Entry #674293, added on 11-02-09 @ 12:18 am EST
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| chapter two? | Entry #674293 |
Braden walked around the school checking everyone’s progress as well as supervising his own groups. Braden was the most popular person in SWC. With is exceptional good looks and charisma, his perfect teeth in his perfect smile, and his glinting blue eyes, he was practically a god. If he had an idea, everyone who heard about it was on board. If he supported something, it suddenly had a hundred supporters.
Braden came upon a group of kids working in the library. The library was probably the biggest job. All the books had to come off each shelf, then the shelves themselves had to come out of their units, then the units unbolted using the ill-gotten power tools, and finally everything had to be carried outside and re-assembled. There was a fork lift, but it was busy moving lab benches, which no group of humans were able to really lift, not even the football guys.
As soon as Braden walked into the library, the kids in there started hustling. They were more eager to please him than any teacher. Two girls who had been standing idle, chatting, stooped over and resumed their job of removing reference books from a shelf and piling them up on the floor. Braden flashed them a twinkly smile as he passed and they twittered behind him.
The supervisor of the library was Chad McKinnis, a popular basketball player with excellent grades. Chad was going to university on a partial scholarship in the fall. Chad grinned at Braden and ran his fingers through his fuzzy hair.
“Looking good in here, dude,” Braden said.
Chad nodded and revved his drill. “Pretty much half done,” he said, bending to zip out the empty shelf’s floor bolts with a whirr whirr whirrrrrr. Three other basketball warriors were holding the shelving unit steady and calling good-natured insults to their co-workers around the library.
Braden exited the library, tousling Warrick Fletch’s hair on his way by. Warrick was the resident disabled kid, living life in a power wheelchair. Braden thought he was cute like a puppy, with his frizzy waist-level head, and always tousled him on passing. Due to Braden thinking he was cute like a puppy, Warrick enjoyed much more popularity than most bashful, wheelchair-bound kids like him might.
The forklift whizzed by holding a science lab bench, its inexperienced driver narrowly missing walls as he maneuvered it back and forth in an effort to drive in a straight line. Braden saluted the driver, pudgy Cory Cassidy, who took his hands off the control lever for just long enough to give Braden a queen-wave and run the corner of the bench into the nearest wall. The door-handler in front of him actually fell to the ground with laughter, as Braden trotted across to the main office.
The secretaries’ desk was one of the biggest problems, after toilets. It was totally built into the wall and attached to the floor, and a bunch of kids were in there with hammers and chisels from the woodshop trying to pry it loose. Meanwhile, another kid, James Sheely, was standing on a chair on top of the massive structure loosening the screws on the hanging light in the ceiling.
Braden looked up at him. “How are you going to hang that outside, James?”
James stopped his unscrewing for a moment, and grinned sheepishly down. “I’ll figure something out!” he said. He probably would. He was renowned for his scientific intellect – highest grades year after year in Bio, Chem, and Physics.
Braden went outside and looked upon his creation and saw that it was good. His busy worker bees buzzed all over the school grounds, erecting classrooms, library, and offices out of basketball court, football field, and parkinglot. In a moment of inspired insanity, it had been decided that the cafeteria would be rebuilt on the road passing the front of the school. Two girls, Candace Robbins and Rose McMurphy, were gleefully crossing “Caution” tape between the street-light posts on the corner, while another two, Jane Rogers and Paula Serrano, standing on desks, were pounding a six-foot pole into the grass at the other end of the cafeteria for another “Caution” tape X.
More and more kids had arrived as the night grew darker, dinner times passed, the good stuff on TV ended, joining whatever group they could find that needed more hands, until it seemed like their numbers had doubled. By midnight, about half the graduating class was involved, and the job was nearly done.
The entire school had indeed been turned inside out. The only part of the plan which had disappointingly not turned out very well was the toilets. First, the toilet-removing group had turned off the wrong valve and halfway through removing their first toilet, had soaked themselves and flooded the bathroom before Mr. White and his crew saved them. Then, two of the first three toilets cracked and broke during removal, and the third slippery little character was dropped on the front steps of the school and shattered. The toilet group had, therefore, succeeded in erecting two toilet stalls with intact toilets inside, and stuck a ‘girls’ sign on one and a ‘boys’ sign on the other.
For most of the endeavor, the class of 2011 worked unnoticed. The front street had a strip mall across from the school, and the side street was a highway with shops on the other side. The prank had almost been blown, however, when an elderly couple from the house across the street from the fields had come out their back door and started asking the kids what was going on. Somebody ran to find Braden, and Braden explained the whole thing to them, without one word of a lie, to the point that the gentleman was laughing and telling about a prank he had been involved in at college, oh so many years ago, involving a Volkswagen Beetle, a Hi-Fi system, and the college courtyard. Mr. and Mrs. Harris looked forward to morning, when they promised to come out and watch the reactions.
A grand total of three students at the school that night had relatives in the press, so it was pretty much guaranteed that the prank would be news. By one a.m., the school was inside-out, most of their guests had gone home, and Braden, Matt, and Josh were doing a final tour of their work, admiring, putting on finishing touches, and generally slapping each other on the back for such an inspired idea.
Braden laughed out loud for the thousandth time that night when he saw how James Sheely had hung the lamp over the secretaries’ desk. The kid had actually welded a truss out of some discarded rebar that had been left at a construction site down the street for weeks; it had an uneven cross-bar base, about six feet of bar jutting out over the desk, and even a counter-balance, the principal’s iron hat rack, dangling from the other end.
“Waddya wanna do now?” Josh asked.
Braden answered, “Go home and get some sleep. I’m coming down here at six, with my camera. You dudes in?”
Laughing, the other two agreed. They didn’t want to miss one single moment of their high-school crowning glory.
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