This is the story of an underestimated sixteen-year-old and how he almost masterminded the cover-up of the century. This is my story.
As a teen in high school, I was thought of as a loser to everyone. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. Even the teachers, and the D&D dorks thought of me as a loser. But even though I was a loser, I was responsible, reliable, and teachers trusted me. They simply didn't think that I would have the courage to do anything bad. That is why, I was made the Key Master.
Confused? Let me explain: Every school year during Spring Break (or March Break as it is sometimes called), all the students are picked up by their parents during the holiday. Everyone except me, my mother pasted away when I was young, and my dad dumped me at the Academy and never came back.
So what happens to me? The teachers have to bring me along to the hotel that they stay at. I'm appointed my own room and key. It's not those fancy hotels, more like the kind that attract short-tempered parents, their screaming children, and Academy teachers.
But this year was different. Lancelot and one of his jousting friends, Bohort, couldn't go to stay at their parent's house for the Spring Break. So they also had to come along. As usual, I was the Key Master, who had to make sure that the room didn't get trashed.
Now usually, this really shouldn't have been too difficult, but the malcontent named Lancelot was not too happy that I was given the only key to the hotel room. As soon as the teachers and Headmaster had left to go to their own rooms, Lance had ordered me to give him the key or he'd "open a can of whup-ass" on me.
Lance and Bohort were a cross between a rabid ferret and a sociopath. Bohort didn't so much speak as spit, and liked to bang things that were not drum-related (such as people's heads). His eyes were black, the same color as his teeth. Yep, I was like a floppy-eared bunny in the den of a wolverine.
Obviously I planned to stay far away from Lancelot and Bohort, allowing them to do whatever he wanted so long as it did not involve hurting me. This worked for about the first thirty minutes, until I heard the door to our room bust open, followed by an "Uh-oh". It turned out that Lance and Bohort had been involved in a Super-Soaker skirmish. (Remember Super-Soakers? They're those over-sized barrels filled with water with a crossbow-like trigger underneath it so that you can shoot water out of it like a weapon. Really cool if you're a teenage boy.)
Anyway, at some point during the fighting, Bohort locked Lance out of the hotel room by sliding the metal safety latch at the top of the door into the locked position. Lance did the only sensible thing: He kicked the door in. Fog of war, you know?
Somehow though, the door seemed to be okay. It still opened and shut, but the latch and the wood paneling on the doorjamb (when the latch locked into place) had been knocked off.
It was a distressing sight. The pieces, which were still latched together, lay on the floor, and the doorjamb now had a hideous bald spot of non-painted wood where the paneling had been. The only damage to the door itself was the missing bit of wood where the latch had been glued on (instead of, say, screwed on - safety first at these hotels).
The first thing that Lance said after viewing the scene was "If anyone tells anybody what happened here, I will kill them. And their families. Is this understood?"
I was very reluctant to quibble with Lancelot on this point, but I did think that, perhaps, in this very unusual case, it would be best to tell the truth. "How do you overlook a busted door?" I argued. Plus, I was the Key Master. The room was my responsibility. And I wasn't about to get in trouble for this. Lance's reply, however, involved fire raining down on me and a suggestion that my body might be better served with both of my arms broken. Tough to argue with that.
The three of us stood in the room looking at the debris on the ground. How, exactly, were we going to cover this up? Lance thought we could say it was "like that when we got there", and that we somehow overlooked it when we first inspected the room. Another idea was to throw away the broken bits and paint the doorjamb a matching color. (Not that we had access to glue or paint or any tools whatsoever, but Lance liked to think big.)
It was becoming apparent that he needed my help. And if we were going to go to the trouble of covering this up, what was the point of embarrassing ourselves? Time for the smartest guy in the room to devise a foolproof plan.
My solution was quite simple. We would fit the broken pieces back into their original places, like a jigsaw puzzle, then lock the latch. This actually worked well. When we pounded the pieces back into place, we were surprised by how firmly they took hold. Not quite good as new, but close. We knew, of course, that the fix wouldn't hold forever, and my plan accounted for this.
This was my plan: Later, shortly before the chaperones (the teachers) began making their rounds, we would secure the latch, but position the door so that it was ever-so-slightly cracked open. Then, when the chaperone knocked, one of us would casually say, "Come in! It's open!" And when he opened the door, 'breaking' the latch, the broken pieces would come off (again). We would have a good laugh, and be free of any blame.
We rehearsed the plan, tested it out, and deemed it flawless. Who knew I could be this devious? Who knew how thin the line was between dorky and diabolical? I even thought I detected a glimmer of respect, or at least an absence of murderous rage, in Lance's eye.
Soon it was evening. Chaperone time. Go time. I sat on the sofa, reading. Lance and Bohort sat opposite me. I had just finished putting the hardware and wood pieces back into place and gently sliding the latch into the locked position. Then I ran into the center of the room where we all sat, breathless. My heart pounded. My adrenaline flowed. So this was living! This was a life of danger!
"You guys awake?" It was the voice of Principal Pynchley, our balding, good-hearted, slightly chubby Headmaster.
"Yeah, come in," I said, "We're just reading."
We heard the door moan.
"Seems to be locked." said Principal Pynchley.
"No, it must be stuck. Just give it a push."
Those pieces held their ground. He grunted. The door grunted back. And then the crash of wood and metal as the pieces clattered across the floor.
"Oh dear," said the Headmaster. "I seem to have broken the door."
We leapt off the sofa to have a good look at the door, each of us trying our best to act stunned.
"What did you do Sir?" asked Lancelot.
"How did this happened?" asked Bohort.
"Jeez, you've got quite a grip there. I better be careful shaking your hand."
I made that last comment. Honest. And the great thing is, he bought the flattery. He really reveled in the idea that maybe hidden inside his middle-aged potbelly was a giant just screaming to come out. I remember him saying, "I guess I don't know my own strenght. Wow, I just knocked down the door."
We told him that we had latched the door during the Super-Soaker battle and had forgotten that it was still fastened. He seemed a little skeptical -I need to give him that- but he was also more than happy to just call this "another crazy thing that happens during Spring Break". We were in the clear.
Until Mrs. Morris showed up. She was a teacher and one of the other chaperones. And the instant she saw the door carnage, she knew something was amiss. We tried to explain that Principal Pynchley was just really that strong. Principal Pynchley nodded in agreement. He wassuper strong. But Mrs. Morris was a strict teacher and didn't take excuses from anyone. (When her daughter graduated from the Academy, the poor kid received an award from the school for never having missed a day of school from first to twelfth grade.)
Mrs. Morris informed us that she would "get to the bottom of this by tomorrow", which she did. Under intense interrogation, Lance and Bohort folded. Perhaps they weren't that tough after all. They both ended up paying 75 gold coins to repair the door (a huge sum when you're a teenager, the rough equivalent of 750 gold in adult money) and got two weeks of detention.
Beautifully enough though, no one believed that I, the friendless-but-good loser, could have been behind the plot to fool the chaperones. In other words, I finally got some revenge from all those years of torture. The Spring Break was not over though, so we were all forced to move to a small inn a few blocks away...
This story was inspired by a story written by D.W. Martin titled 'This One Time, at Band Camp'.