Suckers - J.A. Konrath

Tim, who was my best friend in Ms. Peckin’s seventh-grade class, held out the naked baby
doll to me. "Here, Clumsy Joe. Why don’t you hold the baby?"
"Oh, I don’t know," I said, shaking my head. "I’m pretty clumsy."
"That’s okay. We trust you, Clumsy Joe."
"Well, all right..."
"Okay, I think we’ve seen enough," said Ms. Peckin from her desk. "The three of you can sit
down."
"But we weren’t done!" I insisted.
"Don’t argue with me, Andrew Mayhem. That skit was not appropriate and you know it."
I just stood there, appalled. We’d spent an entire evening coming up with the clever dialogue
and shocking plot twist (Clumsy Joe drops the baby). And I personally had spent several hours
rigging up and testing the baby doll so that the fake blood sprayed just right when it hit the tile
floor. Ms. Peckin hadn’t notified us about any content restrictions on the assignment beforehand,
so how dare she decide at the last second that baby splatter was inappropriate?
"Does that mean we get an F?" I asked.
"No, it means that you’ll redo the assignment. Now sit down."
I sat down. Vile old twenty-five year-old crone. Revenge was in order. Sweet, cruel,
delicious revenge.
* * *
The following Monday, Ms. Peckin walked out into the school parking lot to find her car
covered with bloody dismembered baby doll body parts.
Somehow she figured out that I was responsible.
* * *
Detention was not unknown to me. I sat up front, staring at the periodic table of the elements
poster on the wall, wishing the clock would magically fade to an hour from now the way it did in
the movies.
Ms. Peckin looked up from the paper she was grading as the classroom door opened.
"You’re fifteen minutes late," she said.
"I couldn’t find the room."
"Then you’re here until 5:00."
I turned around as the kid sat down.
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