Tabloidology (2 page)

The phone rang again. “I've got to get this,” her mother said, snapping her fingers again and waving Trixi away. “And close the door behind you.”

When Trixi heard the click of the lock on her mother's office door, she tore the top sheet off her writing pad. She crumpled her poem into a tight ball and dropped it into the antique Chinese vase by the stairs on her way down to the basement. Once she was inside the laundry room, she locked the door. From a lower cupboard, she took a roll of duct tape and a plastic garbage bag, setting them on the workbench beside the old cassette recorder and her pad of paper. Trixi took a pencil out of her back pocket and began to write.

At 10:22 pm, Razor was snoring on his bed while Martin's printer hummed and buzzed, spitting out four sheets of paper. He snatched them up and glanced at a mouse—a live one— running across the top of the printer with a leftover crust from Razor's sandwich. As the last sheet left the printer, everything went dark—the lights, his computer, the printer. His mother must have plugged in the toaster again. Martin fumbled around in his desk drawer for the flashlight.

He carefully laid out the sheets of paper on his desk. Holding a red pen in one hand and the flashlight in the other, Martin examined each sentence and every picture, pausing frequently to scribble, circle or cross out. The moment he'd finished going over all four sheets, the lights, his computer and the printer came back to life.

“Martin, are you still working up there?” his mother called from the bottom of the stairs.

“I'm almost done!”

“I don't care if you're almost done. It's way past your bedtime. Lights out. Now!”

“Got it, Mom,” Martin said.

He returned to his computer. There was so much more work to be done.

At 10:22 pm, Trixi inserted the batteries in the back of the tape recorder, plugged in the microphone, slid a tape into the player and pressed the Record button. “Testing one, two, three. Testing one, two, three.” She rewound the tape and then pressed Play. When she heard her own muffled voice saying, “
Testing one,
two, three. Testing one, two, three
,” she said, “This is going to be so good!”

At 11:24 pm, Martin was still sitting in front of his computer. He looked up for a second when the smoke detector in the kitchen squealed—another one of Sissy's batches of dog treats left in the oven a little bit too long. For the tenth time that night, he pressed Print, and four pages slid out of the printer.

He spread the papers out on his desk, grabbed his red pen and read each page word by word. Using his grandfather's old magnifying glass, he examined every picture top to bottom and left to right. When he reached the end of the final page, Martin put the cap on his pen, leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath and smiled. “They're going to love it,” he whispered. “This time, they're really going to love it.”

At 11:24 pm, Trixi Wilder pressed the Stop button on the cassette recorder and laughed out loud. “There's no doubt,” she said. “This is the best one yet!”

The next morning, Martin Wettmore was waiting at the door as the custodian, Mr. Barnes, opened the school. He scooted through the hall to the photocopy room and used a key the principal had given him to unlock the door. Once inside, he punched his four-digit security access code into the photocopier and got to work.

That same morning, Trixi Wilder arrived at school extra early. Carrying a green garbage bag under one arm, she slipped unseen through the back door, sneaked into the girls' washroom and got to work.

TWO

I
t was business as usual at Upland Green School: school buses were on time, parents dropped their children off, students rode their bicycles or walked to school. When the bell rang, everyone headed to class. Teachers talked, students listened—mostly. Long-division questions were answered, the word
because
was misspelled, a game of dodgeball was played in the gym and the librarian read
Buddy Concrackle's
Amazing Adventure
to a class. Everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing at Upland Green School.

All that changed at 9:43 am when a grade-seven student, Felicity Snodgrass, raised her hand in class and said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Roper. May I go to the washroom?”

“Certainly, Felicity. But hurry back. It's almost recess,” her teacher replied.

Felicity ambled down the hallway, taking her time, hoping to dawdle in the washroom until the recess bell. She pushed open the door to the girls' washroom and headed toward the middle stall. As soon as the washroom door swung shut behind her, she froze.

Coming from somewhere in the back of one of the toilets was a gurgling voice:

“I'm so embarrassed that I blushed

For down the toilet I was flushed!

It's really not at all good luck

To be inside a toilet—stuck!

I makes me want to scream and shout

Would someone please come GET ME OUT!”

Felicity bolted from the washroom and ran down the hall screaming, “CALL THE JANITOR! SOMEONE'S FLUSHED THEMSELF DOWN THE TOILET!”

A few minutes later, Brittany Rogers was leaving her class and heading for the same washroom. She pushed the door open, took three steps in and heard,

“The biggest thing I most regret

Stuck inside this small toi-let

Is not that I am cold and wet

But that there is no tv set.”

Brittany whirled around, almost tore the washroom door off its hinges and ran back to her classroom.

In the next ten minutes, three more girls ran from the washroom screaming their lungs out. As soon as the recess bell sounded, word spread throughout the school that something very weird and scary was happening in the girls' washroom. Herds of students stampeded down the hall to stand outside the washroom door, too afraid to go in.

“I recognized the voice in the toilet!” Susan McCartney said. “It's that girl, Donna Goodman, who supposedly moved to Calgary. I don't think she really moved. I think she just flushed herself down the toilet!”

“I heard a splashing behind me after it talked!” Jeanette Leblanc said. “I think it was trying to climb out of the toilet!”

“I don't care who it was or what it was!” Clarissa Stoppard gasped. “As long as I go to this school, I'm never going to use the washroom again!”

“I dare you to go in,” Trevor Smith said, elbowing his best friend, Blake Turner.

“Are you serious?” Blake said.

“Yeah, I'm serious. What are ya? Chicken?” Trevor said as he began to cluck and flap his arms like chicken wings.

“But it's the girls' washroom!” Blake said.

“So? There aren't any girls in there—just some zombie-alien-toilet-monster thingy. Go ahead! I double-dare ya!”

Trevor kept up the clucking, and he was joined by four other kids, all clucking and flapping their arms. Blake's face was turning a deeper red by the second, until, suddenly, he made a dash through the washroom door.

Everyone in the hall fell silent. Less than five seconds later, the door swung open and Blake ran out screaming, “THERE'S SOMETHING ALIVE IN THERE!” He pushed through the crowd, ran down the hall and out the front door.