World's Best Book

Fire in a building was the only reason to pull a fire alarm. Not at Mandrill Heights Junior high school apparently. Someone kept pulling the alarm, and it now it was happening nearly every three weeks or so. Sometimes it took an hour of the fire department checking what seemed like every inch of the school before classes resumed. Teachers were convinced most of the kids knew who was doing it because the faculty’s interrogative attempts to identify the culprit were always met with exchanged glances between students, and then giggles. On Monday morning, after the seventh of these dangerous interruptions, highly respected Principal Goode decided he’d had quite enough.

“Attention…all students are to report to school for classes this Saturday,” Goode said over the PA system.

By noon, the faculty got wind of a mutinous plan by many students to call in sick, so before school days end Principal Goode was back at the PA system: “Anyone too ill to participate this weekend, will come in the following Saturday, and we’ll keep going till everyone has done the time. These extra sessions will be a requirement for passing your grade.”

Goode didn’t know if what he was doing was legal, but after that much disruption, he didn’t much care. This was Janeridge. Things worked differently in small towns.

Chaos loomed on the horizon. Mandrill students dubbed the event Satan Saturday, and many swore it would kill them. All week leading up to the day of dread, Principal Goode endured phone calls and visits from angry parents. On Thursday to simmer things down, he organized a group meeting between him and any parent wishing to discuss the matter. It turned out to be a virtual town hall meeting in a stuffed-to-capacity auditorium.

““This is so unfair!” shouted one woman in a neon pink dress, “our family planned a trip!”

The intimidatingly large crowd murmured its accord. Goode listened to a bit more shrill shouting about the evils of group punishment, and then calmly detailed his position to the sea of frowning faces. He explained that the extra time spent was meant to make up for lost education, not in fact to ‘ruin lives’. He kept the fact that he hoped his decision would end the dangerous alarm tampering to himself. Goode announced there would be an option to push the classes to later Saturdays for neon pink dress lady and others in her position. He then exited the now less raucous auditorium.

Menacing mobs of soccer moms and dads were just the warm up act. Henry Jocofeller’s call was inevitable. It took longer to arrive than expected, but came Friday. Principal Goode sighed and paused before picking up the call from Janeridge’s only multi-millionaire. By Jocofeller’s own telling, he was a very important man. Normally amicable, Goode had gritted his teeth through their interactions before. After a good 5 minutes of manufacturing the composure that had always served him well, Goode hit the line 2 button confident he’d as usual, ultimately be successful.

“Hello?” he said, anticipating the volley.

“My kid and I are going hunting Saturday,” Jocofeller hissed through the phone, “Make Pepo exempt from your b.s. or I’m ending my monthly donations to Mandrill and suing you”.

Sorrows are less sharp when drowned in adult beverages, so that’s what Goode did after work at O’Malley’s with his good friend, chief of police Frank Cobb.

“Yeah…so I think I might exempt a student from that Saturday thing I got planned,” Goode said shaking his head while staring at his glass of proper number 12, “Joco called.”

Cobb, leaning comfortably against the bar and listening intently, raised a greying eye brow.

“lemme guess… he threatened to sue?” Cobb asked like a man who’d seen this dance before.

Goode nodded still staring at his drink.

“Bah.” the chief said waving his hand dismissively with a wry smile, “special treatment would violate Goode principles my man. I say don’t change a thing”.

Principal Goode finally looked up from his drink and stared at his friend.

Saturday morning came, bringing with it lots of grumbling, sour faced Mandrill Heights students trudging up the school steps. Principal Goode stood at the top waiting, delusional in his hope that he could fool young teens into being ok with all of this.

“Hello!” and “welcome!” Goode exclaimed over enthusiastically to the steady stream of malcontents flowing by on their way to their deaths.

Suddenly the relative quiet of Mandrill drive was broken by a red and black Bugatti noisily breaking the speed limit up the street, and screeching to a stop in front of the school. Pepo got out with his Gucci knapsack and headed for the school. Principal Goode looked up from greeting students to see Henry Jocofeller also out of his car and staring daggers at him. Goode stared back. Without breaking eye contact and with the body language of a man on a mission, Jocofeller thumped himself back into his mid-life-crisismobile and tore off down the street. Goode stared at the receding Bugatti with a worried look, and after ushering a scowling Pepo and the other last few kids into the school, he returned to his office.

Principal Goode white knuckled it through that day, trying to work while simultaneously trying not to let his imagination exaggerate all the future blow back he might get for ruining all these people’s weekends. What if not just Joco, but all the parents sued him?! This was a decision that he was regretting more and more by the minute.

But Saturday passed as all days do, and to their own amazement, not a single student died. On Monday, Henry Jocofeller stopped his donations to Mandrill. That meant there would be no auditorium renovations, and several class trips to fun places were canceled. The county prosecutor told Principal Goode that Jocofeller did in fact file a law suit. Apparently in its preliminary stages the suit went in front of a judge who turned out to be good friends with police chief Cobb. That was the last Goode ever heard of any lawsuit, even though in general he would hear lots more from Jocofeller.

On Tuesday, Goode spotted Pepo in the cafeteria with a black eye.

“How’d he get that?!” a concerned Goode whispered to Pepo’s home room teacher.

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me,” she shrugged, “but he didn’t have it this morning.”

Principal Goode never found out which student had given Pepo the shiner. He also never found out who had been pulling the alarm, but it never happened again.

Dana World