Operation: Save The School

by Kyrin Sturdivant

Interrogation —

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. This looks bad, and why would he, a middle school meathead, want to save the school? First of all, ouch. Second, this was out of my control, it would’ve happened if I was there or not, and second..er.. thirdly, you’re not getting the whole story. Here, let me go over it for you, in all the gross detail. It all started on a Monday.

Monday, Nov. 16th, 2015 —

The school bell rang sharply at 9:40 AM like three darts plunging through a steel pan. We arrived at room 113 finding it odd that the door was still hanging open. Mrs. Mercury was nowhere to be seen. Already in our seats, we thought we’d see her stomp in late, a few minutes into class, but the minutes that were left continued to dwindle until we heard those three darts again.

“Maybe she’s dead”, Tommy suggested during gym.

Word of Mrs. M’s disappearance had quickly gotten around and everyone seemed to share Tommy’s disposition. No one could see it any other way. Mrs. M seemed like the type of person who would never miss anything, but then it happened. Once we accepted it and Mrs. M’s weirdness had gone away, it was only a matter of time before something else came to take its place. We just didn’t know it would happen so soon.

We were definitely met with an eventful lunch period. Every bright fluorescent light overhead had blown out without warning. It became pitch black and no one could see a thing. I tried walking forward, but the fear of what was right in front of me stopped my legs from working. I had no choice but to sit back down, forced to listen to the emulsion of panic, screaming, and murmuring. The room had gotten colder. There were no windows on the concrete walls, just echoes of the peril and screams for help. Our pulsing bodies became the only hope for warmth. 

Laying my back against the cold tile, I sank through the floor, feeling nothing but the chug of my heart struggling to pull me back up to the surface. My face had dampened. Pools flooded the bags under my eyes and dodged left and right, searching for the quickest route down the sides of my face. I could feel that my eyes were red, as if they’d been basking in the July sun for more than an hour. We didn’t get out of school until someone called the fire department in tears and they lead us out of the building with flashlights.

That night was filled with even more panicking. When I got home, I overheard my mother on the phone. She was tracing lines in the carpet as she walked around our living room expressing her anger and confusion with the other members of the Parent-Teacher Association, and then to just about anyone she could bark commands and complaints. Luckily, I had been asleep and was unable to answer any of the questions on the long list she had wrote and locked in her hand as she waved it in front of me after she caught me listening. I still have no idea why I was so tired the next morning.

Tuesday, Nov. 17th, 2015 —

At school, everyone was very shaken up. Mrs. M’s class flew by with students on their phones taking upside down pictures and adding flower crowns and dog ears to their egos. Tommy and I, on the other hand, went to the back of the class to see how many The Merriment of Manners textbooks we could stack on top of one another until they toppled over into the trash bin, then on to Gym class.

After Tommy and I changed into our navy and yellow gym garb, we squeaked into the bright underwhelming gymnasium. Mr. Miller had a mesh bag filled with plastic-coated pain and I knew at first sight that I’d be faking a limp and toting one of the faux doctor’s notes Max Minus had erupting of out his backpack.

“Sprained ankle again Wesley?” Miller pouted.

I sold him my classic, Oh my god, I’m in pain face and a whimper, and it seemed I was in the clear, Tommy hadn’t gotten so lucky. He gave me one of those “I’m getting you back as soon as I can come up with a revenge plot” faces. I threw him a wink as I hopped to the bleachers. 

I have to admit, I felt kind of bad watching Tommy take every ball to the face, and even still when he ran screaming and tripped over balls that were just sitting there waiting for him. Before then I had never seen such a sad performance outside of the dinner theater plays Mother would force me to sit through. I hated those.

Tommy said he’d let me have it, not verbally, but with his entire face. The red ringing pain on his face left the area from his forehead down to his chin suffocated beneath it, taunting him with a slow gnawing pain every time he dared to say a word. I could tell he hated me, but I couldn’t help but laugh hysterically, along with everyone else.

Lunch went on undisturbed, past Tommy’s pleas for an end to his pain. I had filled my tray with my favorite food of all, fruit. I spread grapes and strawberries, melon and slices of peach, apple slices and orange wedges all over the plastic surface and devoured it all in under ten minutes with a grin on my face. The only thing that made me regret getting my hands covered in sweet, sugary adhesive was the fact that my phone began to ring. As I took my pinky out of my mouth and wiped my hands on my jeans, I felt slightly humored, because Tommy’s phone started ringing too. He looked up from his phone at me as Melissa’s phone rang from across the room, then Noah’s, then Carter’s, then the entire lunchroom. What was going on, we all wondered? An unknown number. 

“Hello?” Stacy cried from across the cafeteria.

“You there?” Jim prodded.

“Who is this?” Lilly asked, hand shaking.

A familiar feeling washed over me again, fear. Why were we all getting calls from the same number? Was this the doing of one person or several? Were they the ones who turned off the lights in the building? Question upon question continued raising in my head until I felt their comfort and started taking them as answers. Why were we getting calls from the same number; we are all getting calls from the same number, was this the doing of one person or several; someone has to be behind this, were they the ones who turned off the lights in the building; they could be the ones who turned the lights in the building!

I took it upon myself, and maybe Tommy, to find whoever was doing this to our school and to stop them before something worse happened. I set out to find the answer behind all of the weird happenings at this school, along with Tommy (if he wants).

Wednesday, Nov. 18th, 2015 —

The next day of school started as typically as we’d expected, ever since Mrs. Mercury had evaporated off the face of the planet. Room 113 was a mess and chairs were scattered randomly across the room. Bunched up paper with lesson plans lined the window sill and overflowed from the trash bin and onto the floor. Mrs. M’s desk had all sorts of writing on it. Billy, for example, thought it was best to try etching out his interpretation of a blue T-Rex in a yellow Mini Cooper. Tommy and I thought it looked more like Spiderman on a Tricycle but as the quirky Mrs. Kelly would say, “Artistic Interpretation is as much of a shape-shifter as Mister Fantastic, you know from The Fantastic Four”, but her input in this matter is just as irrelevant as her attempt at being up-to-date on what kids are interested in nowadays; pick up a phone Mrs. Kelly. 

Everyone else’s contributions to the Great Mercury Desk Vandalization had held a better standing in mine, and Tommy’s artistic eyes. Sally had written, “Ms. M, if you can read this you are Too Gross!”, and Melissa wrote, “In this class you will gain a Proper Basic Head-Ache -ette”, ironically, that one had us laughing our heads off.

In Gym class me and Tommy had to run laps around the gym for the entire hour. Part of a new Gymnasiums Against Childhood Obesity initiative, but if you ask me it’s 

so unfair.

“If you want your kids to get off their heinies, enroll them in my Junior Football Team, that oughta put the fire under their keisters!” Mr. Miller chuckled after telling us why we had to do Zumba exercises that made Tim topple over Liz.

For the rest of class, all Tommy and I could talk about was how much we hoped our parents would never get such an idiotic idea like that and force us to join the team. We could barely stand Mr. Miller for an hour everyday. 

“Hit the showers, ya lazy kids!” Mr. M shouted, laughing as we ran away.

Thursday, Nov. 19th, 2015 —

The next morning, walking into Room 113 felt a bit odd. The room was at least 10 degrees colder, probably due to the fact that all of the windows on the side of the classroom were wide open, welcoming in the chilly autumn air that blew leaves against the classroom floor. The most unsettling thing was that the whiteboard had inscribed on it two ominous words, “Good Morning”, in Ms. M’s handwriting. She wasn’t back though, no one had seen her, and we learned later that she didn’t even come in that day. Had another teacher come in and written the note as a terrible distraction that we had a missing teacher? If that were the case, then it had been a sadly failed attempt, the note only made us more unsettled. Naturally our next thought was, is a new replacement replacement-teacher coming in today? That couldn’t have been true though, because the bell had rang and our teachers were required to be in class on time.

The hour went by, and though we all felt like peeing ourselves, we held it in, waddling through our day until lunch when we could elaborate on what happened during First Hour.

“Maybe it was a prank from someone in our class”, Sarah Nelson suggested.

“Impossible. No one can write perfectly in the same creepy handwriting as Mrs. Mercury, 

especially not a kid” Tommy denied.

Maybe I was a little biased, but I agreed with Tommy. Everyone in my class had pretty bad handwriting so the odds that one of us wrote the message on the board was highly unlikely. Whatever the answer was, the only one that was widely accepted was that Mrs. Mercury had something to do with it.