Friday, May 15, 2004

Project Spitball

By RICK RYCKELEY
Contributing Writer

Great. Just great.

I’d never been sent to the office before. Leastwise not because I got into trouble. Guess they’re right. There’s a first time for everything.

By now, Mom had been called and she’d be on her way to pick me up. They had tried calling Dad, but lucky for me, they couldn’t get in touch with him. Good thing, too. Maybe I could work on Mom before he got home. She had a way of calming him down, hopefully before he got to me. All this trouble was because of one stupid little wadded-up paper straw.

So there we sat. Bully Brad up against one wall of the office, which right now wasn’t big enough for my comfort, and me up against the opposite wall, both of us waiting for Principal Baker to come back in. Brad was doing what bullies did best, looking mean as he pounded his huge right fist into his left hand, all the time sneering in my direction. He called it his “star maker” ‘cause if he ever hit you with it, you’d see stars. I should know. I’d seen many stars thanks to Bully Brad. But not this time; this time he didn’t catch me. Mrs. Crabtree did.

When Principal Baker asked me what happened in the library, I did what any fifth-grader in trouble at Mt. Olive Elementary School would do. I tried blaming it on someone else.

“It was the milkman’s fault because if he hadn’t delivered milk to school this morning, I wouldn’t have been drinking it.”

Principal Baker didn’t go along with that.

Then I tried to blame it on the people who made the paper straws. Didn’t they know after one good suck of milk, paper straws collapse into a gooey mess? Principal Baker didn’t go along with that excuse either.

Then I tried to blame it on the stupid person who thought it was a good idea to buy paper drinking straws in the first place. Principal Baker said that HE was that stupid person. It was the first time I’d ever seen Bully Brad smile.

So there we sat, awaiting the return of Principal Baker and the reform school officer. By the fifth grade it was well known that Bully Brad had been to reform school three times. His parents said he was out of school ‘cause he was sick a lot. We all knew better; bullies never got sick. Brad was off at reform school. He was gone so much he had to repeat the third grade twice and the fifth grade once. In doing so he ended up the biggest kid in Mrs. Crabtree’s fifth-grade class, my class. Lucky me.

Before Principal Baker returned, Brad had convinced me that the stunt I had just pulled in the library got me a first-class ticket on the next bus to reform school. To prove his point, he jabbed one of his stubby fingers with black-encrusted fingernails toward the window behind me and sneered. I turned and looked out just in time to see a short yellow school bus pull up and stop in front of the school. Brad said it was the reform school bus, and it was here to pick me up.

Reform school or not, I didn’t care. I had the whole fifth-grade class laughing at Bully Brad and lived to tell about it. It was all worth it. Well, up to now it had been worth it; the short school bus opened its doors with a hiss.

My trip to reform school really started at lunch with that stupid paper straw. On Fridays we always had vegetable soup and peanut butter and honey sandwiches. This meant lots of milk was needed to wash down the sticky peanut butter. As always, after the second suck, my paper straw collapsed and I resorted to drinking milk from the carton, but what to do with the milk-saturated straw? Why, it would make a perfect spitball! Not too big. Not too small. Just the right sizes to hit some bully up-side the head. And I knew just the right bully.

When lunch was over, the bell rang and Mrs. Crabtree said we all needed to go to the library for a project. Yeah, I thought, Project Spitball. A large four-foot tall globe stood in the center of the library. Goofy Steve and I could barely reach around it and never had any use for it. That is, until now. The Globe was on a wood platform and could be rotated and spun in any direction. Right down the center of it was a hole about the size of one of those big fat black pencils the first graders use when they’re learning how to write. The hole was perfect for Project Spitball.

We waited till Mrs. Crabtree was helping the librarian, then Goof and I got up and went over to the globe. She glanced our way and thought we were using it to answerer questions she had just handed out. Yeah, like we were going to waste time doing school work. I rotated the globe in the direction of Bully Brad and looked through the hole. He was picking on Thomas. Goof called his name and made a goofy face at him. Goof made the best goofy faces. It worked. Brad was on his way pounding his star maker.

When he grabbed Goof by his plaid shirt, I blew the paper milk straw spitball as hard as I could through the center of the giant globe! Brad immediately let go of Goof and screamed, “My eye! You hit my eye!” then started to chase me around the world, er, and the library. I made a quick turn around the card catalog and out the door, bumping into Mrs. Crabtree coming back from the teacher’s lounge and spilling her coffee all over the floor. As Bully Brad burst through the doorway, he ran into me and we hit the floor. Mrs. Crabtree grabbed both of us up by the ears and walked down to Principal Baker’s office as we balanced on our toes. All the way down the hallway Brad pleaded, “Owww, Mrs. Crabcakes, not the ear!”

For the next two weeks Brad had to empty all the trash cans on the fifth grade hall. For the next two weeks I was covered in white chalk dust from beating Mrs. Crabtree’s erasers together in the afternoons, but I didn’t care. Beating erasers sure was a lot better than getting beat up again by Bully Brad, and a whole lot better than being sent to reform school.

[Rick Ryckeley is employed by the Fayette County Department of Fire and Emergency Services. He can be reached at saferick@bellsouth.net.]