“I did what Mr. Hadley said and took a bronze hammer from the janitor. I don’t know what it was for. Maybe it was worth a lot of money or something.”
Alice took a deep breath through her nose. One hand went to her forehead. “This isn’t helping my headache at all,” she muttered. “I’m worried, Spencer.”
“I know.” He bit his lip. “Me too. The janitors will probably be waiting for me tomorrow.”
“It’s not the janitors I’m worried about,” Alice said. “It’s Garth Hadley.”
Chapter 21
“Is this true, Spencer?”
But Mom,” whined Erica over breakfast, “I don’t see why Spencer gets a ride to school while the rest of us have to take the bus.”
“It’s about last night,” Holly guessed. “What Spencer did at the ice cream social.”
Spencer stared at his soggy frosted flakes and tried to pretend that he wasn’t in the room. His sister’s words were painfully true. Mom was taking him to see the principal.
“We’ve got to go now or I’ll be late for work,” Alice said. It was, after all, her first day at Quick ’n’ Speedy. “Just dump your cereal in the sink. I’ll be waiting in the car.”
Spencer climbed into the station wagon and tossed his backpack next to the car seat behind him. Max had already been dropped off at the day care, and all that was left of him were a few fragments of Cheerios on the seat.
They drove in silence. Spencer thought his mother seemed like a force to be reckoned with. She clearly wasn’t happy about Spencer’s involvement with the BEM. Now she gripped the steering wheel like it was Garth Hadley’s neck.
Well before the morning busses arrived, Alice Zumbro pushed into Welcher Elementary’s front office, Spencer in tow. Mrs. Hamp looked up from her desk, already planning a greeting that would test this woman’s vocabulary.
“Do you require the immediate assistance of someone in an administrative position?” She feigned politeness, poorly.
“Listen,” Alice said, clearly in no mood for prose, “we need to see the principal. I’ve only got five minutes.”
“Principal Poach has not yet arrived,” the secretary said. “His arrival is undoubtedly postponed by the traffic.”
Alice rolled her eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Traffic in Welcher is a contradiction. When will the principal be here?”
“He always arrives for morning announcements.” Mrs. Hamp checked the clock on her computer. “Fifteen minutes, give or take.”
“Shoot,” Alice said. “I’ve got to be to work by then.” She glanced at Spencer, but he was a statue.
“If you have a pressing concern, I could make a note and pass it to the principal when he arrives.”
“My pressing concern,” Alice said, leaning across the desk, “is for the safety of my children at Welcher Elementary School.”
Mrs. Hamp leaned back defensively. “Has there been some betrayal of your trust in our school, Miss?”
“Don’t
Miss
me, missy.” Alice was getting worked up. Spencer couldn’t decide if he should smile or not. It was kind of cool to hear how much his mom cared about his safety. Cool in an embarrassing sort of way.
“My son was approached by a stranger in this school. Whether the man was actually from the Bureau of Educational Maintenance or not does not excuse the fact that he enlisted my son’s help to accomplish illegal acts.”
Mrs. Hamp sat forward. Her eyes widened with the practice of someone with years of experience in meddling and gossip. “Illegal acts? Strangers in Welcher Elementary? Elaborate!”
Spencer shifted awkwardly as his mother gave the one-minute version of how Garth Hadley had asked him to steal something from the janitors. When Alice was finished, Mrs. Hamp sat back. Now the secretary’s eyes narrowed and a smirk appeared.
“Children,” Mrs. Hamp said knowingly, “have a way of leaving out important information.”
Spencer slunk back as the secretary’s accusatory gaze pierced him.
“Mr. Hadley is indeed a licensed member of the BEM,” Mrs. Hamp said. “Last Thursday, he arrived at the school to perform a routine inspection
after
the school had been vacated. If your son did meet Mr. Hadley that day, it would have been due to his lack of obedience in exiting the school when the final bell rang.”
Each word she spoke seemed to reduce Spencer. When she finished, he felt smaller than a toothpick.
“Is this true, Spencer?” his mother asked. “Were you in the school after you had been asked to leave?”
Wordlessly, Spencer nodded. Why hadn’t he just told his mother the whole truth from the very start?
“But what about the other times he contacted you?” Alice asked. “Where did he meet you?”
Spencer wished it were another yes-or-no question so he could simply nod again. But now his mother had called on him to speak an answer. And oh, how that answer was bound to disappoint.
“I only met him once,” said Spencer. “Last Thursday.”
“You see!” Mrs. Hamp jumped in. “Welcher takes great pride in knowing every visitor that passes through these doors. Rest assured that Mr. Hadley will not come again, unless on official business for the BEM. And in such an instance, the school will be empty of children. As it
should
have been last Thursday.”
Spencer glanced at the clock. His mother’s time was spent if she wanted to be on time for her first day of work. But Spencer knew she wasn’t done investigating yet. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“Did you contact this Hadley person on your own?”
Spencer nodded.
Then came the dreaded word. “How?”
Spencer looked at his feet as if hoping to find a different answer written there. “E-mail,” he finally whispered.
“Spencer Alan Zumbro!” Her hand dropped from his shoulder. “You know very well the rules of our family! That e-mail account is for contact with your friends in Washington. Anything else—
anything
else!—must be approved by me.”
Alice put her hands on her hips. “I’m disappointed in you, Spencer.” Mrs. Hamp was smiling at the family tension until Alice pointed a finger across the desk. “And I’m not happy with
you,
either. I don’t care who Garth Hadley is. If the janitors stole something from him, it’s the police he should contact, not my twelve-year-old son! I suggest a background search on school visitors.”
Mrs. Hamp held up her hands in defense. “Don’t look at me. Mr. Hadley’s a government man. We don’t interfere with them.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m a
mother.
And you shouldn’t interfere with me, either!”
Chapter 22
“Ruined by childish riffraff!”
In the noisy moments just before class started, Spencer sat in his desk. A thin smile spread across his face when he recalled his mother chewing out Mrs. Hamp a few minutes ago. But the smile couldn’t last, filled as he was with guilt and shame about disappointing his mom.
Daisy didn’t look much better, sitting in the corner. She arrived at the classroom much later than usual, her eyes pink from sleeplessness and tears. They glanced at each other only briefly. Just long enough to make sure that they were both still alive.
Neither of them would look at Mrs. Natcher. They didn’t want to see if she still had sticky strawberry syrup in her gray hair.
The only troublemaker who seemed unaffected by the events at the ice cream social was Dez. He belched in unison with the bell, trying to make his burp last longer. His expression quickly changed as Mrs. Hamp’s crackly voice sounded over the intercom.
“Dezmond Rylie, Spencer Zumbro, and Daisy Gates. The principal has arrived and demands to see you—immediately.”
Spencer stood on trembling legs. Daisy tried to get up twice, but seemed frozen in place. As Spencer passed her desk, she found the courage and stood at his side.
Dez moaned obnoxiously but jumped to his feet. Dez seemed to have no trouble walking, having gained his “principal’s-office legs” through repeated trips to the front office.
“Take the hall pass,” Mrs. Natcher said. She might have added, “You all get
F
’s for the year,” and Spencer wouldn’t have been surprised.
At the door, Daisy shamefully lifted Baybee from its place on the bookshelf. The doll’s diaper was modestly in place once more, but the plastic forehead looked a little scratched from the bathroom tile.
As they stepped into the hallway, Dez snatched the baby doll from Daisy’s hand. “I don’t trust you with that,” he said, tucking the hall pass under his arm.
The three kids walked in silence for a while. But Dez, King of Unnecessary Noise, soon started making squishing sounds with his mouth every time he took a step.
“You know,” Dez said, “the principal’s not so bad if you know how to handle him.” Spencer and Daisy didn’t acknowledge, but Dez continued anyway. “He likes it if you call him respectful titles like ‘Emperor Fatso,’ or ‘Honorable Senator Blimp.’”
“Be quiet, Dez,” Daisy said.
“Huh?” cried the bully. “What happened to you, Gullible Gates? You used to believe
everything
I said.”
“’Cause I used to think you might have something worth saying.”
The kids were at the principal’s office much sooner than they had hoped. But no amount of lollygagging could postpone the undesirable P-R-E-D-I-C-A-M-E-N-T they had gotten themselves into.
Mrs. Hamp had a pleased glint in her eye as she motioned for the three kids to wait on some benches until the principal was ready for them.
They waited about five minutes, Dez making Baybee dive-bomb off the bench onto her head over and over again while accompanying the scenario with gory sound effects.
Then the principal’s door opened and Dez was summoned inside. The bully tossed Baybee onto the bench and went through the door as though he were going out to recess.
Daisy and Spencer waited nervously on the bench. Baybee sat between them, and Daisy held one of the doll’s hands while Spencer held the other, feeling the uncontrollable need to hang on to something, even if it was only a lifeless, plastic doll.
Dez appeared a few minutes later, his face a storm cloud brewing with bolts of negative energy. “See you chumps in about a week,” he grunted. “Emperor Fatso decided to spend me.” Dez probably meant to say
suspend,
but
the bully didn’t look like he was in any mood to be corrected.
As Dez walked away, Spencer and Daisy’s attention turned back to the principal’s office. A man filled the doorway, almost as big around as he was tall.
Principal Poach wore a striped collared shirt and pink tie that looked miniature against his portly belly. He had a walrus face, complete with bristly brown mustache.
Principal Poach’s eyes were squinty and small as he pointed at Spencer and Daisy with two fingers that looked like microwaved hot dogs. Then the hot-dog fingers wiggled, a gesture that Spencer interpreted to mean “get in my office now.”
The two kids arose, Baybee dangling between them, and entered the office. Principal Poach shut the door and waddled to his desk chair. The principal was so round that the only way Spencer could tell he was walking, and not rolling, was by the stripes on his shirt. Once comfortably nestled into his padded chair, the principal stroked his mustache for a moment. Spencer looked for tusks, but didn’t see any.
“An entire event—ruined!” Principal Poach said. His voice was high and whiny. It seemed biologically impossible for such a massive body to produce such a piercing voice. “Ruined by childish riffraff!” He slammed a hand onto the desk.
“Twenty-four years I have been principal of Welcher Elementary, and I have never—
never—
heard of such behavior. We do not tolerate it. We cannot abide it.”
What Daisy and Spencer didn’t know was that Principal Poach was giving them his memorized speech for first-time offenders. Dez had made it to speech number eight before Principal Poach suspended him.
“During the Edo period of Japan, at the time of the Samurai, criminal punishment included such cruelties as imprisonment, exile, and penal labor. At any rate, the Samurai warriors of Japan saw the need for a corrective course of action to rectify one’s misdoings.”
The speech, aside from being really hard to understand, made Spencer and Daisy shift uncomfortably in their seats. The parts of Principal Poach’s speech that Spencer understood were the bits about imprisonment, exile, and, although Spencer wasn’t exactly sure about “penal,” labor was never good.
“Thus it is with you, my young friends,” Poach continued. “You are in need of guided correctional behavior. Due to the offense, I see fit to . . .”
At this point in the speech, the principal would generally insert a punishment; he had any number of them memorized. But that morning, Principal Poach did something extraordinary. He left the safety of his memorized speech, looked right at Spencer, and began to speak on his own.
“Mrs. Hamp told me of your mother’s visit this morning. I find your claims about the BEM highly unlikely. However, safety of the children is our top priority, and we will monitor school visitors more closely in the future.”
Great for the future,
Spencer thought.
But what about the things that already happened?
“We can never truly know if Mr. Hadley put you up to the task of mess making, as you have declared. But
someone
has to be punished. The ice cream social was a tragedy. I had more than a dozen e-mails from angry parents this morning. The janitors contacted me last night and I . . . I really
wanted
to suspend you.” He sighed, his walrus cheeks jiggling.
Spencer and Daisy sat still as the principal rambled. They squeezed Baybee even tighter, feeling like they were barely balancing between suspension and the unknown.
“But I’m not going to,” Poach went on. “Suspend you, that is.” His hot-dog fingers were nervously interlaced. “I would have, but the janitors encouraged another punishment more appropriate to the offense.”
Spencer and Daisy looked at each other, eyes wide.
Please, don’t let it be what I’m thinking,
Spencer thought desperately.
The principal regained composure and picked up his speech at the “insert punishment here” line where he had departed. “You shall both spend time in detention with the janitors after school, every day for the rest of the week. I expect your full cooperation in this. Our head janitor, John Campbell, was very kind to dissuade me from suspending you. You might want to thank him.”