Big Mouth (4 page)

CHAPTER 3

Aaaagggh!

Bulging eyeballs. Tears like water rockets. Puffy, blood-bloated sockets.

Aaaagggh!

Thirteen dogs plus thirteen cold, waterlogged buns equaled one toilet bowl of butyric acid.

Aaaagggh!

At least I’d fasted since lunch yesterday. I’d learned from my mistake and made it to thirteen HDBs this time.

Aaaa…

Nothing.

Wait, Shermie, wait….

Still nothing.

I hung out a few minutes more while the dry heaves subsided, then stood and flushed. Not bad for a second attempt. Lucy didn’t need to know how it ended.

Smiling, I lifted up my white T-shirt and patted my empty belly.
Thump, thump.
Next time,
fourteen
HDBs, I just knew it.

CHAPTER 4

According to the clock on my cell phone, it was 7:26 when my bus finally putt-putted up to Del Heiny Junior 13. Eleven minutes behind schedule. Swell. Air brakes popped and hissed as the oxidized orange clunker lurched to a stop, then settled.

I lodged a complaint with the tooth-challenged driver on my way out.

“Calm down, big guy,” he said. “I can’t control the traffic, you know. Maybe your watch is wrong.”

My cell phone was regulated by satellite. Satellites were never wrong. Riding the bus sucked.

Because she had an early dentist appointment, Lucy wasn’t with me as I stepped off the bus in front of our three-story circular school building, which was the dark red of a plum tomato from top to bottom. I sighed. It was like walking into a solid blob of ketchup. The only windows were on the bottom floor, where the principal and his staff had their offices. Ringing the top of the red blob was a crown of white flags, each sporting a plump tomato in its center like the red sun on a Japanese flag. Across the middle of the blob, strung like a big Band-Aid over the double-doored entrance, was a long white banner with
GO, PLUMS!
in blocky red letters. I swear, I could have kissed the very ground in gratefulness that we weren’t assigned the extra-plump Burpee tomato as our mascot. Del Heiny High #4 got that one. The huge
GO, BIG BURPEES!
sign over their door was the stuff of nightmares. Life was hard enough without being a Big Burpee.

With just five minutes left to get to Mad Max’s class way up on the third floor, I beelined for the double doors. Even with my shortcut through the waist-high hedge, the other bus-riding Plums left me in the dust fast. They and the few stragglers rushing from the bike racks looked like muted aliens in a low-budget sci-fi flick. The morning sun was painting their faces a mucky Dijon-mustard color, and the dry wind had their hair poking out from their heads like porcupine quills. It was like the opening scene of
Galactic Warriors’
most popular episode, “Captain Quixote’s Glory.” In that episode, the aliens really did have quills.

I raced through the doors and past the broken elevator, skidding to a stop just steps beyond. I did an about-face. The elevator doors had
GO, MUSTARD!
scribbled on them in big, loopy letters with thickly squeezed mustard. I couldn’t help it, I busted up.
The Mustard Taggers strike again!
That made five times in two weeks. Principal Culwicki was probably having a seizure that very second, the big Del Heiny butt kisser.

That happy thought launched me up the stairs at full gallop.
Go, Mustard!

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.

Gardo was skipping lunch because he had to make weight for his upcoming practice game, or meet, or whatever wrestlers called it, so he was fetching more ketchup packets for me. My six corn dogs would be good capacity training for my stomach, but I hadn’t grabbed enough packets to reach the recommended ketchup ratio for that many breaded wieners. And ketchup ratios were important, because Del Heiny was adamant about students getting their proper vegetable allotment each day. The company worked closely with the D.Caf.Nuts to make sure everything sold in the cafeteria was ketchup-dunkable. Laminated cards taped down on each tabletop advised just how many packets to use per corn dog, Tater Tot, etc. To reinforce the Del Heiny Healthy Eating Initiative, the cafeteria’s red walls were stenciled with large slogans like
A TOMATO A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY
and
THE WORLD IS YOUR TOMATO
and
VEGGIES—THEY’RE NOT ALL GREEN
.

Crouched at a nearby wall under the slogans were the school’s three janitors, all dressed in dill-green coveralls. I probably didn’t need to worry about them patrolling for contraband cola today. They had more interesting things on their minds than my measly soda. Between raspy, cancerous coughing fits, they were bickering about who got to glue the humongous tomato decal over the yellow smudge left by the
MUSTARD LOVERS UNITE!
tag, which had been squeezed across the Del Heiny company logo.

Two kids in yellow shirts passed by the janitors. “Go, Mustard!” one shouted. His buddy high-fived him. Some kids following him laughed despite the janitors’ glares.

The next voice that boomed out wasn’t so welcome. It belonged to Shane Hunt, the biggest jerk on the planet. “I feel the need to dunk me a big…fat…scrub doughnut.”

Oh, great.
My mouth went dry. Last week Shane had declared it Scrub Dunk Week in the cafeteria and then promptly ordered a different eighth grader chucked into a trash can every day. Starting with me. I still had a bruise on my lower back where the edge of the can had dug in. And now here he was, looking for another victim. Apparently the idiot didn’t know how long a week was.

Except for a few snickers from the huddled janitors and a “Make it a slam dunk, Shane!” from Shane’s table in the ninth grade section, the cafeteria was silent. Like Moses parting water, Shane swaggered down the center aisle with the Finns, both looking like they had a medical condition as they tried to make their bulky bodies swagger like his too-short one. All of them had their yellow baseball caps on backward. Plums unlucky enough to be in the aisle scuttled out of their way. One poor slob spilled his tray, sending Tater Tots every which way. Shane grinned and stomped the Tots.

“You missed one!” a janitor called out.

Shane darted his eyes around the floor, then pointed near Wayne’s—or was it Blayne’s?—left Nike. Whichever, the sneaker raised, then came down hard. A piece of Tot squilched sideways and splatted against Shane’s jeans.