Sammy Keyes and the Wedding Crasher (7 page)

So, once again, Billy’s managed to put me in a pretty good mood, which helped me focus in my math and language classes. And after break I’m on my way to Mr. Vince’s class when Billy catches up to me and keeps the good mood going. “Beware the Psycho Barfer!” he hacks out, and then starts spazzing, making like he’s hurling his cookies over everyone and everything in the vicinity, including Cisco.

“Easy, man!” Cisco tells him, but when Billy doesn’t let up, Cisco pulls a mop out of his cleaning cart and plays along, pretending to clean up after him.

So it turns into a real comedy act, and a bunch of us are laughing so hard watching it that we wind up having to race through the sound of the tardy bell to make it to class on time.

My good mood totally crashes, though, when I get into class. Heather gives me the evil eye as I slide into my chair, and Mr. Vince is up at his podium looking grumpy as ever. He passes back our homework papers and couldn’t care less that mine’s nowhere to be found.

“But I know I turned it in!” I tell him. I point to the in-basket on the counter at the side of the room. “I put it right there!”

“Then why don’t I have it?” he says with a frown.

Lars Teppler interrupts our wonderful conversation by shoving his paper in front of Vince. “Why’d you give me
an F on this?” He points to some scribbles in the margin of his paper. “What does this say?”

Lars is tall and gangly, and has feathery brown hair that sort of swooshes around his head from right to left. It’s like his hair is in its own little universe of powerful centrifugal forces. And from the rapid whooshing of his head, I can tell that Lars is
totally
ticked off, so I back up.

Ol’ Scratch ’n’ Spit squints at his own writing. “It says, ‘I can’t read your writing.’ ”

Lars swooshes his head. “What?! I can’t read
your
writing!”

“That was my point,” Mr. Vince says like he’s oh-so-clever, even though his scribbles are
never
legible.

“But last time you gave me an F for not using complete sentences, and my writing was just like this!”

Mr. Vince shrugs. “So maybe next time you’ll get it right.” Then he walks away.

Lars just stands there for a minute, stock-still, until finally his head does a slow-motion swoosh and he goes back to his seat.

The class gets completely quiet, and we all just sit there staring at Mr. Vince as he messes with stuff on his desk and then pulls open one of the drawers.

And that’s when it happens.

Mr. Vince makes a horrified face and lets out a sound that no teacher in the history of teaching has made in any classroom anywhere
ever
. He stares inside the drawer with his eyes peeled back and his jaw dangling down, and what comes out of his mouth is a gasp and a choke and a cry and
a strangled scream and a cough and a barfing sound all wrapped into one.

His eyes roll back in his head and he wobbles for a minute, and then he does something I never in a million years thought I’d see ol’ Scratch ’n’ Spit do.

He faints.

First we all jump. Then we just sit in our seats with our eyes bugged out and our jaws dangling. And then half of us rush up to him, but nobody seems to want to take charge, so we just stand there looking down at him lying on his side on the floor.

I can hear Sasha Stamos at the back of the room using the classroom phone to dial the office, and all at once people around me start jabbering.

“Do you think he had a heart attack?”

“Somebody take his pulse!”

“Who knows CPR?”

“No way I’m giving him mouth-to-mouth!”

Still, nobody actually
does
anything, so
I’m
finally the one to drop down and poke around on the side of his neck for a pulse. “His heart’s beating.”

“His heart’s beating!” Tracy Arnold relays back to Sasha.

“His heart’s beating!” Sasha says into the phone.

“Is he breathing?” someone asks. And then, like this was some magic key to respiration, Mr. Vince’s mouth snaps open and he takes in a giant, scary gasp of air.

Well, there I am, hovering right over him, so what’s the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes?

Me.

And between his scary gasp and his eyes flying open, I’m sure I look like I just put my finger in a light socket.

“Ah!” he cries when he sees me, and for a split second I think he’s going to faint all over again. Instead, he points at me and says, “You!
You
put that rat in my drawer!”

“Rat? What rat?”

“You think I didn’t see you laughing at me yesterday?” he rasps.

“Wait … What?”

But of course now everyone remembers that Mr. Vince had been freaking out about something inside his drawer, so they all zoom over to his desk. Tracy Arnold squeals, “Eeeew!” and it’s not the spit cup she’s eeeewing at.

It’s a rat.

A hunchy-backed, matted monster of a dead rat with eyes frozen open and lips curled up and away from its long, sharp yellow teeth.

Jake Meers has it by the tail for everyone to see. I swear the thing’s a foot and a half long from tail to nose, and dangling from around the rat’s mangy neck is a little chain with a metal tag on it.

A bone-shaped
dog
tag.

“What’s the tag say?” Heather asks.

Jake holds the rat higher and turns the tag, and his face morphs into a great big
Uh-oh
.

“Read it,” David Olsen demands.

Jake pulls a face. “It says, ‘Die Dude’!”

Suddenly Mr. Foxmore is standing beside us. “What happened?” he asks Mr. Vince as he helps him off the floor. “Are you all right?”

“No!” Mr. Vince snaps. “And this time you can’t just tell me to erase it. You need to
do
something about it!”

“About what?” Mr. Foxmore asks, because apparently he’s been so focused on Mr. Vince on the floor that he’s somehow missed the monster rat dangling in the air.

Jake Meers steps forward. “Uh, he passed out when he found this in his desk drawer,” he says, holding out the rat and showing him the tag.

Mr. Vince staggers toward his roll-around chair. “I’m not feeling so well.”

“Did you hit your head?” Mr. Foxmore asks.

Mr. Vince feels around for bruises and bumps, but Angie Johnson, who had a front-row view, says, “He didn’t go down
wham
. He more like crumpled and lay down.”

Mr. Foxmore turns back to Mr. Vince. “Do you have a history of fainting?”

Mr. Vince glowers at him. “Yeah, right. I’m just a little pansy fainter.”

Mr. Foxmore stares at him.

“No!” Mr. Vince snaps. “I don’t have a history of fainting.” Then he looks straight at me and says, “Someone’s threatening to kill me.”

“Oh, good grief,” I mutter, and excuse myself through the crowd so I can sit down in my seat and be done with his ridiculous implications.

But as I push through the semicircle of students, I notice Heather Acosta off to the side, talking to Billy Pratt.

Right away, Billy pulls a face like, Sorry! and puts some distance between him and Heather.

Still, it bugs me.

What am I, his watchdog?

Does he act one way when I’m around and another when I’m not?

Or … is there something he’s
hiding
from me?

And then I remember what Hudson had said about Billy, and for the first time I wonder—
Is
Billy the prankster?

Now, it’s not that I think a gross dead rat in a drawer is worth fainting over. Actually, seeing a grown man faint over a rat, no matter how big or ugly it is, is a little shocking. Especially since Mr. Vince has always been blustery and gruff and totally gross himself. I mean, if he’s gonna faint over the sight of an ugly rat, he ought to pass out every morning when he looks in the mirror.

But that aside, I didn’t think the rat-in-the-drawer thing was very funny.

I thought it was kinda
mean
.

Which put me in sort of an odd place in my head. Part of me’s thinking how stupid Mr. Vince is, how embarrassing it is that he fainted over a rat, and what a jerk he is for implying it was
me
, but part of me’s feeling almost sorry for him.

I mean, who puts a disgusting dead rat in somebody’s drawer?

Not somebody who loves ya, that’s for sure.

Anyway, Mr. Foxmore’s on his walkie-talkie, arranging for someone to take Mr. Vince to a doctor to get checked over, and Mr. Vince isn’t saying, No, no, that’s okay. I’ll be fine.

Nope.

He just sits and waits.

And then when
Cisco
arrives to roll him out of the building in an old
desk
chair, Mr. Vince grumbles, “This is the best they could do? Send a janitor? What am I, the garbage?”

Like, du-uh.

Anyway, when he’s gone, Mr. Foxmore turns to us and says, “In your seats.”

Everyone sits.

And fast.

Then he walks to the back of the classroom, picks up the phone, punches in a number, and says, “This is Blaine Foxmore, vice principal at William Rose Junior High School. We’ve had a death threat incident here at the school that requires a police report.… Uh-huh … Uh-huh … That is correct.… I appreciate it. Thank you.” He hangs up and silences us with one of his ninja looks. “Find something constructive to do and ignore the bells. No one leaves until I say so.”

When we finally hear footsteps coming up the classroom ramp, I look over my shoulder and who do I see walk through the door with his forearm in a cast?

The Treadmill Tumbler.

The Lavender Lover.

The one and only Officer Borsch.

Now, maybe I should have been happy to see Officer Borsch, but I wasn’t. I was embarrassed. For one thing, it had taken him almost a year to figure out that I was not a problem child.

Or a juvenile delinquent.

Or a serial jaywalker.

Well, okay, maybe I
am
a serial jaywalker, but it had taken him a year to learn to look the other way.

Anyway, Officer Borsch had been at our school on official business several times last year because of something that somehow involved me, and I was afraid he would take one look at me and backslide into thinking that I was at the bottom of this Die Dude business.

The
other
thing was that I’d somehow gone from
being someone he thought was a problem child to someone who was in his wedding party.

Talk about feeling awkward.

Especially since from the minute he walked through Mr. Vince’s door, I couldn’t stop picturing him in a lavender bow tie and cummerbund.

And sure enough, when Officer Borsch spots me, his face goes all, Oh no, Sammy,
now
what? Then he sees
Heather
, and he looks at me like, Not this again! But
then
his expression goes totally blank, and he acts like he doesn’t even know me.

First he has a little hush-hush conversation with Mr. Foxmore.

Then he gets a little tour of the crime scene.

Then
he places the rat in a big plastic bag.

And finally he clears his throat and says to the class, “Death threats, no matter how funny you think they are, are still death threats. So here’s what we’re going to do. Mr. Foxmore will release you from class one at a time. I will be outside waiting, and you will stop and answer a few questions. What you say will be kept confidential, and since aiding and abetting can have the same punishment as the crime itself, be smart and come clean about what you know.” He takes a deep breath through his nose, then says, “Holding out always backfires. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. It’s up to you.”

Now, I
know
Officer Borsch. I actually kinda
understand
Officer Borsch. And part of what I understand about him is, he doesn’t get kids.

Especially not teens.

I mean, if he thinks his little speech is going to get a peep out of any of us, he’s living in Loony Land. Maybe his intimidation techniques work with some people, but eighth graders?

Please.

Every single person in class is thinking, What a dope! You expect me to squeal about the rat? That’ll make
me
a rat!

And even though he’s in uniform, he just looks like a big, blustery cop who couldn’t chase you down if his life depended on it.

Especially since his forearm is in a cast.

Now, during all this, Mr. Foxmore has been on and off his walkie-talkie half a dozen times. He’s also been in and out the door a bunch because the bell to change classes had rung and some of Mr. Vince’s fourth-period students hadn’t heard their “Report to the media center” announcement.

But now he’s focusing on getting us moving. And since they’re using roll sheets to release us in alphabetical order, Heather is the first one out the door.

The rest of us are not allowed to look out the window.

We’re not allowed to talk to each other.

And we’re sure not allowed to text.

Now, it’s not like they’re
flying
through the list of names, but they’re not really dragging it out, either. And while we’re all waiting for our names to be called, we’re trying to be quiet, but everyone’s jittery. Angie Johnson is biting her nails, Sasha Stamos’ foot is wagging like crazy under her desk, Lars Teppler keeps pushing buttons on his watch, Jake Meers is spit-washing his rat-hoisting fingers
and wiping them on his socks, David Olsen is doodling on his binder … everyone’s moving something.

Everyone except Billy Pratt.

He’s just sitting there, hunched over and quiet.

And then all of a sudden Mr. Foxmore snaps, “That’s mine,” from over by the door, and in an instant he’s at Billy’s desk and has snatched Billy’s phone right out of his hands.

“Huh, what?” Billy says, because it happened so quick.

“You and I met in my office last Thursday,” Mr. Foxmore says, scrolling through Billy’s phone. He eyes him. “Do you recall that, Mr. Pratt?”

Billy gulps and nods.

“Hmm,” he says, studying the phone. “I’ll have to invite Heather to expand on this message.”

“She’s just goofin’ around,” Billy says with a laugh.

Mr. Foxmore gives him a sharp look. “And you’re just stayin’ after school.” He pockets the phone. “I’m sure you remember where my office is, don’t you, Mr. Pratt?”