Everyone knows that Halloween at Clarkstown Middle School is basically permission for some girls to celebrate Dress-Like-a-Slut Day. Olivia and friends decide to dress as angels. I use “dress” in the loosest terms. We’re not talking Old Testament, white-robed, harp-strumming, heavenly angels. We’re talking push-up bra, belly-baring, barely dressed angels.
Mrs. Korn announces over the PA that teachers should send students with costumes of a questionable nature down to the office during homeroom. The principal will rule on whether it’s a dress code violation or not. If they have a rule about wearing underwear as outerwear to school, there’re going to be a lot of violations today.
I keep it simple and wear my soccer uniform to school with a sign that says “Mia” on the front and a picture of a ham on the back—my favorite player! Bo doesn’t make it past first period before Mrs. Bustamonte adjusts her glasses, clears her throat, and sends him down to the office. He protests her call. “What? I’m fully dressed and surrounded by a cardboard box!” he insists.
“To the office!”
“Aw, come on, Mrs. B.! It took me three days to make this. I painted it and everything.”
Unmoved, Mrs. B. stands at the door, shaking her head and pointing the way down the hall. “Out!”
“It’s a public health message,” Bo insists as he gathers up his books, bumps between the rows of desks, and high-fives his friends all the way to the door. He turns and gives us one last look at the offending costume, supposedly inspired by his mom’s job at a radiologist’s office.
It’s a cardboard box, the kind used for large appliances, with two circular holes, about the size of grapefruits, cut out of the cardboard in front, just below a rectangular opening for Bo’s face.
A sign above Bo’s head reads, Mammograms. An arrow pointing to the circular holes reads, Insert breasts here.
“Let the principal be the judge. Personally, I think it’s sexual harassment. Aren’t any of you young ladies offended?”
I don’t have the heart to tell Mrs. B. that breasts sell everything from cars to teen magazines. We wouldn’t know to be offended if size triple-Ds were staring us in the face. Some of us just hope we’ll develop our own before we go to high school next fall and finally have something to fill out the sports bras we’ve been wearing since third grade.
“Go Taubs!” calls Joey Montanado.
“At least you picked an appropriate costume, Joey,” says Mrs. B. She closes the classroom door and walks over to her desk to take attendance. Scanning the rows for empty seats, she says, “A circus clown. Now, that’s a cute idea—especially since everyone loves balloons. Can you blow them up and twist them into little balloon animals like they used to do when I was a little girl?”
The class cracks up.
“He’s not a balloon clown, Mrs. B.,” smirks Olivia, who is forced to wear a smelly, oversized T-shirt from the school Lost and Found because the principal ruled her costume obscene. “Those are rubbers glued to his sweats.”
Mrs. B.’s back stiffens; she stops taking attendance and peers over her glasses at Joey. “Prophylactics?”
Olivia nods. “Condoms.”
After her coughing fit subsides, Mrs. B. says, “Joey, why don’t you gather up your things and join your friend Mr. Tauber at the office?”
Joey borrows a page from Bo’s playbook: “Condoms save lives!”
Georgie whines, “I thought this was Discovery Tech, not Health. If you keep talking about condoms, Mrs. B., I have my mother’s permission to go to Industrial Arts, where I can learn something constructive. Abstinence is all they taught at my old school.”
“And on what planet was that? Mars?” asks Olivia.
“Akron, Ohio—rubber capital of the world.”
“Did you say rubber?”
“As in, Goodyear,” he says. “Number one supplier of NASCAR champions for the third straight—”
“That’ll be enough, George,” says Mrs. B. “Now, class, turn on your computers and take out your textbooks. We’re on lesson—”
“Mrs. B.” Olivia raises her hand and holds her computer mouse up for Mrs. B.’s inspection. “Look!”
Mrs. B.’s glasses slip off her nose for the third time today.
Another mouse ball bites the dust.
* * *
“Hellooo, shoes!” I whisper to Ibby in the media center during tenth-period study hall as I point to the librarian’s costume.
Our librarian is dressed as a Dutch girl with a white wimpled hat, blue-and-white skirt, and authentic wooden clogs. I don’t mind when teachers get into the holidays, but sometimes their sense of humor is a bit wacko. Like Nurse Bicknell dressing as a vampire and scheduling a teachers’ Red Cross blood drive for this afternoon or Mrs. Korn in a prison jumpsuit with a Styrofoam ball and chain fastened to her leg.
In order to communicate, Ibby and I write in my notebook and pass it back and forth to each other so we don’t get thrown out of the library for talking. But we’ve written less than half a page when we’re asked, “Young ladies, are you getting your work done?”
Work? All day today, teachers have been handing out candy in class. Not to mention the stuff we brought from home and ate for lunch, even though our parents tried to hide it for the trick-or-treaters tomorrow night. By now, we’re so stoked on sugar that we can’t shut up or sit still, and a few of us are acting downright crazy. Ibby and I are busy mapping out the path people will take through the haunted house, when I feel something sting the back of my neck.
“Ouch!” A piece of candy corn hits my arm and lands on my notebook.
Bo and his buddies point and laugh.
“Knock it off!” I whisper.
Another piece sails across the room.
Bo holds the distinction of having been kicked out of the library this year more than any other kid in the entire school. I think he’s shooting for the all-time record, held by Marty Mikulsky, who was famous for slipping magazines in unsuspecting students’ backpacks, causing the theft alarm to ring repeatedly as people filed out of the library for their next class.
Bo has issues with the librarian because she hesitates to let him take books out. It might be the eighteen dollars he owes in overdue fines, but I think it goes deeper than that. She’s protective and looks at the books sort of like children—little book babies. Based on his rowdy behavior in the library, maybe she’s afraid if she allows them to hang out with Bo Tauber, they won’t come back and behave themselves by sitting in neat little rows on the library shelves.
She approaches Bo’s table and whispers, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave now, Mr. Tauber.”
Bo, who was stripped of his mobile mammogram unit at the office, pleads, “I have to do research on the Napoleonic period for Social Studies. Please don’t kick me out. I promise I won’t fool around anymore!”
Maybe she thinks that Bo doesn’t appreciate books or history because he’s always fooling around. I bet she’d be surprised to know that he watches the History Channel every night and has read all of Michael Shaara’s Civil War novels. Even a goalie’s got to have a hobby.
“Sorry, you’ve lost your chance for today, and now you’ll have to leave.”
Maybe it’s the fact that this is the second class Bo was kicked out of today—Metz nailed him for putting dissected worms in the water fountain—or maybe it’s the disappointment at not being able to wear his costume or maybe you can just blame it on a sugar overdose, but Bo doesn’t leave right away. Instead, he throws his backpack on the floor by Ibby’s feet and sits down next to me at our table.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Thanks a lot for the candy corn,” I say. “Next time, warn me before you pitch them and I’ll open my mouth and give you a target.”
“Here, you want some?” He reaches into his sweatshirt pocket and grabs a handful.
“No food in the library! And I believe, Mr. Tauber, you were asked to leave.”
“I’m going!” Bo gathers up his backpack and heads for the exit, but before he makes it through the door, the security alarm sounds, the boys’ table goes crazy laughing, and Bo is called back to the desk for a backpack search.
A library magazine for cat lovers is confiscated from Bo’s backpack.
“I swear I didn’t take it. I’ve been framed! I don’t even like cats!”
“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” Joey Montanado calls.
The magazine looks familiar. I give Ibby a knowing smile.
“Meow,” she says. “Trick or treat!”