#3

“Guys, could we not do anything that would affect my grades? My parents flipped out when they heard that I didn’t do my homework,” Patty squeaked.

“Yeah, and you heard what Miss Grothoff said. ‘If this ever happens again I’ll call your parents,’” Tom said in his best impression of Miss Grothoff – hands on hips with a furrowed brow.

“I think that’s bogus. There’re too many of us. She’ll spend the whole night calling our parents if she meant what she said. And my parents don't like being called late at night,” Paul argued. We were still bitter towards him for what he did the other day. We all agreed we’d get him back, but right now we were thinking about tomorrow’s game.

“Okay, we’ll stay away from our grades. We’ll think of punishments that are non-academic related. Let’s take a vote.” Everyone raise their right fist. Jeff was the natural leader – we all looked up to him to be the mediator when we had our arguments.

“Okay, it’s settled. What’s the game tomorrow?”

“Let’s have a magic word.” I said. I could feel eyes magnetize towards me.

“What d’ya mean?” Jeff asked.

“We’ll come up with a magic word, and whoever gets Miss Grothoff to say the word, that person wins . . . And instead of a punishment, the person gets a prize. Let’s say they get a portion of everyone’s desert during lunch.” Last year, our class came up with superlatives for everyone. They said I was the most likely to host a reality TV show.

“That sounds like a plausible idea.” Jeff said, surveying the group’s response. He saw a couple of nods. Carl was giving a thumbs up. “So what’s the magic word?”

“Bloody,” I said with the biggest grin on my face. We were studying the American Revolution that month. Miss Grothoff had conservative values and an even more conservative diction. It would be our goal to coax the magic word out of her.

---

The next day in class we took our seats and propped ourselves up in our chairs, awake and alert. Miss Grothoff gave each of us a suspicious look. We figured she knew something was up, but we were too eager to get the word “bloody” out of her mouth to care that our game was close to being exposed. From the way she started talking in front of our class, I could tell she was pretty giddy about finally having attentive students.

“So class, let’s begin today’s lesson with the Battle of Lexington . . .”

“Miss Grothoff!” boomed Jerome, a bit too eager to win the game, “what kind of battle was the Battle of Lexington?” We all knew what he was trying to say, and even after class he admitted that his first inquiry was very amateurish.

“Well, it was the first battle of the American Revolution. Did you ever learn about the minutemen last year?” We took that as a rhetorical question, because we begun to volley our questions.

“Did people get shot?!”

“Was it as bloody as The Gladiator?!”

“How many people died!?” We were all batting around the bush. We didn’t know how to ask the right questions. Then all of a sudden we heard a quiet and hollow voice from the corner of the room. It was Sue, the class thespian.

“Miiissss Grothoff…. I think I cut myself.” She revealed to us her finger which was drenched in a red liquid – we presumed it was blood. The girls froze in shock, some squealed. The guys, on the other hand, were pretty skeptical . . . and entirely jealous that we didn’t come up with the idea ourselves.

“Oh my word! Sue, your finger is . . . bloody.” There she said it; loud enough for everyone to hear. “Go to the nurses office, right away! Sam, you go with her!”

Sam? That’s me. Miss Grothoff ushered us out before you could say “hot potato.”

Sue and I took our time. There was no hurry – no real emergency at hand. I could tell by the way the red ink dried up without caking. “That was pretty sneaky of you.”

“I always wanted to be an actress,” she said through a huge grin. She had outwitted us all – she really did deserve to win.

We arrived at the nurse’s office and from the nurses office we were redirected to the principles office. Principle Walker reprimanded Sue for deliberately faking an emergency – these types of pranks are not funny, he emphasized.

“You’re not very funny,” Sue said under her breath, quiet enough so Principle Walker wouldn’t hear her. I snickered to myself. I was sent back to the homeroom afterwards to explain to Miss Grothoff that it was all a joke. Miss Grothoff looked both relieved and irritated. I looked at my classmates and everyone had the same expression: envy.

[I really don't know how long I can keep this up . . . I'm already running out of ideas.]