Artifacts (2 page)

“It doesn’t start out that way,” Mouth said. “But Tank’s such a dope, that’s how it usually ends. You should see us at home.”

“Are you kids excited for the end of school?” Mom asked.

“End of school nothing,” I said. “We’re ready for the beginning of two weeks away from everybody who makes our life terrible.” I shot a look at Dana.

Korie smiled. “It seems like we’ve been waiting to go to Camp Runamuck forever.”

“And Jax, it won’t be long before you and Dana are in high school together.”

“Oh, kill me now,” Dana said, dropping her head to the kitchen table.

Toad leaned over to whisper in her ear. “And I’m right behind him.”

“Come on,” Dad yelled. “Let’s go. Everybody out. School’s not going to wait for you. I want everybody who’s not related to me through that door so I can finish my breakfast in peace. Remember, smiles on your faces and learning in your heart.”

“Learning in your heart?” Mom asked.

Dad laughed. “It sounded good in my head.”

“Dad, I …”

“You too.” He waved me off. “Get out!”

Korie and I scrambled toward the door as fast as we could and barely made it out before the rest of them followed.

Mornings were the most fun part of the day. I could always count on Korie showing up, the Wahoo brothers making an entrance that made you feel like you were watching the WWE or roller derby, and I loved when my dad kicked us all out, pretending like he hated every second of it when I knew that he couldn’t live without it.

Stumbling off the porch, Korie, Mouth, Tank, and I jumped on our bikes and rode toward the school. It was going to be a really long day for Crunch and we wanted to make sure we were there to support him.

Crisscrossing back and forth across the road, Korie and I talked about the next two weeks of school, Camp Runamuck, and how we were going to get Crunch to pass English. We both knew Bartholomew, so even though we were sure there was a way to get Crunch out of it … there’d be a really high price to pay for it.

The Wahoos were being very Wahoo-like and spent most of the ride arguing and yelling and trying to run each other off the road.

“I still can’t believe Crunch took his brothers’ reports and handed them into Bartholomew,” I said. “Are we sure that really happened?”

“No,” Korie shrugged, “but the only other answer would be that his brothers switched their reports for his, knowing he’d get into trouble.”

“Crunch’s brothers are idiots,” Mouth said. “Sort of like mine.” Mouth swerved
waaaaay
out to the side to avoid Tank’s reach. “There’s no way they could have come up with a plan to set Crunch up like that.”

“Yeah,” Tank agreed. “Idiots. They probably copied the papers to start with and then Crunch was dumb enough to copy the copied papers.”

Crunch’s dad’s car pulled past us. Crunch was sitting quietly in the backseat staring out the window. He half-waved to us and then quickly pulled his hand down before he got caught.

“He looks like he’s on his way to prison,” I said.

“He is,” Korie said. “Nobody ever comes back a free man after an early morning parent-teacher conference with Bartholomew.”

“Well, at least in Crunch’s case, he probably made sure he got a great last meal.”

“This is one of those times I wish I had a garbage truck or something really big that we could ram into his parents’ car, send it crashing over on its side, pull Crunch from the burning wreckage, and then …” Tank said.

We all stared at him.

“And then we need to turn the TV off.” Mouth laughed. “You’ve been watching
waaaaay
too much of it.”

***

Riding up to Hickory Wind Middle School, we locked up our bikes at the end of the third bike rack. It had taken a little time to figure it all out, but even though the third bike rack was a little farther from the front door, it was just behind where the last bus parked, waiting for all the kids to come out of school. We could run out, get our bikes, and take off before any of the other kids from the first and second racks could get around the buses and on the road.

Taking the stairs up two at a time, we crashed through the doors and headed right for Bartholomew’s English class. By the time we got there Crunch and his parents were already inside but the door was cracked open … so we peeked in.

Crunch was sitting quietly with his parents on either side. I thought my head was going to explode with laughter because those little wooden sixth grade chairs were not made for the six-foot-three, two hundred-and-eighty pound Mr. Newton, even when he was in sixth grade.

“How did he even get into that chair?” Korie asked.

“How’s he going to get out?” Tank asked.

“He must have folded himself one way and then twisted around in another,” Mouth guessed. “From the look on his face, I think his head might pop off.”

“Mrs. Newton looks like she’s going to cry,” Korie said.

“You’d be crying too,” I said. “Crunch has to go to summer school now.”

“I don’t think she’s crying about summer school,” Mouth said. “I think she’s crying because Crunch can’t go away to Camp Runamuck for two weeks. She was probably looking forward to the break.”

“Yeah.” Korie sighed. “A break from Crunch is nice sometimes.”

“What do you think they’re saying?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Mouth said.

As their mouths started moving, so did his.

“
Oh, please, Mr. Bartholomew,”
he said in Mrs. Newton’s high voice,
“please let Crunch pass so I can get him out of the house for two solid weeks. I can’t stand it anymore
.”

“
Hey
,” he continued in Mr. Newton’s much deeper voice, “
how did I get in this chair in the first place? I’m like a giant man and this is a teeny tiny little bit of a chair. It’s like a torture chamber and something really sharp is poking my butt.
”

Then came Crunch. “
Hey Mr. B. I know I’m a dope, but I can hand in anybody’s papers you want me to. They don’t have to be my brothers’
.”

I slapped my hands over my mouth and Korie’s so they wouldn’t hear us laughing.

After a few minutes of going back and forth, the meeting was over.

The Newtons didn’t say another word and it looked like Bartholomew couldn’t care less. He just shooed them away and went back to his work.

I watched Mr. Newton hold his breath and try, like, five times to squeeze back out of that chair. Each time was funnier than the last. Finally, he ripped off the top of the desk, stood up, and handed it to Bartholomew.

It was
awesome!

“It doesn’t look like it went too well,” Korie whispered.

“Yeah,” Mouth cackled, “that desk got crushed!”

“I was talking about Crunch, you idiot.” Korie smacked him.

Mr. and Mrs. Newton shook Bartholomew’s hand, put their arms around Crunch, and walked toward the door.

“Oh, no. That’s the arm-around-his-shoulder death march,” I said.

“Oh, gosh, we won’t see him until high school,” Korie said.

“Well, that’s one less happy camper for Camp Runamuck,” Mouth said. “Maybe they’ll let me have all of his stuff when we get there.”

“Keep talking like that you won’t get there, either,” Tank said.

As the door opened, the Wahoos settled down and the Newtons walked out past us with Crunch straggling behind them.

“Boys.” Mr. Newton nodded.

“Hey, Mr. Newton,” I said. “Crunch, how’d it go in there?”

Crunch shrugged.

“Not as well as we had hoped,” Mr. Newton whispered. “Clarence …”

I love when Crunch’s parents call him Clarence.

“ … won’t be able to start the summer with you. He has some work to catch up on that will take him into July.”

“It’s a bunch of malarkey,” Crunch snapped.

I winced at that word. Crunch’s parents were
so
against any type of cursing that Crunch developed this whole vocabulary to take the place of the bad words. Most of them were stupid, but they made perfect sense to Crunch.

“Yeah,” Crunch continued, “it was such a bunch of BS …”

“
Clarence
,” Mrs. Newton warned him.

“Bunk,” Crunch corrected himself, “it was such a bunch of bunk.”

“Sorry, Crunch,” Korie said.

Seeing the sad look on Korie’s face had me go a little bit … amuck.

“Wait a minute,” I said, grabbing Crunch’s shirt and dragging him back into Bartholomew’s room. “Hey, Mr. Bartholomew!” I called as we powered across the floor, stopping just short of his desk.

Uh-oh. Maybe I didn’t think this all the way through.

“Hello, Jackson,” Bartholomew said.

I hate when he calls me Jackson
.

“I believe we’re done with the conversation over Clarence and his … reports,” Bartholomew said. “There’s no more to discuss on this matter. Although, we could start talking about you and your grades if you’d like.”

I brushed him off. “My grades are fine!”

“Ooooohhhh!” I could hear the rest of them behind me.

“Look at this face!” I squeezed Crunch’s cheeks between my thumb and forefinger and pointed it at Mr. Bartholomew. “Does this look like the face of a report copier?”

Bartholomew’s eyebrows knitted and he looked very closely at Crunch. “Jackson, I applaud your valiant effort to save your friend from the horrors of summer school, instead of being whisked off to the wonders of camp, but I found his brothers’ papers in the files myself. I know how well they were written.”

I had nothing. “Mr. Bartholomew … things are not always what they seem.”

Wait. What does that even mean?

Korie’s face fell, the Wahoo brothers collapsed in laughter, and Crunch … knew he was a dead man.

Then Bartholomew, of all people, came to my rescue.

“Mr. Murphy, are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Bartholomew asked.

I shot Korie a look because I had no idea what I was saying. “Yes, I … think … I am,” I said slowly but confidently.

“Are you trying to tell me that Mr. Newton’s brothers took Clarence’s original work?”

Bartholomew waited for my answer.

“That’s it!” I agreed. “No. Wait.” I wanted to make sure everything was clear before we left that office, a white lie possibly, a little misdirection maybe, but clear. “What I’m saying is that my client—”

“Your client?” Korie elbowed me and reminded me of where we were.

“What I’m saying is that Crunch read the books, wrote the reports, and then his brothers put their names all over them.”

Bartholomew thought for a minute. “Well, I think that could be quite possible …”

I was floored. “You do
?
I mean … Crunch, can you help me out here?”

Crunch hemmed and hawed for a minute and then finally spoke up in his own defense. “I love those books and my brothers never even opened them up. When the reports were due, they made me write them so they could hand them in.”

Mr. and Mrs. Newton slowly came back into the classroom, and while she slipped into one of the chairs … he wasn’t about to try it again.

“Clarence, why didn’t you say anything when I first accused you of not doing the work?” Bartholomew asked.

“I didn’t want to get my brothers in trouble,” Crunch said. “I wasn’t sure if you could drag them back from high school to take the class over again …”

I thought the Wahoos were going to explode.

For the next ten minutes, Crunch and Bartholomew talked, and even laughed in all the same places, as they discussed the book.

I was shocked.

“This did not turn out the way I expected,” Korie said, sitting down in one of the chairs, waiting for the discussion to be over.

“Me, either. Whoever would have thought that Crunch liked to read?”

“Whoever would have thought that Crunch could read?” Mouth said.

“I know
you
can’t read,” Tank said.

As Crunch and Bartholomew finally finished, I wanted to make sure that everything was good and that everyone was still able to go to Camp Runamuck.

“Thank you, Jackson,” Bartholomew said. “Clarence most certainly read the books, wrote the reports for his brothers, and has completed that very heavily weighted aspect of his grade.”

“Great!” I shouted, forgetting I was still in school. “Sorry. So does that mean he doesn’t have to go to summer school?”

Bartholomew laughed. I guess you could call it a laugh, maybe it was a snicker. “Clarence still has to go to summer school. When I thought he had copied the reports and he wouldn’t be able to join you at camp, he stopped handing in his work altogether.”

“You what?” Mr. Newton yelled.

“I knew I’d have to do it all over again,” Crunch said. “Why do it the first time when I could wait and do it a few weeks from now.”

I shot a look at Korie, who shrugged.

“So the reason Crunch … I mean, Clarence … stopped handing in his work was because you mistakenly accused him of copying his work?” I asked Bartholomew.

“Well, technically …” Bartholomew muttered.

“Yes or no?” I asked.

“To be truthful, I have to say yes,” Bartholomew admitted.

I knew I had him. “So, either pass him or give him something to make up those assignments.”

“Extra … credit?” Bartholomew offered.

I looked at Crunch, who nodded. “We can do extra credit.”

Bartholomew thought for a moment. “I’ve never done this before, but Clarence, if you come back to my classroom after school, we should be able to forge an agreement which allows you to make up the credit and avoid summer school. Will that work for you and your parents?”

Crunch nodded like a bobblehead doll.

Following Mr. and Mrs. Newton out, we all stumbled out of that classroom with the greatest victory we’ve ever had.

Now we just had to wait and see what Bartholomew had in store for us when we came back later that day.

Little did I know it would be the start of our greatest adventure.

Pushing and shoving our way to our table in the cafeteria, we agreed that no matter what Bartholomew asked Crunch to do, Korie, Tank, Mouth, and I would help him so we could all go to Camp Runamuck the way we’d planned.