The Fourth Stall Part III Page 7

  “Sure thing, Mac,” Tyrell said.

  “Thanks,” I said as I shook his hand.

  He pocketed the twenty-dollar bill that we’d exchanged during the handshake, his upfront fee, and then was gone. I had been standing right there, but I’m telling you I couldn’t even have told you what direction he’d gone if I had been under oath and hooked up to a lie detector. He was that good. I shook my head in awe.

  For the next week Staples made us go to a ton of school-related events with him as a part of the Big Brother thing. He said they made him look extra good to his counselor and the court system and whatnot. And, man, there were even more school activities than I’d thought there were. Especially once you hit seventh grade.

  It started the evening after I’d gone to Tyrell to investigate the circumstances surrounding Jimmy’s business. We went to a seventh-grade orchestra recital. It was actually a pretty big event. The local news was there, and so were tons of parents and some random people who must have been pretty hard-core music aficionados. And of course Vince, Staples, and I. The orchestra played lame music and they weren’t even that good, but then, as much as it scared me to admit it, Staples was kind of growing on me. And I really wanted to see him get his sister back. So we didn’t put up too much of a fight.

  The chairs were all set up onstage in the Olson Olson Theatre so that they created a rising tower of musicians. They had the first row seated on the lowest level and then the second row of chairs was about a foot higher and so on for four rows of chairs arranged in a half-circle.

  We took three seats in the back of the theater and waited for the recital to begin.

  “I can’t believe we’re here.” Vince groaned.

  Staples slugged him on the arm hard enough to make a lady a few rows in front turn around and shush us even though the concert hadn’t even started yet and the stage was still empty. Vince rubbed his arm and made a face.

  “What’s wrong?” Staples whispered. “You guys afraid to get exposure to a little refined cultural arts? To experience some of the finest music our species has to offer?”

  “I can’t wait!” I said with as much sarcastic enthusiasm as I could muster.

  Staples actually laughed. But then he slugged me on the arm, too. My already bruised and sore arm just pretty much felt numb, so it hurt only horribly bad instead of excruciatingly bad.

  “This is going to look great on my report, though,” Staples said, referring to his Big Brother events log report that was turned in to his Big Brother coordinator each week.

  Vince and I exchanged glances.

  “Oh, are you guys having a moment? Do you want me to leave you alone?” Staples asked, and then laughed again, this time louder. “You and the looks you’re always giving each other.”

  The old lady in front of us turned around and shushed us again.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” Staples said politely.

  Then the recital began. I think, anyway. I’d never actually been to an orchestra recital before. The conductor came up onstage, and everyone applauded robotically. The lights dimmed and kids started filing onstage. They all got in front of the chairs and held their instruments but remained standing. Then the conductor made a motion and most of the kids, except for those who needed to stand to play, sat down all at once.

  That’s when it happened.

  Almost every single chair broke, and the whole setup came crashing down on top of itself into a big rumbling pile of kids, broken instruments, chairs, music stands, and even a few tears. It was chaos. The audience gasped; kids shouted. Staples snickered madly.

  Vince and I looked at each other in shock. No way had that been an accident. Seventy chairs don’t just break all at once.

  Anyways, they were eventually able to get some of it set back up, but several instruments were damaged and some kids were hurt. Not seriously injured—there were no broken limbs that I could see—but they were still in too much pain to play. So the concert recital ended up being fairly short and disjointed. The whole thing had pretty much been ruined by the chair incident.

  It was humiliating for our school; the next day the local newspaper printed a photo of the pile of kids, chairs, and instruments with a caption that read: LOCAL MIDDLE SCHOOL ORCHESTRA ATTEMPTS MASS STAGE DIVE AT CONCERT RECITAL.

  Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the most professional thing for them to have printed, but I had to admit it was a pretty funny headline.

  Anyways, the whole thing left me in shock. I mean, chairs just don’t break in unison for no reason, like I said before. To me, it was pretty obvious that it had been planned. At first I thought maybe it had been Staples, given how hard he’d laughed. But he genuinely looked surprised right after it’d happened. Plus, I didn’t think he’d risk getting caught for a few cheap laughs with custody of his sister on the line.

  On its own maybe the incident could be written off as some cruel practical joke that the marching band might have played on them. After all, our school marching band and orchestra had a pretty heated rivalry with each other for some insane reason. But the incident couldn’t be viewed on its own. Because there were others.

  The next night Staples made us go to this cake-decorating contest that took place in the school gym. That’s right, a school-sponsored cake-decorating contest. That’s one of the things that’s sort of cool about my school: if you got enough kids and signatures gathered up, you could start pretty much any sort of after-school club you could think of.

  Anyways, on that night, right before the judging phase of the contest, the school fire sprinklers in the gym all went off at the same time, drenching the entire audience (all twenty-five of us) and all of the cakes. They were all ruined, which was hard to watch. Well, Staples snickered again, as you might expect, but I was pretty heartbroken for all of those kids who had worked so hard. One kid had even made this amazingly detailed 3-D Death Star cake complete with the trench and exhaust port and everything.

  So maybe that incident was just random bad luck, right? Well, I tended to think that the timing of it was just too suspicious.

  Then of course there was the swim meet that our school hosted later that week. Everybody showed up to find the pool filled with blood and guts and severed hands. It looked like a cannibal holocaust had occurred in there. Not even Staples was able to laugh at that.

  Of course they later found out that it was just red dye and Karo syrup combined with hamburger meat and Halloween-marketed fake hands. Of course when we found out, we all agreed that at the very least it had been a pretty brilliant prank. Nonetheless, every time I tried to sleep that week, I could still hear the screams of those moms in attendance ringing in my ears. And the incident had made our school look pretty foolish. The meet had to be rescheduled, which annoyed all of the other schools involved.

  Probably the worst one of all happened that Friday, when somebody spiked our football team’s Gatorade with laxatives during a game. The second half was not pretty; you’ll want to trust me on that. It got so bad that our team actually had to forfeit the game and take it as a loss even though we’d been winning 28–6. Of course, when the referee had made that call, he wasn’t aware that the Gatorade had been spiked. He just thought the world was ending, like the rest of us.

  That was the worst one in a lot of ways. For one, it counted as a loss for the team. And now they were 3–2 after two losses in two weeks. Our school and the whole town were pretty big into football and we expected to make the state tournament every year; we hadn’t missed in decades. So this stuff couldn’t keep happening.

  And there was more, too, than just the stuff we’d witnessed ourselves. Some of the stories I’d heard kids telling around school involved:

  A school assembly for grades one through five during which the whole room slowly started to reek like rotting milk until it got so bad that Dickerson had to postpone the end.

  A school dance where somebody had coated the floor in vegetable oil just before it started, so pretty much everybody took several hard spills
and one kid even sprained his elbow.

  Three of the school science lab animals had been dyed completely green, which was more funny than mean or bad, but still . . .

  The school practice football field had a huge curse word cut into the grass so deeply one night that they basically had to strip all of the grass from the entire field to get rid of it. So we now have an all-dirt practice football field.

  The school seemed once again to be falling apart. Only this time it was definitely due to direct and obvious acts of sabotage, as opposed to mysterious inner workings like what Dr. George had inflicted the year before. Plus, this time the end motive seemed merely to be to have fun at our expense, to ruin things and embarrass us. These were the sorts of things that Jimmy couldn’t even possibly solve, which threw my theory right out the window that he was creating his own problems. There really didn’t seem to be any grand master plan at work.

  In fact, from what I’d been able to gather from kids talking at recess, Jimmy was falling behind. There was just too much for him to handle. We actually didn’t even get our cut that Thursday. Our money drop was never made. And we couldn’t even go ask him about it because I simply couldn’t risk being seen near my old office again.

  But anyways, the point was that it was pretty obvious that all of these incidents were related. The question was how. And why? Who had anything to gain from embarrassing the school and just wreaking general havoc?

  The Sunday after the most insane week I thought our school had probably ever had (yes, even more insane than when the SMARTs and everything had happened last year), Vince, Staples, and I were playing catch in the playground in Vince’s trailer park. We were playing catch because Staples had said, “Having a catch is like the Super Bowl of Big Brother activities.” But also, it was sort of nice to escape the recent insanity with some relatively mindless Sunday afternoon baseball.

  Even if Staples kept trying to kill us.

  We had a classic triangle going. I stood near the sandbox (the very same one that Vince and I had used as our first-ever office almost seven years ago), Vince stood about twenty yards away near his trailer, and Staples was standing about twenty yards from each of us in front of this creepy small scarecrow that Mrs. King had erected next to her small garden.

  At first we had all laughed at the small but oddly ominous scarecrow, but as the afternoon went on, I saw Staples stealing small glances over his shoulder at it. It was making him nervous. It was kind of bizarre and hilarious to see Staples getting so jittery near an inanimate object, but at the same time it only made the scarecrow seem even creepier.

  I maybe would have even laughed at him if he hadn’t been trying to kill us, like I mentioned before. Every time he threw the ball to either Vince or me, he basically just rifled it as hard as he could. And he could throw pretty hard. I was guessing he even could have ended up playing at least college baseball if he hadn’t gotten mixed up in the crime world as a kid and if his life had gone differently.

  He laughed the first few times when it caught us off-guard and we had to duck or flinch as we caught the ball. But after a few times Vince and I were handling his fireballs with ease. That wasn’t to say that my glove hand wasn’t sore, but we were both good enough to at least make the catch every time without flinching.

  Anyways, after a little bit we both started throwing back at him pretty hard ourselves. He handled our throws even better than we caught his, mostly because we couldn’t throw nearly as hard as he could, not even Vince. All in all, it was the most tense and hostile game of catch that I’d ever participated in.

  But then, Vince threw Staples one of his signature circle changeups. It’s by far Vince’s best pitch. It looks just like a slightly slower fastball until it gets to you and just falls off the table. Not many seventh graders can throw a pitch that breaks as much as that one does. So when it got to Staples, even if he had recognized it for something other than a fastball, he still likely would have missed it.

  The ball sailed right under his glove, hit the fake trailer park playground grass, and bounced up and nailed the scarecrow right in the leg.

  “Ow!” yelled the scarecrow.

  I swear Staples must have jumped seven feet straight into the air. Then he turned and backpedaled away from the talking scarecrow so quickly he tripped and fell back onto his butt. Vince and I would have been laughing if we also weren’t pretty spooked ourselves.

  Then the scarecrow climbed down from its post and took a step toward us. Its motionless burlap face with button eyes was fixed into a mouthless and dead stare. Staples was almost shaking, he looked so freaked out.

  He climbed to his feet and took several steps back.

  “If you come any closer, I’ll tear your head off,” Staples said, although it wasn’t too effective of a threat since you could plainly hear the fear in his voice.

  The scarecrow stopped walking and then reached up and tore its own face off.

  “Please don’t do that,” the scarecrow said calmly.

  But of course it wasn’t actually a scarecrow. It was Tyrell.

  “Who are you?” Staples demanded.

  “He’s a friend of ours,” I said.

  “Man, you guys have some weird friends,” Staples said, shaking his head. “Who does that, seriously?”

  I tried not to laugh. Tyrell, to his credit, just shrugged and smiled.

  “What did you find out?” I asked. “Wait, let me guess. All of the sabotage of school events is somehow related to Jimmy after all, right?”

  “It seems like it,” Tyrell said.

  “Ha-ha, see? Who needs you? We can figure things out for ourselves!” Vince joked. “It’s like my grandma told me once, ‘If you can see any of your own bones without a mirror, then everything is definitely not okay. Drink a milkshake immediately! And then call a banker!’”

  We all laughed except for Staples. He stared at Vince and then said, “What the heck is wrong with your grandma?”

  “She’s a genius, that’s all.”

  “Anyway,” Tyrell said, “do you know how everything is related?”

  “Hey, I gotta pay you for something,” I said.

  He nodded and then continued, “Well, turns out that I spotted some younger kids hanging around our school a lot. I saw some sneaking around right before all of the recent incidents, like the recital and the swimming pool bloodbath massacre. And these kids definitely don’t go to our school, Mac.”

  This was all way too confusing. Why would another school be randomly sabotaging us?

  “So how is that connected to Jimmy?” Vince asked. “I mean, he can’t be paying them because those things are all causing him problems, too.”

  Tyrell shrugged. “Well, then this next part will really surprise you. I caught Jimmy making cash payments to some of the same kids who I saw sneaking around the pool right after the swimming-pool bloodbath.”

  I shook my head. This just didn’t make sense.

  “No way,” I said.

  “I’ve got video evidence if you really need to see it,” Tyrell said.

  Vince and I looked at each other. His head looked even more like it was about to explode than mine felt.

  “So where are these kids from? Tell me you found out . . . ,” I said.

  Tyrell grinned and nodded, then furrowed his eyebrows, showing that even he didn’t quite understand the why of what he was going to say next.

  “They’re from Thief Valley Elementary,” he said.

  I think all of us must have looked pretty funny just then with our mouths hanging open like idiots. After I collected myself, I handed Tyrell another ten-dollar bill.

  “Well, thanks, Tyrell. Nice work as usual,” I said.

  “No problem,” Tyrell said, and then seemingly vanished again. I mean, really, he just ducked behind some bushes, but once he was out of sight, it was like he had never been there at all.

  Vince and I looked at each other.

  “See?” Staples said. “That school is horrible. I’ve got t
o get my sister out of there before she gets involved in this crap.”

  “What now?” Vince asked me.

  “I don’t think this changes anything. I still say we stay out of this. This is Jimmy’s mess; he can dig our school out of it somehow.”

  “Really? You’re going to let this spiral further and further out of control just like that?” Vince asked.

  “I’m not letting anything happen! It’s not my job to keep the whole school out of trouble,” I said. “Besides, what can I do? Dickerson has been all over me. If I try anything, we’ll get expelled, which won’t help anybody.”

  I really believed what I was saying. To a point. On one hand, I knew that I was probably the only kid who could fix the problem before the sabotage got so bad that the football games would start getting played with samurai swords instead of a leather ball. But on the other, the Dickerson element was still the ultimate deciding factor. My hands were essentially tied.

  I thought Vince realized the same thing because he sighed and then nodded in agreement.

  “You can’t just let this go!” Staples said loudly. “I knew that kids at Thief Valley are bad influences. You saw that kid who was basically bench-pressing two first graders the other day! You need to put an end to whatever sort of conflict there is between the two schools because I don’t want Abby getting caught up in stuff like this. She’s a good kid; I don’t want her to end up like me. Plus, it’s going to look really suspicious for me if she somehow ends up in the middle of some serious acts of school warfare right when I’m trying to get back into her life, you know?

  “Besides, I told you there was no such thing as halfway out. You guys thought you could reap the rewards of the business without any of the consequences. Well, now you’re right back where you started, looking down the business end of an expulsion. You see what I mean now, don’t you?”

  Staples had a point. He’d warned us something like this would happen and we hadn’t listened.