Happy Kid! Page 3

  To the whole school Jake and I were two of a kind.

  Instead of slapping Jake’s hand, I just brought my own up, waved it at him, and said, “Hello?”

  CHAPTER 3

  First period hadn’t even started and it already looked as if there was a good chance seventh grade was going to go pretty much the way sixth grade did.

  And sixth grade had been the worst year of my life.

  Bert P. Trotts is the only middle school in our town, so all the kids from all three of the elementary schools end up there, all mixed together. That meant I’d never met two-thirds of the kids in my grade. Still, you’d think that just by chance there’d be some familiar faces in at least one of the seven classes I had each day. But, no, I was lucky if I knew anyone at all in any of them. Even my lunch section seemed to be loaded with kids from those other schools.

  In my opinion, meeting new people is not everything it’s cracked up to be. Especially if you are accidentally placed in accelerated English and social studies classes the way I was in sixth grade. Those classes were filled with new people, like Melissa Esposito, who were smarter and faster than I was. Fortunately, I was so busy trying to do my accelerated homework in a smarter and faster way that I didn’t have a lot of time to feel bad about how poorly the meeting-new-people thing was going.

  I also threw up for three days during the April break.

  But as bad as sixth grade was, I almost got through it. I had only a couple of weeks left to go before summer vacation. Then things got a lot worse.

  And I’m not talking about final exams.

  I was on the bus on my way home from school one afternoon in June. The seat across from me emptied out after one of the stops, so I moved my backpack onto it. I just wanted a little more room. As my backpack made the trip from one seat to another, a screwdriver fell out onto the floor. So, of course, I had to bend down to pick it up. The bus driver heard the screwdriver hit the floor. She looked up into the mirror that gives her a view of her passengers just in time to see me with it in my hand as I used the cushion of the seat in front of me to pull myself back up. The girl sitting there started screeching because she thought I wanted to sit with her, which was absolutely not true. I had an entire seat to myself. Why would I want to sit with a screecher? She was kind of flattering herself.

  The next thing I knew, the driver was turning the bus around and heading in the opposite direction.

  We thought we were being kidnapped, and some of the older girls used their cell phones to call their boyfriends to tell them they loved them. (My mother was so P.O.’ed when she found out Lauren had called her new boyfriend, Jared, instead of her.) One of the boyfriends called the police, and a state trooper pulled up behind us. He flashed his lights, and the bus driver flashed hers back at him. As it turned out, she was just headed back to the school. But she didn’t let us out once she got there. Instead she sat in her seat with the door closed until the trooper, who had followed us all the way there, got out of his car and was standing at the bottom of the bus steps. Then she opened the door and told him, “Fourth seat on the left. Weapon.”

  Coincidentally, I was sitting in the fourth seat on the left. I was so shocked when I heard her say those words that I just stayed there and watched as this big guy with tall leather boots and dark glasses came down the aisle and stopped next to me.

  I was still holding the screwdriver in my hand because I had been too shook up to put it back in my backpack. Plus, I was kind of confused about how it had fallen out, not knowing that, after having been jammed point-down in the pack since second period, the screwdriver had worn a hole in the bottom.

  “Come on, son,” the officer said. “You don’t want to hurt anybody with that thing.”

  I looked down at the screwdriver. “This? This is a Father’s Day present. For my dad.”

  He grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me away. Lauren swears that she tried to get off the bus to help me, but the driver wouldn’t let anyone leave. A likely story. I was sitting in the back of the police cruiser as the bus drove away again, and I could see Lauren through one of the back windows with her cell phone pressed to her ear and her mouth moving a mile a minute. She didn’t even wave.

  The state trooper didn’t want to leave me alone in his car while he went into the school to get the principal, so he radioed his dispatcher for help. Sitting in a police cruiser with a cop is nowhere near as cool as you’d think. Parents kept driving up to the school to pick up kids who had stayed late. I could see all the moms and dads and their kids staring through the windows, trying to see who’d been caught.

  Finally, the principal came out, and the officer showed him the screwdriver. I thought, Thank goodness. Mr. Alldredge will explain everything. After all, I had made the screwdriver in tech ed class. It was an assignment. Nobody goes to jail for a school assignment.

  Mr. Alldredge looked at the screwdriver, looked at me, and said, “Why don’t we all go into my office.”

  I thought, Okay, he’ll explain everything in his office.

  First, though, we made our own little parade as we walked through the school lobby: the principal, the uniformed state trooper, and me. And wouldn’t you know it, Melissa Esposito and the rest of the girls’ track team were posing with their trophy for a photographer from our local newspaper, The Daily Report.

  Melissa already thought I was an idiot, anyway, and she was very obvious about it. So I guessed having her see me hauled through the school wasn’t going to make things any worse than they already were.

  But standing right next to Melissa was Chelsea Donahue. Chelsea was the most fantastic girl in the sixth grade. She was smart and cool, had long, blond hair, and was nearly as tall as I was. She was the first girl you noticed in any group. Chelsea was also in my accelerated classes. If she thought I was an idiot, she wasn’t obvious about it. Though we’d never had a conversation or even really spoken, we did do oral reports on the same book once.

  I hoped she thought the state trooper was my father.

  “So, Kyle, what were you doing with the screwdriver?” Mr. Alldredge asked as he slipped behind his desk once we were in his office.

  “I was taking it home.”

  “Why did you bring it to school in the first place?”

  “I didn’t. I made it here at school. We made them in tech ed. Mr. Kowsz will tell you.”

  Mr. Alldredge gave me a “you are such a liar” smile. “That’s not part of the tech ed curriculum. Are you trying to tell me that Mr. Kowsz did something with his class that was not in the curriculum? Mr. Kowsz never breaks rules,” he said, sounding as if that was a bad thing. “Mr. Kowsz goes out of his way to enforce them.”

  I froze for a while. My class was supposed to have spent the week before in the computer lab learning how to make spreadsheets. But Mr. Kowsz couldn’t even use e-mail. So whenever we went to the computer lab, he had one of the kids in the class figure out the lesson plan and show the others how to do it.

  But who wants to make spreadsheets? So we all said, “Spread what?” Then, instead of skipping ahead to making wrought-iron candlesticks (which is technology education how?), Mr. Kowsz had us make screwdrivers so we wouldn’t get ahead of the other tech ed classes.

  If only he had just let us surf the Net that week the way we’d suggested.

  Mr. Alldredge leaned forward and started tapping away at a keyboard. He looked at the monitor, then he looked at me. Then he looked at the monitor again.

  “Hmmm. Kyle, I don’t see your name coming up on any of our school clubs or events. You don’t do any sports?” Mr. Alldredge asked.

  “No.”

  “Drama Club? Newspaper? Peer Helpers?”

  “Ah . . . no.”

  Mr. Alldredge looked over at the state trooper. I read the CNN website. I knew what he was driving at with all those questions. All your most famous kid criminals steer clear of after-school activities. As bad as being escorted through the parking lot and school by a state trooper had been, I had
a feeling things were going to get much, much worse.

  “Which one of your parents should we call?” Mr. Alldredge asked.

  Well, there was a question I could spend an hour or more trying to answer. Here I was, sitting in the principal’s office with a state trooper. Did I want my mother or my father to be the first to hear the news?

  “You could just ask Mr. Kowsz,” I suggested. “He’ll tell you that I made the screwdriver in class.”

  Mr. Alldredge’s big, fuzzy eyebrows shot up. “You don’t want us to call your parents? Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “Call my father,” I sighed. “My mother sees clients all day long and will have trouble getting away. My father is a systems analyst. No one knows what he does, anyway, and it won’t matter if he leaves his office.”

  Mr. Alldredge sent me to the reception area to wait. The trooper came out and stood by the doorway that led to the hall, in case I tried to make a run for it. Then Mr. Alldredge came out and went over to some equipment in a corner behind the secretaries. In a moment I heard his voice calling Mr. Kowsz’s name on the intercom. Maybe, I thought, this could all be cleared up before Dad gets here, and we can just go home.

  But Mr. Kowsz didn’t show up.

  He still wasn’t there when Jake Rogers got out of detention. Jake was someone I actually had gone to elementary school with. I’d spent most of those years trying to stay out of his way, so he wasn’t one of the familiar faces I’d been hoping to see in my classes when I arrived at the middle school back in September. I wasn’t happy to see him just then, either. Jake knew me well enough to seem surprised to see me sitting next to a state trooper as he walked past the office. Surprised and impressed. His eyes bulged out of his head, and his mouth gaped open. Then he pointed one fat, scaly finger at me while he gave me the thumbs-up sign with his other hand.

  I had impressed Jake Rogers. That gave me something to think about while I continued to wait for Mr. Kowsz and my father.

  “Kyle!” Dad exclaimed when he arrived and came rushing toward me. “What happened?”

  “I was bringing this thing home that we made in tech ed, and all of a sudden the bus driver took us back to the school and a trooper came onto the bus and—”

  Mr. Alldredge suddenly appeared. “Why don’t you wait until we’re in my office,” he suggested. “We’ll all be more comfortable there.”

  I didn’t think that was very likely.

  “Mr. Rideau, were you aware that Kyle brought a screwdriver to school today?” Mr. Alldredge asked after we’d all sat down across from his desk.

  “What were you doing with a screwdriver?” Dad asked me. “I’ve never even seen you use one.”

  “I did not bring a screwdriver to school. I made it in technology education,” I explained.

  Dad’s head swung back toward the principal.

  “There are no units in the technology education curriculum on making screwdrivers or any other kind of tool,” Mr. Alldredge said.

  “Mr. Kowsz will tell you,” I insisted. “There are sixteen other kids in the class. Any of them will tell you, too.”

  “Mr. Kowsz leaves the building early a couple of days a week. We just got in touch with him on his cell phone, so it will be a few minutes before he gets back here,” Mr. Alldredge told us.

  The state trooper sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him. I think he was getting bored.

  “So is it a screwdriver he made himself?” Dad asked Mr. Alldredge.

  Mr. Alldredge picked it up off his desk to show him.

  “Oh, wow. You made that, Kyle?” Dad said. “Very nice.”

  “That screwdriver is a contraband item under Section Three, Subsection Four, of the Disciplinary Section of the Bert P. Trotts Student-Parent Handbook.” Mr. Alldredge stopped speaking long enough to hold up a form with signatures on it. “You received a copy of the handbook in September and returned this form stating that you had read it. Both you and Kyle signed it. That is your signature, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes. I actually . . . remember . . . signing that form.”

  He remembered signing the form, but I guessed he didn’t remember reading the handbook. The thing is over sixty pages long, with no pictures and small print. Dad flipped through it when I brought it home and said, “I think I’ll just skim this.”

  Mr. Alldredge had read every word, though. He opened the book up.

  “Section Three: Activities Leading to Suspension, Expulsion, or Legal Action. Subsection Four: Possession of any weapon, including but not limited to deadly weapons, firearms, whether loaded or unloaded, knives, whether sharpened or not, explosive devices, whether functional or not, blackjacks, maces, brass knuckles, grappling hooks, dart guns, crossbows, or any other dangerous object.”

  Mr. Alldredge dropped the handbook onto his desk and looked up at us. “Do you have any idea how dangerous a screwdriver can be?”

  “Oh, yeah. Two of the guys were sword fighting with their screwdrivers in class. I was sitting there waiting for an eye to come flying out at me. Nothing happened, though,” I assured him.

  “Why was he asked to make something so dangerous in class?” Dad asked.

  Mr. Alldredge shook his head. “He wasn’t.”

  “It’s clearly a handmade tool,” Dad pointed out. “He didn’t make it at home. Except for studying, all he does is hole up in front of the computer or the television. He doesn’t go out, so he couldn’t have made it somewhere else.”

  At that point I began to wonder if Dad should stop trying to help.

  “He had to have made it here,” he continued. “It seems unreasonable to me to ask him to make something and then call in the police when he tries to bring it home. What was he supposed to do with it?”

  That was better.

  “Kyle, why were you holding the screwdriver in your hand on the bus?” the state trooper broke in. “What were you going to do with it?”

  “It fell out of my backpack,” I explained. “And then the bus driver took off—we thought she was kidnapping us, you know—and I just sat there with it. I didn’t think to try to put it away.”

  As the trooper went to pick my backpack up off the floor next to Mr. Alldredge’s desk, Mr. Kowsz knocked on the door and entered the office.

  “I’m sorry to have to call you back to school, but this young man was caught with a weapon, which he claims he made in your second-period class,” Mr. Alldredge said.

  “A weapon? We don’t make weapons in second period,” Mr. Kowsz said as he was sitting down. As if maybe “we” made them in another period.

  “Do you make screwdrivers?” Dad asked.

  Mr. Kowsz blinked. He blinked again. Then he nodded his head once. “I try to do a hands-on technical design activity-related project at this time of year that interfaces with our exploration of manufacturing and construction technology.”

  Mr. Alldredge and the state trooper just stared at him, but my father smiled and said, “Ah. Screwdrivers.”

  “The kids are supposed to use them for Father’s Day presents,” Mr. Kowsz continued. He gave me this really serious look. “Not for weapons.”

  The state trooper shoved the bottom of my backpack up for everyone to see. “There’s a hole in the bottom of this thing,” he pointed out. “The screwdriver just slipped through it.”

  There was a pause while everyone thought about that.

  “So, we’re agreed that Kyle hasn’t done anything wrong?” Dad finally asked, standing up.

  “I agree,” I said.

  The principal did, too. He wasn’t so sure about Mr. Kowsz, though. He made Mr. Kowsz stay after the rest of us left. He said they had something to discuss.

  Dad and I walked out to the parking lot with the state trooper.

  “I cannot come back to school tomorrow,” I said after we left the trooper at his cruiser and headed on to our car. “Everyone will know.”

  “What will they know? That the principal made a fool of himself over a screwdriver?” Dad ask
ed.

  “They’ll know the principal and the state police—the bus driver, even!—thought I was some kind of weirdo who goes around attacking people with hand tools! I’ve never even been in a fight. I’ve never been in any trouble at all. But everyone was willing to believe I was a maniac armed with a screwdriver.”

  “That’s not your fault,” Dad said.

  “It’s not my fault, but I was the one who was blamed,” I reminded him. Had he already forgotten where we’d just been? “All kinds of people saw me in that state trooper’s car. Parents saw me! Kids from my classes saw me with the state trooper and the principal. You know what they’re thinking?”

  “No, I don’t, Kyle. And neither do you.”

  “Yes, I do! They’re thinking Kyle Rideau must be the kind of guy people suspect when there’s trouble. They’re thinking I would never have been in that cruiser if there wasn’t a reason . Why did that bus driver think I would use a screwdriver as a weapon? She’s known me all year. Mom made me give her a Christmas present. I gave her cookies, and look what she did to me!”

  Right in the middle of the parking lot Dad stopped and hugged me. “She was just scared,” he said.

  “Of me? She was scared of me?” I said into his shoulder.

  “She was just scared, period. And you just happened to be there. That’s all it was. It’s all over now.”

  I should have given him a shove or something because we were both way too old for a father-son hug. But a hug from your father reminds you of all those times you broke your best toy and your dad said, “Don’t worry. I can fix it. Everything will be okay.” And then everything was. That hug out in the parking lot convinced me that what had happened really was over and done with.

  Boy, was I wrong.