Homeroom Headhunters (8 page)

etter get back before anyone realizes you're missing,” Peashooter said before he and the rest slipped into the shadows of the boiler room.

“I can't just go back to class,” I protested. “It's already fourth period. Pritchard's probably pinning this all on me as we speak.”

“You're a smart guy. Figure something out.”

Before I could balk—he was gone. All of them were. It was as if they had disappeared into the walls of the building.

Now what was I supposed to do?

My brain sputtered out nothing but a series of brain farts. I was still in shock over their invitation into the seedy underbelly of disorganized academia.

Just tell the truth
, a little voice at the back of my head peeped.
Absolve yourself.

Yeah, but who's going to believe the truth when it's coming from
you?
I answered back.
I'm Public (Education) Enemy #1 now. Best
to keep a low profile.

I decided to head to the nurse's office and tell her I was feeling sick from smoke bomb inhalation. I was sure she'd write a pass to get me into my fifth period class.

Instant alibi.

Miss Braswell bought the act—hook, line, and
stinker
. I threw in a few coughs as well as a puff from My Little Friend for safe measure. She made me lie down on the vinyl bed for the rest of the period.

So far, my plan was working perfectly.

Just close your eyes until the bell rings. Take a nap.

Assistant Principal Pritchard's voice rumbled over the intercom. “I'd like to speak directly to the students responsible for today's incident in the gymnasium.…”

It was like the voice of God was speaking directly to me. And He didn't sound all that happy.

This isn't good.

“I'm offering you an opportunity to turn yourself in,” Pritchard continued. “If you voluntarily come to my office before school ends, this will be seen as a willingness on your part to comply. If you don't, I cannot offer you any leniency when I find you.…”

Pritchard's voice thundered through school: “And rest assured, I will find you.”

I'm in way over my head. What have I gotten myself into?

As if to validate my fears, the fiberglass panel over my head pulled back, and a folded piece of paper dropped onto the bed. The ceiling closed itself before Miss Braswell noticed.

I turned over onto my side and unfolded the note.

Two simple sentences:
Hide in the last stall in the boys' room.
Wait there until we contact you.

• • •

I had called home to tell Mom there was a basketball game at school that night. I'd get a ride home with some friends.

Friends.
Mom should've seen right through that one.

My new “friends” had me huddled on a toilet seat, knees pressed against my chest, for what felt like hours.

Sitting in that silence, I was overcome by how quiet—how eerily soundless—the school could be when nobody was inside it.

Mausoleum quiet.

Necropolis quiet.

I peered between my feet, deep into the toilet bowl, where the white porcelain was swallowed by shadows.

I felt myself at the edge. One step forward and I'd be in a free fall forever.

It's not too late. You can still walk away from this.

Couldn't I?

Could I?

“Spencer?”

The voice from above my head startled me. Looking up, I discovered Sully.

“Everybody's gone,” she said. “The place is ours.”

• • •

Peashooter entered the center circle of the basketball court. Less than ten hours ago, Assistant Principal Pritchard had been run over on the very same spot by five hundred panicked students rushing for the door. Remnants of the stampede still remained: tossed-off pom-poms, crumpled notebook paper, an abandoned backpack.

Now Peashooter stood before the empty bleachers and grinned as if those empty rows of pine planks were the rib cage on a corpse pecked clean of its meat—and he was the vulture with the fullest tummy.

“When did you ever feel
school pride
?” His question ricocheted across the court. “When did this place ever make you feel like you belonged?”

There were only the five of us scattered about the gym—but from the boom of his voice, Peashooter may as well have been spurring on an army of hundreds.

“
Never
. That's when. And you know why…? Because you
don't
belong.”

Peashooter turned to Yardstick. Somehow, he had managed to scale one of the basketball backboards. Now he was using the basket as a seat, his scrawny butt crammed in the hoop, and his daddy longlegs dangling.

“You never belonged,” Peashooter said directly to Yardstick. “Not to them. Not in this building. Not to anyone—but yourself.”

Compass was sitting a few feet to my left. He was already riled up.

“There was a time when I walked among the student body of Greenfield wanting nothing more than to belong.” Peashooter looked up toward the ceiling and shook his head. “I tried so hard.
And still
—I wasn't good enough.
And still
—they didn't care.”

Sully sat to my right. I glanced over to see how she was reacting to all this, but there was no peeking through that eclipse of hair.

Peashooter continued. “But the joke was on me. On all of us—because we fell for it.”

Sporkboy was in the front row, beaming like a teacher's pet with rabies. He picked up a discarded pom-pom, lit it on fire with a match, and tossed it high into the air.

Sully drew her slingshot and fired off a penny.
Direct hit!
The burning tassels burst into sparks, dissipating in the air like a dying Fourth of July firework.

“We tried their slave-brained way of life. But their lives aren't theirs at all! They've been conditioned, just like the students before them and the students before that. That's not school pride. That's what
lemmings
do.”

Peashooter turned to Sporkboy.

“Remember what a lemming is?”

“It's a rat,” Sporkboy promptly responded, pleased with himself for remembering his biology lesson. A wide grin spread across his face until his cheeks pinched his eyes.

“That's right.” Peashooter nodded. “A stupid rodent that follows other stupid rodents. It's their nature to follow blindly, one after another, until they run off a cliff and drown in the sea. If the lemming ahead does it, so will the lemming behind. Every last one of them!”

Yardstick's legs began to swing through the air. Peashooter's speech was working its magic on him. On all of us. I imagined this was the Big Game and Peashooter was our coach, giving us our pep talk before hitting the field.

He was psyching us up for battle.

For war.

“This school? This school has no leaders. The sixth graders blindly follow the seventh graders, who blindly follow the eighth graders, who blindly march into high school. None of them, not one single student, stops to ponder what might happen if they were to break from the herd.”

Peashooter paused and everything felt deathly quiet. All I could hear was the dull thud of my own heart pounding against my chest.

“Until now.
Until us
.”

Peashooter walked up to me. He continued to address everyone, but from the glint in his eye, I could tell this was meant particularly for my ears.

“No more GPA. No more aptitude testing or placement testing or cognitive testing or any of it. Because we are not grades!”

“No!”
Sporkboy yelled back.

“We are not yearbook photos!”

“No!”
Compass chimed in along with Sporkboy.

“We are not basketball starting lineups!”

“No!”
Yardstick followed along with the others, their voices growing stronger. More confident.

“We are not status updates!”

“No!”
Sully and I added to the chorus.

“We are free!” Peashooter raised his arms over his head. “Free to make a home for ourselves! Free to do what we want! To read what we want! To
belong
where we want! That's what true school spirit is. All that stands between us and making this school ours are the five hundred mindless rodents who follow each other from class to class, day in and day out.
Lemmings
learning how to be better lemmings!
”

Sporkboy was the first to leap to his feet, charged. Yardstick hopped down from the backboard. Compass popped up from the bleachers and followed along.

Peashooter scanned their eager faces. He had them right where he wanted them.

I turned to Sully and discovered she was already standing.

I was the only one left.

“True school pride is emancipation from the herd. To shake up the status quo!”

Peashooter locked his eyes on mine. He held out his hand.

“I stand before you and declare that if you feel true school pride, then fight for it!”

I took Peashooter's hand. He pulled me up from the bleachers with such force, I felt like a basketball propelled across the court for a three-point shot.

Nothing but net.

“Fight for this school and make it ours!” Peashooter craned his neck back and shouted, “
To the law of claw and fang!”

“Claw and fang!”
we yelled in unison, our collective voice flooding the gym.

“Claw and fang!”

“Claw and fang!”

• • •

We took to the halls.

We ran from one end of the building to the other, whooping and leaping and colliding, and knocking over anything that got in our way.

We tore down banners proclaiming school pride.

We made our own proclaiming—
SCHOOL LIED
.

We raided the music room and paraded down the hallways celebrating our greatness as loudly as we could.

We loosened the screws on all the desks in Mr. Rorshuck's classroom and scribbled mathematical profanities across his blackboard:
Testiclation! Assiom! Isuckeles triangle!

This is for calling us names.

We TP'ed the hallways. We mummified the main office. We shrouded the library.

We decimated the Dewey decimal system as Peashooter shouted, “Take reading back from the bookworms! Take our books back from these maggots!”

We raided the food storage and ate with our bare hands.

We took a garbage bin from the cafeteria and stuffed as much putrid food into Riley Callahan's broken-in locker as it could hold.

This is for taunting us.

We reset all the clocks. We adjusted them to totally random hours, tangling up the minutes until there was no synchronicity, no uniformity, as if to say,
Now it's our time
.

We unscrewed globes from their mounts and played dodgeball with the world.

We took the chalk—every last bit from the building—and flushed it down the toilet.

This is for everything.

This is for nothing.

We broke into the track-and-field supply closet and took whatever equipment we wanted.

We spiked javelins into the ground at the front entrance, then impaled a red rubber dodgeball on each.

Let these faceless decapitated heads serve as a warning:
Beware all ye who enter here.

Sully began to chant, jumping up and down in mock-cheerleader fashion: “BE AGGRESSIVE!”

We lifted our javelins and our voices in chorus: “B-E AGGRESSIVE!”

I found myself chanting loudest:
“B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-
S-I-V-E!”

We were wild. We were free.

We were home.

• • •

It was one in the morning by the time I left school.

How had it gotten so late?

I had to hoof it home, which would give me just enough time to come up with a good excuse.

Get brainstorming, Spencer.
You'll need a whopper for this one.

When the headlights hit me, I winced. The police!