Locker 2375 Chapter 7
Posted on | March 17, 2009 | No Comments
Locker 2375 c7
Page 507and ½
A rule book for detention?
Who had ever heard of such a thing?
And the facts that the book was over 500 pages long made me scratch my head a couple of times.
After the 10th scratch I started to wonder if this book was so old that it was home to a colony of mites and how far could they jump anyway, I moved my head as far away from the book as possible while still being able to comfortably read?
As I opened the book I was sure I heard the faint hiss of an airlock, coming from the book itself.
Page 1 had 3 words on it, READ VERY CAREFULLY.
Page 2, 3 words also, but a different 3, NEVER CHANGE SEATS.
And the book continued in this way for what seemed like hours… and that was the peculiar thing about this detention room, no clocks.
The only clock I could see was the one that was hanging around Mr. Smith’s neck and he seemed to spend more time at the door than he did supervising the growing population of the room.
Page 507, 3 words, ALWAYS LOOK FOREWARD.
And then the book got even a little more odd, there were half pages.
These half pages were half the size with half the amount of information on them.
I guess that makes good sense, page 507 ½ would be halfway between pages 507 and 508 and have half the content.
The instruction on the ½ page also had the dubious quality of also only being half as clear as the other pages and that might be because there were only 1-½ words!
So what did 507 ½ say?
NO EEP.
Just as I was about to scratch my head for the 15th time I felt a piece of paper, the size of a pea slam into the back of my head.
Page 507 was very specific, ALWAYS LOOK FOREWARD!
But someone was blasting me with spitballs .
I noticed that Mr. Smith was at the door, still, and he seemed to be far from being finished.
From what I could hear he was talking about the best way to get the smell of garlic out of your shoes!
Why would shoes smell like garlic?
And what was EEP, the ½ word from the ½ page?
When I was pretty sure the coast was clear I pretended to be lacing up my shoes and took a casual glance behind me to see Omar, the president of the student council, loading another spitball into the hollow core of a disposable pen.
Omar, is that you?
“shhhhh”, he said and signaled me to move back closer to him.
“I can’t Mr. Smith might see me!”
“Don’t worry about Mr. Smith he has garlic issues and will be preoccupied for weeks if not the rest of the semester.”
I slowly slipped out of my desk and moved back to the seat in front of Omar.
“Omar what are you doing here?”
“I mean you are the last person I would have expected to find in detention!”
Omar looked at me, looked around the room and then moved in close to whisper in my ear.
“Remember Baxter”, Omar asked with a quizzing look on his face.
“Remember how he was absent from school so often?”
“Well he wasn’t absent at all he was down here in detention.”
“See that desk in the back corner?”
I lifted my head a bit higher and could see the desk Omar was motioning to, it had a plaque, candle and a tiny on it.
“That was Baxter’s desk, maybe his second home!”
Baxter left the school under very suspicious circumstances.
Some students said he won a lottery and was living the life on a small island eating Mars Bars and drinking as much Pepsi as he wanted.
Others said that Baxter had gone to detention and never come out.
And even others said that Baxter and the previous detention master had simply vanished!
Come to think of it Mr. Ferrier, the old detention master, was gone wasn’t he.
But wasn’t Mr. Ferrier Baxter’s Dad?
Imagine your Dad being the detention master?
But none of that answered the simple question of why Omar was in detention.
“Omar, why are you here?”
Omar looked at me with a smile that could have been a frown, I was not sure if he was about to laugh or cry.
“Remember when Baxter was declared officially gone?”
Of course I remembered that day.
The last time we saw Baxter was also the day that there was an international banquette on campus, it was like a giant going away party.
“That was the day I was told that I would have to take over all of the roles and responsibilities of the student council president.”
“But what I didn’t know was that I was also going to have to serve the time in detention that Baxter still had outstanding.”
“So every day from 5am until 8:30am and then again from 3:30 until 6:30 I sit down here and do what I am told to do by Mr. Smith.”
I was shaking my head in disbelief I must have heard wrong, Omar is down here for 6 ½ hours a day?
What is it with 1/2s in this place?
“Didn’t they tell you how long you are going to be here”, Omar asked with a sly smirk on his face.
Ms. Shelley didn’t say anything about time I thought this was a one off.
Omar looked at me with a huge smile, “there is no such thing as a one of in here Max.”
Just as I was about to raise my hand and ask Mr. Smith when I could go Ms. Shelley poked her head through the door, commented on the pleasant smell of garlic in the air and pushed Sam into detention as well.
“Ahhh”, said Mr. Smith.
“Now that we have the mould and fungus specialist in detention, we might be able to get somewhere with the garlic smell in my shoes”.
Funny how Sam’s locker reputation was legend around the school.
I heard the sound of stone scraping on stone and a bell from a bicycle, I was sure I was going mad.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Contact James
Share JamesEd
FriendFeed
Video of James’ Zayed University Courses
Categories
Useful Web Links
Tags
Archives
Jamesed.com by James Piecowye is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at www.jamesed.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.jamesed.com.
