Homeroom Headhunters (6 page)

could feel the blood rushing to my head before I opened my eyes.

Sure enough, I came to—hanging upside down.

I'd been strung up to a basketball hoop in our gymnasium. There was a jump rope wrapped around the lower half of my legs and tied to the rim. Another jump rope, looped around my torso, held my arms in place.

I felt like a carcass hanging from a butcher's meat hook.

A meat piñata.

Not a pretty picture, I know.

I spotted the clock on the gym wall. It was only—10:30 a.m.?
Wait
. Hold up. That would mean it was still third period. Where was the Halloween assembly?

But I was upside down. It was really 6:50 p.m. School had been over for nearly four hours! The only sign that the costume competition had come and gone were candy corns littering the gym floor, looking like the lost fangs of a few dozen werekids. Just one more mess for Mr. Simms to pick up.

I tried to yell for help, but there was something stuffed inside my mouth.

All I could do was wriggle my hands at my waist. I started to panic. None of this hypothetical maybe-this-is-all-just-a-dream kind of panic, but the oh-I-think-I-just-pooped-in-my-pants kind.

Remain calm, Spencer, I said to myself.
Think.
How are you going to get out of this one?

I heard a door open behind me, which sent an echo through the empty gym. I tried to turn my head around to see who was coming, but I was dangling in the wrong direction.

I saw bare feet first.

They were hovering just above—
below
—me, five sets, each attached to people wearing safety-pinned gym uniforms. Even though their feet were planted firmly on the floor, they looked like a row of wax-skinned bats hanging from the three-point line.

I had to tilt my head to the side just to get a good look at them—and when I did, I realized there was writing all over their bodies. I got lost reading the scribbled bits of graffiti wrapped around their arms and legs.

LOST BOY

WHITE FANG

ADVERTISE HERE

The one with the paper clip nose-piercing stepped forward.

“
I blacken the name of our fair city…
” he recited. “
I beat up
people
.…
I am a menace to society. Man, do I have fun!
”

Say—
what?

“Call me Peashooter.”

The tall one with the yardsticks stepped up next. He had measured and marked a column of perpendicular lines across the length of his legs to correspond with the metric system—inches, centimeters, and millimeters. His legs looked like a pair of rulers.

He murmured something I couldn't quite make out.

“You're lard sick?” I managed to ask through my gag.

“Yardstick.” He raised his voice. “I'm
Yardstick
.”

The one with the acne had sketched the symbol of an atom across one forearm, while the image of a drafting compass piercing an anatomically correct heart was drawn on the other.

“Call me Compass.”

The next to step forward had
LORD OF THE FRIES
scrawled across the slope of his belly in a meticulously executed Old English font. There was a skull and crossbones on his forearm.
Wait
—scratch that. Not crossbones. A fork and knife.

“The name's Sporkboy,” he declared as he drum-rolled his own stomach. “Got a problem with that?”

Again with the crazy eyes.

I shook my head—
nope
.

“Good.”

Each was wearing about six different whistles, like strings of silver teeth dangling across their chests.

And they'd armed themselves.

Compasses bent open to expose their sharp points.

X-ACTO blades attached to protractors.

Sharpened pencils.

I saw Sully standing at the back. She was one of the posse. The only girl among the boys. Her choice in clothes differed from theirs. And no writing anywhere I could see. Her head hung low enough for her hair to cover most of her face, but I saw her eyes peering through.

“What are you looking at?” she asked. “You already know my name.”

I stared back at her with pleading eyes:
Help help help help
help
—but she didn't seem to receive my message.

Or want to.

I could almost trace the veins running the length of her pale limbs, and her eyes were overly dilated.

Like cat eyes.

Peashooter leaned over until we were face-to-face. I noticed something in his hand.

Something small.

With teeth.

He held out his hand so that I could get a good look-see.

A staple remover—
a four-fanged pincer with spring-locked jaws—was an inch away from my nose. Without saying anything, he slipped its metallic teeth into my nostrils, and pinched.

Not enough to break the skin. No nosebleeds here. But enough to get my attention.

I was all ears.

“Everybody's gone for the day.” He tugged harder. “Nobody'll hear you.”

He released my nose so that I rocked back and forth from the basketball rim. Then he caught me by the nose again, pinching me in place.

“If I remove your gag, you better not scream. Promise?”

I nodded.
Slowly
.

He detached his staple remover from my nose again. He sunk its fangs into the wad in my mouth and tugged it out.

A sock. I'd had a dirty gym sock stuffed in my mouth this whole time.

I took a deep breath, then emptied all that fresh air from my lungs by yelling my head off: “Help me help me help me somebody please get me out of here help help help!”

Nothing. No cavalry to save the day.

“Told you nobody would hear,” Peashooter said. “Now you've gotta pay for your disloyalty.…”

Yardstick and Sporkboy each pulled out a sock stuffed with something that appeared to be heavy. Sporkboy started swinging his over his head like a helicopter propeller, sending a slight clink-clinking sound through the air.

They must've been filled with spare change.

By my hasty calculations, about fifty-seven cents of pain each.

Give or take.

“Pound him,” Peashooter nodded.

In the blink of an eye, both boys advanced and proceeded to whack me as hard as they could. The thud of money against my body brought the holler right out of me: “Ow ow ow!”

“Never break your promises. Not to us, got it?
Word is bond.
”

I gasped. “What do you want from me?”

“We tied you up to see how you'd handle yourself.”

“This is some kind of
test
? Did I pass?”

“Hardly,” Compass huffed, the acne spread across his face reddening.

“I'm getting really light-headed up here.…”

Sully rushed up and brought an inhaler to my mouth. She squeezed off a gust into my lungs.

“Somebody's got a crush.” Sporkboy snorted. Compass laughed along with him.

Out of nowhere, Sully brandished a slingshot. Before Sporkboy could even blink, she'd loaded a penny, aimed, and fired.

Bull's-eye
—right in the navel.

“Owww! I was just joking.”

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male,”
Sully recited.

“Who the heck said that?” Sporkboy rubbed his sore tummy.

“Rudyard Kipling.”

“Yeah, well—
For a penny in the belly isn't as painful as my fist in
your face
,” he spat back. “That was
me
. I said that!”

“Enough!” Peashooter silenced the two of them. He then turned back to me. “We've had our eyes on you for some time.”

“What did I do?”

“We know you're looking for an escape.”

Escape?

With all the blood in my body rushing to my skull, I was having a full-blown hallucination. Either that, or this had just become the weirdest Halloween of my life.

“The time to rise is nearly upon us.” Peashooter gnashed the teeth of his staple remover in front of my face. “Who will you stand by? Us—or the cattle you call classmates? You have been chosen to join our tribe.
To become one of us!
”

Along his left forearm, I could read
DAMAGE DONE
.

This can't be happening.

Sporkboy lunged forward, and I flinched, thinking he was about to bludgeon me with his sock cudgel again, but Peashooter held out his hand, halting him.

“Enough.”

“Come on,” Sporkboy whined. “Let me just have a little fun with him.…”

Peashooter leaned into my face.

“We can do anything we want here.” He grinned. “This is our home.”

Sully leaned over, whispering, “It can be your home too.”

“Think about it,” Peashooter said. “We'll be back for you.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Peashooter stuffed the sock into my mouth before it even dawned on me to ask him to cut me down.

• • •

Mr. Simms wheeled his mop and bucket into the gym. I could hear his key chain rattling at his hip ahead of seeing him.

“What the—?” he started.

“
Mmm-mff mmff-mmm!
”

Rough translation:
Get me down from here before my head pops
like a tick fattened up on too much blood!

“What's going on here?” he asked, tugging the sock from my mouth.

“Keep it down!” I gasped. “They're watching.…”

“What are you talking about?” Mr. Simms pulled out his pocketknife and started sawing through the jump rope around my torso. “Who did this?”

“Headhunters!”

“Head—
what?
”

Done with the first rope, he started on the one suspended from the basketball rim and soon sent me splatting against the gymnasium floor.

Ouch! My body felt like a slab of beef after a few hours with a meat tenderizer.

“You've got to believe me,” I said, slowly regaining my equilibrium. “Somewhere in this school there's a tribe of teenage headhunters!”

Mr. Simms gave me a look I was a little too familiar with. He wasn't buying a word of what I'd said.

“Headhunters? In…school?”

“Yes! Well. Sort of.”

Mr. Simms didn't say anything for a long time.

“You don't believe me?” I said.

“Would you?”

He had a point.

• • •

Mom hugged me so tight, I think she may have broken a couple of my ribs. Tears ran down her cheeks. I don't think she'd ever been this happy to see me before.

Then she gripped my shoulders and shook me until whiplash was inevitable. Fury flashed through her face, eclipsing her relief. “
Spencer Austin Pendleton!
”

You know you're in big trouble when your mother pulls out your middle name.

“I called the police. I had no idea what had happened to you—”

“I'm sorry, Mom—”

“Don't you ever,
ever
do something like this to me again!”

“I said I was sorry!”

Mr. Simms stepped up, coughing lightly. “You know how boys get, ma'am. Kids'll start fooling around, and before you know it, there goes the time.”

Mom let me go, turning her attention toward him.

“Thank you for keeping an eye on him, Mr.…”

“Simms.” He held out his hand and shook Mom's. “Wasn't any hassle, really. You got a good kid here, no matter how much of a headache he can be.”

“I'd say he's a full-on migraine most days.”

“Mom…”

“This was the last place I figured I'd find you. What were you doing at school?”

Mr. Simms and I exchanged a quick glance as I considered telling her the truth. That I had been kidnapped by a tribe of wild kids living in the school who wanted to recruit me?

Who was I kidding?

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Just hanging out with some new friends.”