Riddle Me This,
By Kai Bruno Woods
Chapter 1. Lowest of the Low
The stuffy office was barely big enough for two people, and it smelled of tobacco and oranges. This was probably due to the man that occupied its space.
Mr. Grant was grossly fat, sweaty, and rarely good-humoured, which made the acceptance of his superior intelligence very difficult indeed, for any of the students who had to deal with him. But, since he recently celebrated his eighth year as dean of Great Hangleton Secondary, they had to get used to it. As unpleasant as it sounds, Grant was most likely one of the most successfully educated souls in the town, and with good reason.
Great Hangleton was vastly uncultured, and lowly populated, despite its name. When it was built, around a century and a half before, its creators surely had glowing plans for it. But whatever flourishing city of gold they had imagined, was far from what Great Hangleton now presented itself to be, and had little chance of ever flourishing, in any shape or form.
It was very rare for one to observe a citizen of Great Hangleton who was truly happy. In fact, those of Great Hangleton who were not silenced by their own unhappiness, were inflicting it upon others, whether they meant to or not.
Therefore, Great Hangleton could be, and often was, a very unpleasant to find yourself.
And, as unbearable as it was to live there, it compare to the horror of attending their schools. There were two schools in the town; a primary and a secondary.
Most of those who graduated the primary crossed their fingers, and hoped that their problems wouldn't follow them into secondary. But they did, of course, and the trouble was the same, only more practiced.
There was a sad truth that these schools illuminated; All the troubles that started with school, will follow you out of school, and turn you into a punch-bag for your problems, and there was no way to fix it except to get out. It was the sad truth that most of these troubled children, turn into troubled teenagers, and then, not long after, angry, disappointed adults.
For now, the schools were divided into two categories; those who stayed quiet, and ridded themselves of attention, and those who were angry enough to seek it, and cause havoc.
Like most previous principles of Great Hangleton Secondary, Grant possessed a small mental list of those that he liked to discipline the most, which were often those who were easiest to discipline, thus those who hadn't really done much at all, compared to others in the school. This was an unfair, but personally helpful strategy for Grant, as it was safe to say that he feared some of his students, and detested others.
Mr. Grant like to deal with the said group of detested students first, and hope that the older students in the other group got the message. One of these detested students found themselves crammed into the tiny office, in front of Mr. Grant's desk, behind which, the man himself sat, glaring wearily at him.
"So," said Grant. "I suppose you think it's funny to flush sodium down the school toilets?"
The boy he spoke to was dark-haired and as thin as he was pale.
"I do, actually," replied the boy, who liked Mr. Grant about as much as Grant liked him, which wasn't much at all.
"Don't talk back to me, you fool," growled Grant. "You cost me more money than I have, Boy. You're not even worth the uniform you're wearing, never mind the school bathrooms! Mind you, you'll pay for it."
The boy smirked. "I'll run it by my mother."
Grant shifted uncomfortably in his seat. It was widely known that the Peterson's were broke and unemployed, and the boy's mother, according to heavy rumour, was mentally unfit.
"Look here," he snarled. "You've been filling my plate with issue after issue, since you're first year."
"I know, sir,"
"And you've done an incredible job of wrecking the bright future you'll never have."
"Thanks, sir. I try."
Mr. Grant leaned closer, as far as his large stomach would allow over his desk, and smiled, maliciously.
"How about we take a little look at your permanent record?"
The boy raised an eyebrow. "I have a permanent record?"
"Oh believe me," said Grant, chuckling darkly. "Your record is a treasured one. I was saving it for a rainy day- I suppose it has finally come."
He leaned back in his chair, and opened a metal press, right behind him.
"Marvin Peterson, right?" smirked Mr. Grant, flicking through the yellow files in the cabinet with his stubby fingers, a nasty look on his face.
The boy called Marvin nodded. "Just Marv, actually."
The fact that his dark, reddish black hair covered his eyes in messy strands, unmistakably due to lack of haircuts, made Marvin Peterson increasingly difficult for Grant to talk to without raising his voice.
"I'll call you what you're birth cert calls you, as long as we're under the roof of my school," Grant hissed, his chins wobbling angrily.
"Sorry, would you like me to leave?"
"Oh you will be leaving, after we look at your permanent record."
After Marv lost his insolent smirk, Grant began to leaf through his files again.
"You see, Marv," snapped Grant, nastily, as he searched. "I've been watching you're moves for a while-your ongoing crave for mayhem doesn't stop you passing your exams, does it? But, then, all smart-asses seem to feed from attention, don't they?"
"I do not,"
"And I find your record very fascinating. Not even sure how you managed all these noble tasks. None the less, you did. And I could expel you, for this."
This did not so much as irritate Marv, from the stony look on his face.
"You want to go uneducated, do you, Boy?" muttered Grant, but was evidently distracted. He muttered something like "bloody file" but then stopped searching, and smiled.
"Oh I know where I put them, now." He opened a convenient drawer in his desk, where one might keep a stapler, or a good book, and pulled out an impossibly bulky yellow folder.
On the top-right corner, Marv saw the words 'Peterson, Marvin' printed in heavy black ink.
Marv would have gasped, but thought better of giving Grant such satisfaction. He knew right well he was in for it now.
With a very fat finger, Mr. Grant flicked open the folder, and Marv felt an invisible weight on his shoulders.
The folder was crammed full with records of all the restricted and possibly illegal things Marv had done in almost two years of school.
"Let's see," droned Grant, reading from the page. "Oh, look. First day, you almost blinded Mrs. Darcy?"
"It was an accident. I never meant to hurt her," protested Marv.
"You don't accidentally toss a biro at a teacher," said Grant, flatly, and continued.
"Second Week, Friday the 12th of September, you managed to somehow ride your bicycle onto the roof of the woodworks classroom? How?"
"I don't know, sir," cried Marv. "I didn't do it on purpose."
Mr. Grant lost whatever was left of his smirk.
"Only you could accidentally drive a bicycle fifteen feet above the ground."
"I didn't," shouted Marv. "It flew!"
"Are you questioning my intelligence, Peterson?"
Before Marvin could protest, Grant kept speaking.
"The following Monday! When writing lines on the blackboard during your deserved attention, you carved them into the blackboard-left three inch tears in the surface."
"I don't know how that happened, sir," said Marv, losing his patience.
"Don't you? Bit of a temper, mixed with a taste for carnage, I'd say. What about October 3rd? You set our lab on fire."
"The potassium was right next to the water, and my elbow slipped. It could have happened to anyone," explained Marv.
"But it happened to you!"roared Grant, stomach shaking in his fury. "it's always you who's there. It's always you who's done it. What about the following April? You set a snake free within the school grounds! Dan Kelly's pet snake?"
Marvin smirked. "Snake's don't belong in cages. They belong in an open space, where they can hunt their food."
"It was a python!"shouted Grant. "It could have killed someone!"
"I wouldn't have," said Marvin, quietly. "I set it free."
There was a moment where Mr. Grant stared at Marvin, trying his best to declare his state of sanity. Had he heard him correctly?
Had the snake made him a little promise? Did he have it in writing? Or was he simply as naive as he looked?
When he couldn't think of anything to say, he continued.
"And now this," he said quietly. "Now you have, single-handedly, destroyed our bathrooms. I'll have you on community service for this."
"Why?" said Marv. "I didn't do it, sir."
"But you did!" Grant laughed. "You admitted it when you came in!"
"I answered your question," said Marv, matter-of-factly. "You asked if I thought it was funny, and I said that I did."
"But you were at the scene of the crime," cried Grant, as if this were the right quantity of information to close the case.
"I saw it happen, but I didn't do it," said Marv, feeling very small. "It was Mick Ferguson."
Mr. Grant chuckled. "Ferguson? The 6th year straight 'A' student?"
"You said it yourself, sir. All smart-asses feed from attention."
"It sounds like something you'd do, and I stand by my theory."
"Mick isn't all innocent."
"Neither are you, Marvin."
"You're afraid of him!"
"Don't you use that tone with me."
Marvin said nothing back. There was no real point in arguing with the dean of the school.
"So," said Grant, a nasty smile emerging from its fatty shadows. "Go home now, Marvin. Take the rest of the day off-the rest of the week. Or even better-how about the rest of your life? Here's the deal, Boy. I never want to see your insolent, meaningless face anywhere near my school again. You can tell your parents"-
"Parent," said Marv, cutting him off.
Mr. Grant raised an eyebrow, in question.
"My dad's dead."
A small smile, with unlikely sympathy, appeared on Grant's lips.
"How could I forget?"he said. "Your father. The useless, half-wit... so sad that he checked out early"-
"My father was not a half-wit," shouted Marv, feeling the ripple of hate in his sight grow, slowly blinding him. "He was killed in a fight."
"Oh, really? I was told he killed himself. It makes more sense, doesn't it? He was only intelligent enough to know that he was too much of a disappointment to live"-
"You're wrong!" yelled Marv.
Grant stopped dead. He'd never been spoken to with such a fierce tone from a student. He'd never had any trouble taking a tone from a child, but the look in this twelve-year-old's eye made him tremble.
"Don't lie to me," he said, sweat trickling down his forehead.
Marvin laughed, darkly. "Don't call me a liar. Don't ever call me a liar, and then talk dirt about my dad like you knew him."
Marv had turned to leave, and would have left the school right there and then, if his rage had not stopped him.
"That's right-run away. Go and cry in the arms of your filthy, psychotic, irritable mo"-
"You coward!"Marv shouted, so loudly that his throat hurt. "I bet you're so ashamed of yourself, you bad-mouth other people who amount to ten times of you. You just wish you were like them."
At first, Grant seemed mildly offended, but then he pointed at Marv, wearing the expression of someone who thought they were superior to all others before them.
"If I wanted to be a vicious, loony old bat, or a drunken, vile, careless piece of filth, I'd have been crawling on my knees at the lowest of the low, just like your ludicrous parents-or the one that still half lives."
Marv didn't know how it happened, but, just then, the door swung wide open without assistance.
He was too overwhelmed with anger to care.
He left Mr. Grant, no more than a large, pink and grey blob behind the tears that were filling up Marv's eyes, and slammed the door behind him.