Big Mouth Read online

  “What’s her problem today?” I whispered to my lab partner, Linus “Tater” Tate, after she’d stormed off. “Did someone let the rats out of their cages?”

  “We should be so lucky.” Tater had earned his nickname in fourth grade when he jammed four Tater Tots up his nostrils. That got him such a big laugh, he’d been doing it ever since. I guess everyone needed their claim to fame, but I just couldn’t look at Tater without staring at his nostrils. He checked to make sure Max wasn’t close, then leaned over, his hand on his office aide key ring to make sure the keys didn’t jangle. I tried to focus on his eyes. “Word is, one of the science teachers got suspended at that emergency school board meeting. Supposedly he gave his class a lecture on tomatoes, saying they’re more acidic ounce for ounce than a car battery. He said they’d burn your stomach lining right out of you if you ate enough.”

  I nearly gasped out loud. “He said that?”

  “Uh-huh. He also said there are a thousand tomato bug eyes in every squirt of ketchup.”

  “Really? Dang.” What was that teacher thinking? District policy strictly forbids anti-tomato talk on campus, and the school board strictly enforces district policies. Of course they’d nail him. And of course Max would be ticked off about it. That was just the kind of power trip that burned her Bunsen. If we were living in the seventies, she’d be marching around with hippie braids and a DOWN WITH THE MAN sign. “Shoot, she’ll probably be cranky all week.”

  “Probably.” He went back to stirring our gel mixture. Some butyric acid splashed the bottom of his yellow shirt. He scrunched up his big nostrils. “I don’t see what the big deal is, though. So he got suspended. I wouldn’t mind staying at home for a week. It’s not like he got transferred to home ec like that teacher at Del Heiny Junior 7 last year. Now that would suck.”

  “Seriously.” But then, that science teacher had refused to apologize to the school board, or to the PTA, or, worst of all, to the school’s almighty sponsor.

  In our district, every school had the same sponsor: Del Heiny Ketchup Company. It had been that way for years, ever since the district’s budgets got slashed. They needed cash from somewhere, so like cities do with sports stadiums, the school board decided to get a sponsor. The soda companies were out of the running, though, since the state’s Department of Cafeteria Nutrition started cracking down on campus soda sales. Which sucked, by the way. How did the D.Caf.Nuts expect us to wash down our hamburgers? With milk, for crying out loud? Anyway, Del Heiny Ketchup Company stepped in and saved the day by offering to sponsor the entire district. All the school board had to do was agree to name every school after Del Heiny and turn their mascots into tomatoes. That arrangement passed muster with the D.Caf.Nuts, with ketchup being a vegetable and all. So in one swoop, Del Heiny got an image boost, the district got its money, and I got stuck here, in glorious Del Heiny Junior High #13, home of the oh-so-fierce Plum Tomatoes.

  “No, no, no. You’re doing it all wrong, Linus. Didn’t you pay attention to the instructions?” Mad Max didn’t like the consistency of our butyric acid gel mixture.

  I didn’t like the smell of it. For the sake of science, though, I leaned in for a closer examination—holding my breath, of course. The mixture looked fine to me, like cherry Jell-O. Rubbery and red. Which, like an idiot, is what I said to Max.

  “Is this experiment about making cherry Jell-O, Sherman?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Is it about Jell-O at all?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then the point of your comparison is?”

  “I don’t know, I just—”

  “That’s what I thought. Now discard this gel and follow the steps written on your handout. Come on class, let’s pick up the pace here! We’re running out of time.” She clapped her hands and zipped away to terrorize another lab group.

  Jeez. I’d almost rather be hanging out with Arthur.

  Tater flared his big nostrils and exhaled like a rhino. “Thanks, Thuff. For a minute there I thought she’d assign me after-school cleanup again. I hate cleaning up after lab days. Her experiments always reek by sixth period.”

  It wasn’t like I’d really done anything, but hey, he thought I did. “No problem, man. I got your back.” I clapped him solidly on the shoulder, then scooped up the gel tray.

  “Wait.” He stopped me before I could walk away with it. Pulling out his cell phone, he snapped a quick picture of it. “My brother’s not gonna believe this one. I just wish this picture was scratch ’n’ sniff.”

  “He’ll be glad it isn’t.” I left him pulling out his lucky green marker to fill out our worksheet.

  When I passed Lucy’s desk, she caught my hand and whispered, “Hey, Shermie. Big news. I know how you can get down thirteen dogs instead of eleven.”

  We both looked around quickly. Max was browbeating the troops on the other side of the room, and everyone else was working on their experiments. I knelt down next to Lucy. “Spill it.”

  “Wet buns.”

  “Excuse me?” I instinctively covered my rear with my hands, spilling my gel blob onto the floor. It oozed under the table behind us. I made a funny face to make the girls at the table giggle. When they went back to their experiment, I quickly shoveled the red gel back onto my tray with my foot.

  “Wet buns,” Lucy repeated when I knelt down next to her again. “That’s what the pros do. They dunk their hot dog buns in water before they eat them, separate from the wieners. Wet buns go down easier and quicker than dry buns.”

  Wet buns, of course! I swear, taking Lucy on as my coach was a stroke of genius. I’d just do whatever she told me, and then the fame and money would come rolling in. Thirteen-Dog Tuesday, here I come! Next stop, the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog–Eating Contest, the Super Bowl of competitive eating. Fame will be mine!

  Lucy nudged me away suddenly. “She’s coming. Go. Hurry.” She turned back to her goo, which was bright yellow, and tried to look studious. “Man, this stuff stinks.”

  Of course it stank. It was butyric acid. Vomit. Puke. Throw-up. Blood of the evil Porcelain God. And, with thirteen wet HDBs staring me down, probably my new best friend.

  CHAPTER 3

  Aaaagggh!

  Bulging eyeballs. Tears like water rockets. Puffy, blood-bloated sockets.

  Aaaagggh!

  Thirteen dogs plus thirteen cold, waterlogged buns equaled one toilet bowl of butyric acid.

  Aaaagggh!

  At least I’d fasted since lunch yesterday. I’d learned from my mistake and made it to thirteen HDBs this time.

  Aaaa…

  Nothing.

  Wait, Shermie, wait….

  Still nothing.

  I hung out a few minutes more while the dry heaves subsided, then stood and flushed. Not bad for a second attempt. Lucy didn’t need to know how it ended.

  Smiling, I lifted up my white T-shirt and patted my empty belly. Thump, thump. Next time, fourteen HDBs, I just knew it.

  CHAPTER 4

  According to the clock on my cell phone, it was 7:26 when my bus finally putt-putted up to Del Heiny Junior 13. Eleven minutes behind schedule. Swell. Air brakes popped and hissed as the oxidized orange clunker lurched to a stop, then settled.

  I lodged a complaint with the tooth-challenged driver on my way out.

  “Calm down, big guy,” he said. “I can’t control the traffic, you know. Maybe your watch is wrong.”

  My cell phone was regulated by satellite. Satellites were never wrong. Riding the bus sucked.

  Because she had an early dentist appointment, Lucy wasn’t with me as I stepped off the bus in front of our three-story circular school building, which was the dark red of a plum tomato from top to bottom. I sighed. It was like walking into a solid blob of ketchup. The only windows were on the bottom floor, where the principal and his staff had their offices. Ringing the top of the red blob was a crown of white flags, each sporting a plump tomato in its center like the red sun on a Japanese flag.
Across the middle of the blob, strung like a big Band-Aid over the double-doored entrance, was a long white banner with GO, PLUMS! in blocky red letters. I swear, I could have kissed the very ground in gratefulness that we weren’t assigned the extra-plump Burpee tomato as our mascot. Del Heiny High #4 got that one. The huge GO, BIG BURPEES! sign over their door was the stuff of nightmares. Life was hard enough without being a Big Burpee.

  With just five minutes left to get to Mad Max’s class way up on the third floor, I beelined for the double doors. Even with my shortcut through the waist-high hedge, the other bus-riding Plums left me in the dust fast. They and the few stragglers rushing from the bike racks looked like muted aliens in a low-budget sci-fi flick. The morning sun was painting their faces a mucky Dijon-mustard color, and the dry wind had their hair poking out from their heads like porcupine quills. It was like the opening scene of Galactic Warriors’ most popular episode, “Captain Quixote’s Glory.” In that episode, the aliens really did have quills.

  I raced through the doors and past the broken elevator, skidding to a stop just steps beyond. I did an about-face. The elevator doors had GO, MUSTARD! scribbled on them in big, loopy letters with thickly squeezed mustard. I couldn’t help it, I busted up. The Mustard Taggers strike again! That made five times in two weeks. Principal Culwicki was probably having a seizure that very second, the big Del Heiny butt kisser.

  That happy thought launched me up the stairs at full gallop. Go, Mustard!

  By the time I rushed through door 306 to Science Concepts in Action three floors up, I was the one having a seizure. My white Scoops T-shirt was stuck to my back and I was wheezing and coughing and huffing like Ruffers Thuff, Grampy’s fifteen-year-old dog. Then the tardy bell blared from the speaker over my head, vibrating my entire skull. I had to grab the doorjamb to steady myself.

  “Sherman, are you all right?”

  I nearly screamed like a girl when Mad Max spoke.

  Teachers should never stand behind their classroom doors. Ever!

  Max leaned in closer and said more quietly, “In this weather, Sherman, you’ve got to be careful not to overdo it. That goes for everyone, not just you. Now go sit down and catch your breath.”

  The humiliation.

  I did my best not to stumble across the room. Still, I practically fell into my seat next to Tater.

  “Hey there, Thuff. Whoa, buddy, are you okay?” He thumped me on the back like I was choking or something. It just knocked more air out of me.

  “I’m…fine…Tater.” He kept thumping me. “Tater…Stop!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  When I could muster enough power to rip my stare away from his gigantic nostrils, I saw that he’d shaved his head since yesterday.

  Now, I was the first to admit that on some people, bald was a cool look. But we were talking Tater here. The guy already had two strikes against him in the looks department—one for each rhino nostril. But that maze of blue veins crisscrossing his albino scalp…yikes. I’d say this for him, though, at least he didn’t have to worry about his hair anymore.

  “Hello, Earth to Sherman.” Tater waved a hand in front of my eyes, his jangling office aide keys adding to my cranial pain. “Did you hear me? I said did you do the homework last night?”

  “Of course I heard you.” I hadn’t. Stupid wheezing. “I hear everything. Homework. Did I do it. I heard you.”

  “What’s wrong with you today?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Just leave me alone, okay?” I tried holding my breath to stop the wheeze. But that just made me cough.

  Mad Max banged the wall with a tibia bone from the dusty skeleton that hung by the whiteboard. “All right, people, listen up. We’re short a science teacher for a while, so we’re reassigning students to other classrooms, including this one. It might be a little crowded, but let’s make the best of it. Don’t make me dole out push-ups.” That got our attention more than the banging bone. Last week she’d made a kid do twenty push-ups for missing the trash can with a balled-up Twinkie wrapper.

  Satisfied that her threat had sunk in, she whisked open a door that separated our lab from the next one. Ten Plums filed in to fill ten empty single-seater desks lining our walls. I recognized the first guy and the two girls who followed him. They were all Scoops regulars, so they smiled when we made eye contact. Maybe slaving for Grampy had some perks after all. I adjusted my Scoops shirt. Without it I was a complete nobody.

  The next five Plums were just faces from the halls. Several of them had on yellow T-shirts, which a lot of kids had started wearing last week after the Mustard Taggers called for a “Revolt Against Red.” The ninth guy, though, made me groan out loud. A monster in a GO, PLUM WRESTLING! T-shirt, the kid was unmistakable: He was a Finn twin, twenty feet tall, at least, and ugly as sin, with his nose bent to the left like his identical brother. The mark of the Devil.

  Science Concepts in Action just took a nosedive.

  Traipsing in behind the Devil’s spawn was Gardo, also wearing his Plum Tomato wrestling shirt. They were teammates on our junior varsity prep wrestling team. Man, my buddy looked like a dwarf next to the Finn. And since I was two inches shorter than Gardo, I’d probably be face level with the Finn’s armpits even if I stood my tallest. Not that I ever planned to stand next to the big oaf and measure. My only Finn contact was last week when their jock jerk captain Shane Hunt had one Finn grab my legs and the other grab my arms for a big swing into the trash can. I had no intention of getting that close again.

  So which Finn was this, the one who had my arms or the one who had my legs?

  As if hearing my thoughts, the Finn looked my way. I snapped my eyes back to Gardo, who grinned and winked as he slid into a desk seat. A girl sitting between us giggled softly and wiggled her fingers at him. She must have thought he was flirting with her—which he was now that she’d tootle-oo’d at him.

  “Chop, chop, people, take your seats!” ordered Max. Then she stopped and watched while the Finn squeezed himself into a desk. She was as mesmerized as we were. The top of the desk was attached to the seat by a curving metal arm, so he couldn’t push it out at all, he just had to slip into the seat from the side. It was like watching a bear climb onto a trike at the circus.

  When the big dumb bear was finally wedged in, Max stepped onto the box behind her podium and switched on her lecture voice. “As I survey the room today, I see that you are all familiar with the topic of today’s lecture—at least follically.” She smooshed down the hairs frizzing out of her blond bun and adjusted the chopsticks that held it in place. We all automatically smooshed down our own frizzies. Except baldy Tater, of course. He just sat there with his green marker poised over his notebook.

  Max stabbed her tibia bone at a huge picture of the bright yellow sun taped to her whiteboard. “The sun. Solar eclipses. Solar flashes. The reasons for our static-struck coiffures…”

  The cafeteria was in the very center of our round school, on the bottom floor, with an open sunroof three stories up. A few hundred Plums milled around, buying food from the shiny metal slop counters up front, carrying food trays up and down the aisles, and sitting at long rectangular tables throwing paper airplanes and shooting straw wrappers. The place was louder than the food court at the mall. It was heavier on the eyes, too. Except for the metal fixtures and the bleached white linoleum that reflected the sunlight above, everything in the cafeteria was dark Plum red. Red walls, red trays, red tables, red-aproned cafeteria ladies. To planes passing above, Del Heiny Junior 13 probably looked like a giant doughnut with ketchup icing and little ants scurrying in the center hole.

  I was sitting in the unofficial eighth grader section waiting for Lucy, who surely was back from the dentist by now. There was a Halloween pumpkin centerpiece in front of me, its goofy face drawn on with black marker. Tissue-wrapped lollipop “ghosts” lay around its base. The Associated Student Body’s spirit officer probably had to get a special waiver from Del Heiny to bring all that in. Pumpkins and lollipops weren’t ketchup
-dunkable.

  I salted my lukewarm Tater Tots, then popped open the soda I’d smuggled onto campus. The can was tucked on the seat between my legs so that the janitors who patrolled the cafeteria wouldn’t see it. If it had been a cold soda, I would’ve been in a world of hurt with it jammed against the Thuff Family Jewels. But because I’d stashed the can in my backpack hours ago, it was now the same temperature as my Tots. I wasn’t a fan of room-temp soda—it didn’t have the crisp, carbonated bite of cold pop—but a guy did what he could.

  “Hey, Thuff!”

  I twisted in the direction of the slop counters, where Gardo was waving to get my attention.

  “How many?” he shouted.

  “Nine!” I shouted back.

  “What?”

  “Nine!”

  “Nine!” Thumbs up. “No problem!” He disappeared into the food zone.

  Gardo was skipping lunch because he had to make weight for his upcoming practice game, or meet, or whatever wrestlers called it, so he was fetching more ketchup packets for me. My six corn dogs would be good capacity training for my stomach, but I hadn’t grabbed enough packets to reach the recommended ketchup ratio for that many breaded wieners. And ketchup ratios were important, because Del Heiny was adamant about students getting their proper vegetable allotment each day. The company worked closely with the D.Caf.Nuts to make sure everything sold in the cafeteria was ketchup-dunkable. Laminated cards taped down on each tabletop advised just how many packets to use per corn dog, Tater Tot, etc. To reinforce the Del Heiny Healthy Eating Initiative, the cafeteria’s red walls were stenciled with large slogans like A TOMATO A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY and THE WORLD IS YOUR TOMATO and VEGGIES—THEY’RE NOT ALL GREEN.

  Crouched at a nearby wall under the slogans were the school’s three janitors, all dressed in dill-green coveralls. I probably didn’t need to worry about them patrolling for contraband cola today. They had more interesting things on their minds than my measly soda. Between raspy, cancerous coughing fits, they were bickering about who got to glue the humongous tomato decal over the yellow smudge left by the MUSTARD LOVERS UNITE! tag, which had been squeezed across the Del Heiny company logo.