“Someone needs to call the Fire Department! I am locked in my room!”
“He can’t get out?” Paul asked, turning back to a laughing Mike.
“No man! The pennies wedge the lock up against the slide; he can’t even turn the handle.”
“That’s brilliant, man.”
The ranting, cussing and general screams of fear continued for a full two minutes longer until a junior who had seen the prank before recognized it for what it was. He told Gert to move from the door. He then pressed against the corner of the door, and the pennies fell to the floor.
“What the hell is going on!?” Gert screamed as he came through the door.
Most of the meek freshman retreated back into their rooms.
“Was this you?” Gert asked the junior who had helped.
“Screw you, man, I just helped you. I should have left you in there.” And then he walked away.
The hallway was clear, save a few students, who decided this might be a good time to go get some food. Gert honed in on Paul and Mike like an eagle to a mouse.
Mike quickly pulled Paul in and shut the door.
“Do you think he knows?” Paul asked, smiling.
“I’m sure we’re on a short list.”
“Kind of like Spindler?” He was the boys’ old high school principal, who followed them around relentlessly, at least, until his car mysteriously burst into flames.
“Kind of like that, but by the time we’re done, we’ll make all that look like child’s play.”
For two weeks, Mike and Paul had harassed Gert to no end. On a particularly eventful evening, Paul gained illegal entry into Gert’s dorm room via a credit card and some precision maneuvering. Paul had hooked up Gert’s Bose stereo system to a timer set to go off in the wee hours of the morning. At precisely three-thirty-eight am on the morning of Tuesday the eleventh of October, “Runnin’ with the Devil” by Van Halen ripped through the night like a fire truck through a sleepy village.
“Fitting song,” Mike told Paul as they sat at their doorway. They were careful to only open their door when they heard the rest of the floor doing the same.
The music and Gert’s resultant cursing had been heard on the floor below and above. Despite Gert’s protestations, he had received his first written warning since he had started school four years previous.
“How much more of this do you think he can take?” Paul asked Mike after they had seen a hangdog expression on Gert as he exited the student lounge.
“I guess we’ll see,” Mike had answered. “The good thing is he’s been too paranoid to write anybody up.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s slept in days,” Paul said. “I’d almost feel bad if he wasn’t such a prick.”
“If who wasn’t such a dick?” Debbie asked. She was working the counter at the snack shop.
Mike looked up guiltily. “What did you hear?”
“That Gert’s a dick,” she said, flashing a smile.
Mike and Paul quickly rewound through their conversation trying to see how much they had given away.
“We never said Gert,” Paul said. Mike was inclined to believe him, but they had just shared a particularly large joint and Mike wasn’t entirely too sure what they had said. He had been so fixated on the large, frosted, chocolate chip brownie, he hadn’t even noticed Debbie working the counter.
“I saw you working on Gert’s door two days ago,” she said to Paul.
“Shit,” Paul answered her. “But that was two days ago, if you knew, and we’re still at school.”
“Relax! I can’t stand him either. He asked me on a date on the first day of school and when I told him no, he wrote me up the next day for having a candle in my room. Didn’t matter to him that it wasn’t even lit.” Debbie handed Mike two brownies.
“I don’t have enough for two,” Mike told her, brushing the dust off his wallet.
“They’re on me,” she said, flashing another smile.
“Sweet, thanks,” Mike told her, doing his best to smile back, but the munchies had taken a serious hold on his social skills and all he could do was concentrate on the treat.
“What do you want?” Paul asked cautiously.
“Nothing much,” Debbie answered coquettishly.
“Huh?” Mike asked, looking up, half a brownie in his mouth, chocolate on his cheek.
“You don’t get out much,” Debbie said, smiling. She wiped his cheek with a wet towel she had behind the counter.
“She wants in,” Paul said.
“In what?” Mike asked.
“Dude, get your face out of the brownie.”
“Sorry, man, I’m pretty hungry.”