinkie wrapper.

Satisfied that her threat had sunk in, she whisked open a door that separated our lab from the next one. Ten Plums filed in to fill ten empty single-seater desks lining our walls. I recognized the first guy and the two girls who followed him. They were all Scoops regulars, so they smiled when we made eye contact. Maybe slaving for Grampy had some perks after all. I adjusted my Scoops shirt. Without it I was a complete nobody.

The next five Plums were just faces from the halls. Several of them had on yellow T-shirts, which a lot of kids had started wearing last week after the Mustard Taggers called for a “Revolt Against Red.” The ninth guy, though, made me groan out loud. A monster in a GO, PLUM WRESTLING! T-shirt, the kid was unmistakable: He was a Finn twin, twenty feet tall, at least, and ugly as sin, with his nose bent to the left like his identical brother. The mark of the Devil.

Science Concepts in Action just took a nosedive.

Traipsing in behind the Devil’s spawn was Gardo, also wearing his Plum Tomato wrestling shirt. They were teammates on our junior varsity prep wrestling team. Man, my buddy looked like a dwarf next to the Finn. And since I was two inches shorter than Gardo, I’d probably be face level with the Finn’s armpits even if I stood my tallest. Not that I ever planned to stand next to the big oaf and measure. My only Finn contact was last week when their jock jerk captain Shane Hunt had one Finn grab my legs and the other grab my arms for a big swing into the trash can. I had no intention of getting that close again.

So which Finn was this, the one who had my arms or the one who had my legs?

As if hearing my thoughts, the Finn looked my way. I snapped my eyes back to Gardo, who grinned and winked as he slid into a desk seat. A girl sitting between us giggled softly and wiggled her fingers at him. She must have thought he was flirting with her — which he was now that she’d tootle-oo’d at him.

“Chop, chop, people, take your seats!” ordered Max. Then she stopped and watched while the Finn squeezed himself into a desk. She was as mesmerized as we were. The top of the desk was attached to the seat by a curving metal arm, so he couldn’t push it out at all, he just had to slip into the seat from the side. It was like watching a bear climb onto a trike at the circus.

When the big dumb bear was finally wedged in, Max stepped onto the box behind her podium and switched on her lecture voice. “As I survey the room today, I see that you are all familiar with the topic of today’s lecture — at least follically.” She smooshed down the hairs frizzing out of her blond bun and adjusted the chopsticks that held it in place. We all automatically smooshed down our own frizzies. Except baldy Tater, of course. He just sat there with his green marker poised over his notebook.

Max stabbed her tibia bone at a huge picture of the bright yellow sun taped to her whiteboard. “The sun. Solar eclipses. Solar flashes. The reasons for our static-struck coiffures…”

The cafeteria was in the very center of our round school, on the bottom floor, with an open sunroof three stories up. A few hundred Plums milled around, buying food from the shiny metal slop counters up front, carrying food trays up and down the aisles, and sitting at long rectangular tables throwing paper airplanes and shooting straw wrappers. The place was louder than the food court at the mall. It was heavier on the eyes, too. Except for the metal fixtures and the bleached white linoleum that reflected the sunlight above, everything in the cafeteria was dark Plum red. Red walls, red trays, red tables, red-aproned cafeteria ladies. To planes passing above, Del Heiny Junior 13 probably looked like a giant doughnut with ketchup icing and little ants scurrying in the center hole.

I was sitting in the unofficial eighth grader section waiting for Lucy, who surely was back from the dentist by now. There was a Halloween pumpkin centerpiece in front of me, its goofy face drawn on with black marker. Tissue-wrapped lollipop “ghosts” lay around its base. The Associated Student Body’s spirit officer probably had to get a special waiver from Del Heiny to bring all that in. Pumpkins and lollipops weren’t ketchup-dunkable.

I salted my lukewarm Tater Tots, then popped open the soda I’d smuggled onto campus. The can was tucked on the seat between my legs so that the janitors who patrolled the cafeteria wouldn’t see it. If it had been a cold soda, I would’ve been in a world of hurt with it jammed against the Thuff Family Jewels. But because I’d stashed the can in my backpack hours ago, it was now the same temperature as my Tots. I wasn’t a fan of room-temp soda — it didn’t have the crisp, carbonated bite of cold pop — but a guy did what he could.

“Hey, Thuff!”

I twisted in the direction of the slop counters, where Gardo was waving to get my attention.

“How many?” he shouted.

“Nine!” I shouted back.

“What?”

“Nine!”

“Nine!” Thumbs up. “No problem!” He disappeared into the food zone.