High school things
A pink post it note stuck to his computer told Jason he was going to have a bad day. He’d barely had time to get his coffee before arriving at Jackson high school. He swept an imaginary piece of lint off of his freshly pressed khakis and pulled his blue and yellow sweater vest tighter around his stomach. His desk was bare, except for his laptop and a single photo of his dog Bessie. A few filing cabinets crowded around the faded plastic tree in the corner.
“They’re both ready when you are,” the front office administrator poked her gray head in to say. She’d been at Jackson High longer than nearly anyone, and hadn’t improved her timing at all since her first day.
Jason took a sip of his scaldingly hot coffee and wiggled his mustache to free the annoying drop that always stuck. “Send them in,”
Perry and Mason shuffled in to the cramped office and sat in the two hard backed plastic chairs. Perry stretched his legs out, almost like he thought about putting them on Jason’s desk. He’d been in the principal’s office enough times to know that wasn’t a smart idea. Instead he stroked the five o’clock shadow that had already started forming on his face. His fresh white sneakers were barely creased around the outside. Mason seemed to shrink as he perched his gangly body in the chair. He tucked his legs under the chair and pivoted to face the door like he was contemplating running. His yellow t-shirt was streaked with red and blue paints. If Jason didn’t know better he’d almost have thought it was an intentional tie-die shirt.
“Now, who wants to tell me why you’re both here?” The note had mentioned a wrestling match in the morning’s Art class, but Jason always liked to give the students a chance to explain themselves in their own words. The punishment would be the same regardless.
“He started it,” Perry grunted and scuffed his sneakers against the carpet.
Mason’s eyes went wide behind his blue rimmed glasses. His lips trembled. “No I didn’t!”
Perry tucked his lips to the side and blew a kiss at Mason’s shakiness. “Yeah you did, when you walked in with that stanky ass shirt this morning. I spent all first period behind you with your fumes affecting my concentration. I have a medical condition, you know.”
Mason bent his head and took a surreptitious sniff of his armpit. “I showered — recently,” he said in a halfway convincing lie.
Jason had heard it all before, a hundred times from a hundred different students. The ‘why’ was rarely the most interesting part. Everybody had an excuse, everybody had a reason. The rules didn’t care about that. In fact, there was pretty much only two things the rules cared about. “Smelling bad isn’t a good reason to throw paint on someone. Especially at Jackson High. I’m gonna give you two seconds to come up with something better than that,”
Perry’s eyes flicked around the room as he struggled to come up with an excuse that wouldn’t end with him in trouble. “I thought it would help brighten his day up,”
“That a good enough reason to miss the next home game?” Jason could tell he’d touched a nerve because Perry looked down at his feet. “Coach seemed pretty fired up about beating the Warriors next Friday, and Lord knows we don’t have the team to do it without the quarterback,”
“No, sir,” Perry bit the words off as he said them. “You gonna be the one to tell Coach I’m not playing?”
“Some quarterback,” Mason interrupted. “Missed the first two paint sticks before you hit me,”
Perry’s arm reached out to punch Mason, but stopped halfway. That didn’t stop Mason from flying out of his seat in a frantic attempt to dodge.
Jason’s palm slapped down on the desk hard enough to rattle his stainless steel coffee mug. Both boys looked up in shock at the sudden noise. “That’s enough out of you. Jackson High is a zero-tolerance school for fighting. I know you know what that means Perry. Mason? You understand?”
“Is that a phone call to my parents?” Mason asked as he climbed back into his seat.
“The next time I call your mother it’s going to be so I can ask her to dinner,” Jason said quickly. “In school suspension. All next week, both of you. You can work together on homework,”
“I was defending myself!” Mason looked like he wanted to stand. Then he looked at the size difference between himself and Jason, and thought better of it. “How am I going to do Algebra with this knuckle-dragger breathing down my neck?”
“Zero tolerance means I don’t care about your excuses either. Now get back to class, and if I see either of you back here in the next month I’m shipping you out of state to one of those charter schools. Let them figure out how to deal with you. Understand?”
Perry grunted in acknowledgement.
“Not good enough. Do you understand the words that I have said? Yes or no,” Jason said, enunciating his words with brutal exactness.
“Yes, sir,” both boys said at the same time.
Jason looked them both in the eyes. Damn kids. Hard enough running a school and keeping everything moving without these idiots attacking each other. “Good. Now get out of here,”
Mason was out the door to the office and into the hallway before the words had finished coming out of Jason’s mouth. Perry took his time standing. “You really gonna keep me from playing?”
“Son, I would dress up with pom poms and lead cheers the entire game if I thought it would help you graduate this school with anything higher than a D average. But we both know that ship has sailed. Keep your head down and you can keep playing. I see you again in here and I’m going to assign you a tutor for the last month of classes,”
Perry nodded his head as if they’d come to some sort of understanding. “Not many people want to see you in pom poms.”
High school things was originally published in Sixty Minute Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.