Chapter 6. Lone Tree High School
The Gazelles Gazette was published, as it always was, on Friday. Usually, this was an occurrence that no one much noticed. The students picked up a copy on their way to their first hour class, looked at it rather than their textbooks during that class, then left it on their desk, or the floor, or somewhere along the hallway to their next class. The only person who particularly noted its publication, then, was Miss Kimberlane, the high school janitor, when she had to pick up 500 or so of the 600 copy print run through the course of the day.
This week was different. Lori Bradshaw, proud of her photographic journalism, had quietly arranged that 2000 copies be printed. This was rather easy; she just told the printer that Mr. Thorndyke had ordered extras. She also ensured that the paper was well distributed. She got up early that morning, early enough to place copies of the paper in the coffee shops and convenience stores. As people made their way to work, they picked up a copy. Never in the history of the high school had the Gazelles Gazette made such a splash. It was a special edition, the first ever for the paper.
The paper wasn’t anything too impressive: it was only a single sheet of newsprint, folded twice. But the contents of the paper certainly garnered people’s attention. The lead headline shouted out LAKE MAEBIEWAHNAPOOPIE MONSTERS in a font that spanned the front page. Underneath the headline were two black and white snapshots. The first was the enlarged shot of the six monsters, with the pate of a seventh rippling up out of the water. The second was enlarged even more, and showed the first monster, the one that stared directly into the camera. His visage was somewhat blurry, but still his features were plainly evident.
Underneath the photographs was the copy, written by Herman Munson, the student editor himself:
Lone Tree (GGNS): Thursday afternoon, a Gazelles Gazette journalist discovered a mystery living in the depths of Lake Maebiewahnapoopie, and brought back with her photographic evidence to prove it.
Appropriately enough, the mystery was discovered during a biology field trip conducted by Mrs. Nielsbohr’s fifth hourclass. The above photos, which reveal a previously unknown life form that evidently lives within the lake, were taken during that class. An interview with Mrs. Nielsbohr brought forth two interesting facts. First, she said that the point of the field trip was to discover the plant and animal life native to the lake’s biome. Secondly, she confirmed that these creatures were previously unknown, and that the word “monster” might well be applied to them. “Honestly,” she is quoted as saying, upon seeing the photographs. “I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re little monsters, is what they are”
Only the size of the creatures, evidently, is now debatable. While Mrs. Nielsbohr refers to them as “little” monsters, the distance at which they were photographed would tend to support the idea that the creatures are quite large….
The article went on from there, but few read it. They saw the photographs that were obviously taken at the lake just a hundred yards or so from the schoolhouse, and that was enough for them. Nearly everyone at school had a copy before first period. Few remained in the school building once they had seen the photos. Instead, they hit the doors and walked down to the lake, hoping for the creatures’ reemergence.
At first, they stood peering over the waves and chattered excitedly. A few pointed. Even though they didn’t see anything coming up out of the water—no action for the present—they weren’t about to go back into the school building. It was a nice fall day; the morning was crisp but not cold. The sun shown down from a blue sky, and more than that, there was an excitement in the air such as rarely happened on an ordinary school day. Something was living in the lake! Right here in Lone Tree! Most of the students, after having a look and assuring themselves that no creature was currently showing itself, sat down on the grass. They clumped together in little groups, talking and joking and waiting expectantly. If something was going to happen, they didn’t want to miss it.
Thus, when the first period bell rang, there was a surprising dearth of students in the school. The teachers, wearily exiting the staff lounge with their morning coffee, walked the nearly-empty hallways as they made their way to class.
They had no idea where their students were, of course. As much as the average teacher exhorts his or her students to read, most teachers don’t read much themselves. None had read the school paper. Instead, they wondered amongst themselves what had happened: wasn’t there a full contingent of students there earlier? What had happened to them all? Was there an assembly this morning? That couldn’t be right, could it? Had anyone heard Principal Klieglight make an announcement?
When they arrived in their classrooms, they found at most two or three students staring back at them. These were the students who also didn’t read. Or, possibly, they were students who were too well socialized to show any interest in the world around them. When Mr. Berryola, a math teacher, found so few students in his classroom, he had no idea how to proceed. He was the first teacher to pick up his phone to call the office. “I have only three students in my room,” he said into the receiver. “What am I supposed to do?” Other teachers called in for instructions as well, but they weren’t as quick as Mr. Berryola. They were put on hold.
Principal Klieglight himself fielded the call from Mr. Berryola. Like all principals, Klieglight liked to hear his own voice. Unlike most principals, however, he was sensitive to the effects that his words had on others. He didn’t like to see people squirming, frowning, and grimacing while he was speaking to them, and so was most comfortable talking on the phone, where he could still hear his own voice but didn’t have to see people’s reactions. He liked the phone.
Here is a transcript from that call:
Mr. Berryola: This is Mr. Berryola from the math department. I have only three students in my room. What am I supposed to do?
Principal Klieglight: I feel sure that you’ll bring your class to a fruition of educational activity. Time on task! That’s the ticket.
Mr. Berryola: Perhaps you didn’t understand my question. What exactly am I supposed to do with my class? You can’t expect me to teach with only three students in the room!
Principal Klieglight: I’m sure you understand, Mr. Pinkberry, that sound educational practices contain no room for sloughing, no sir! Those students shouldn’t be roaming the halls on passes. No passes! No excuses! It takes a firm hand, shall I say a…a fatherly hand.
Mr. Berryola: I don’t think you understand, sir. I didn’t allow them to leave…they just never showed up. Perhaps there is an epidemic of some sort…no! Wait a minute! Is this Saturday? No, no that’s not right. Is there an assembly today?
Principal Klieglight: Mr. Crayolaberry, I feel sure that this problem will be worked out successfully if you and I could just sit down with all the parties concerned…perhaps a conference call…these students need our guidance. The parents, of course, might feel at a loss to control the students as well. Let’s see, just what was the name of the boy you called me about? Was it the Williams boy?
Mr. Berryola: No, no, I called to tell you that I have only three students in my classroom.
Principal Klieglight: Oh, I remember now. The Williams boy, yes. I know his father. We play a round at the club every now and then. I feel sure that we’ll be able to work something out. Why don’t I call him in for a visit? Better yet, a conference call between the three of us. We’ll get this straightened out! Nip it in the bud, I always say. Don’t let the problem get so out of hand that it’s too late to sink the ship! Now, Miss Rumbolt, if you’ll excuse me….
Mr. Berryola. I’m not Miss Rumbolt. This is Mr. Berryola.
Principal Klieglight: Oh yes! So it is! Now, Mr. Pinkberry, what seems to be the problem?
After three such calls, Principal Klieglight felt a little dazed. If only his teachers could organize themselves! Organization, that was it. Honestly! It was like talking with eight year olds! Before he became a principal, Klieglight had taught eight year olds, so he knew exactly what he was talking about. He had experienced exactly the same sorts of difficulties when he tried to talk with them. “Organization,” he had always told his second grade students. “Organization and discipline, that’s the ticket!” But they had responded to this wisdom no better than his teachers did. If only they could organize their minds, he thought, bring a little discipline to their thinking! If they could only listen to themselves! My!
Ms. Blandishment, the school secretary, looked patiently on while Principal Klieglight stormed around his office with his fist in the air. Although he took pains to appear calm and unruffled in front of his teachers and students, there was a lot of this posturing and agonizing in the office. She was used to it. He would gesture at a lamp, then at a potted plant, firmly instructing it in Right Thinking. Right Thinking was something Ms. Blandishment had heard much about in her years at the school.
Principal Klieglight, with a final shake of his fist, finished his tirade. His fist relaxed as he saw Ms. Blandishment. He looked guiltily about the room for a moment.
“Now, where was I?” he asked.Ms. Blandishment was happy to answer. “You were just trying to get the students back into the building, sir.”
“Into the building? Of course they’re in the building!” He consulted his watch. “My, yes, they’re in the building. It’s quarter to nine! School hours! My students know where they are to be during school hours, yes sir! You bet they do!” Then he looked sheepish for a moment, and said, “Unless…this isn’t Saturday, is it?”
Ms. Blandishment shook her head.
“No! No, of course it’s not Saturday, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? No, of course I wouldn’t be. Not that I don’t work the occasional weekend, you understand.” He considered for a moment, then a self-satisfied grin came upon his face. “If it were Saturday, you wouldn’t be here, now would you, Ms. Blandishment? Well, now that that’s settled, I believe I’ll take a short coffee break. Or maybe a Diet Coke. That’s the ticket!”
He headed toward the door of his office, but Ms. Blandishment repeated her concern. “The students, Principal Klieglight. The students.”
“Oh yes. The students.” Principal Klieglight looked confused for just a moment. “Which students were those?”
“The students who are still outside. They’ve gone out to see this…this beast of the lake, I’m afraid.”
“Come now, Ms. Blandishment, there’s no call to be afraid of the beast! No call at all.” He considered for a moment. “What beast would that be, by the way?”
“I didn’t say I was afraid of the beast, I said that I was afraid that the students have skipped school to see the beast. The beast in the lake. This one.” She handed him a copy of the school paper.
Klieglight took the paper, rolled it up, and waved it around his head. “No student of mine is going to miss class!” he said. “Who is it? I shall call his parents immediately.”
“It’s not a single student, Principal Klieglight. It is very nearly all of the students.”
“All of the students? Well, what are they doing? Where are they? Why aren’t they in school? No time for shirking! Time on task!” He slapped the rolled paper onto his desk for emphasis.
“They’re all by the lake, Principal Klieglight.” She gestured to his window. Outside, the students were milling about on the grass. They looked to be settling in for the morning.
“Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?” He began pacing about his office. He was gearing up, Ms. Blandishment could see, for another assault on the lampshades and potted plants.
“Perhaps the P. A. system, sir.”
“Oh yes! That’s the ticket. The P. A. system! Beautiful, Ms. Blandishment, beautiful.”
Klieglight strode toward the I9000 Central Communications Nexus on one wall of his office. It was quite a system, the I9000. It was a floor-to-ceiling installation, 4 feet wide and 9 feet high, made of sturdy white plastic and chrome. It had been his first purchase as principal. From here, he could speak with anyone inside or outside the school, and he often did. He picked up the microphone, pushed the green activation button, and flicked the red switch he had personally labeled VOICE OF GOD with a Dymo labeler. It was the switch that routed his announcement to every speaker, in or out of the building. It was his favorite.
Finally, he lifted the microphone, fingered the on button, and pulled it to his lips. “Fellow students!” He lowered the microphone and thought for a moment, “Now, that’s not right, is it?” He raised the microphone and began again. “Students!”
Finally, he was set for some principal action. “It has come to my attention that very few of you are in school. Stop whatever it is you are doing, and come to school immediately! There shall be no second warnings!”
Principal Klieglight put down the microphone. “That will take care of that!” he said with a satisfied smile. He again joined Ms. Blandishment by the window. The students, apparently unfazed by his announcement, remained much as before. “Any time now,” Principal Klieglight said, “they’ll be coming inside. My word is gospel around here.” He stood a moment longer, trying to hold his confident smile in the face of the students’ indifference.
After a moment, he looked nervously at Ms. Blandishment, then coughed into his hand. He took his eyeglasses from his breast pocket, breathed on them, shined them up a bit with a handkerchief, and put them on. He looked out the window again. Still, the students idled upon the hillside.
Principal Klieglight tried to figure out how long it would take his announcement to reach the ears of the students. “Let’s see,” he whispered to himself. “The speed of sound is…hmmm…times…let’s see, a hundred yards or so…carry the one…drat. Story problems!” He gave up, thinking that surely he had been engaged in the problem long enough that the sound should have reached them by now.
Still, there was no action on the part of the students. One, he noticed, was strumming a guitar. A Frisbee sailed lightly on the breeze, catching an updraft. He thought he heard laughter, even at this distance.
Maybe, he thought, the P. A. system was on the fritz. They weren’t acting on his orders simply because they hadn’t heard them! But a school day without the buffer of the P.A. system was too horrible a scenario to contemplate. He quickly pushed the idea from his mind.
Another glance out the window showed a couple of students throwing rocks into the lake. The sight galled him. It looked for all the world as if they were on a picnic! On a school day! Principal Klieglight seethed at this breach of his personal authority. He felt a new resolve to address the problem.
“Well, we’ll see about this, won’t we?” he announced to Ms. Blandishment, who was no longer beside him. A phone had rung in the outer office. This time, he let her get it. He had spoken with enough teachers that morning. If they couldn’t bring a little organization and discipline to their minds, he was going to have nothing to do with them. Besides, he had other things on his mind. There was some principal action to be undertaken at this school, and he was just the man for the job.
Klieglight marched back to the I9000. He pushed the green activation button, picked up the mike, toggled the VOICE OF GOD switch, and fingered the on button on the mike. “Fellow students!” he boomed. “This is quite enough! Show yourselves! Er, report to your classes at once! Suspension proceedings will begin immediately! There will be no second warnings!”
This second warning was cut short by Ms. Blandishment, who was standing in his office door with the telephone receiver in her hand. She was gesticulating wildly, and forming silent words in an exaggerated fashion. He couldn’t tell what she was saying, but he didn’t spend much time trying to decipher it. All the world was veering toward chaos.
“All right! All right! I’ll talk to them!” he said. “Do I have to do everything around here? When are these teachers going to become self-sufficient?” He put down the microphone and stalked to the phone on his desk. He picked it up.
“Look,” he said into the receiver, “I’m quite busy now, and don’t have time to solve every problem. Organization and discipline! That’s the ticket! Time on task! No shirking! No passes! No excuses!”
As it turned out, however, Klieglight wasn’t talking to another of his teachers. He wasn’t on an inside line at all. He was on an outside line. This gave him pause. He was speaking, he now knew, on a line that was connected somewhere in the real world. The thought gave Klieglight the shivers. He didn’t have to shiver very long, however, because someone was shrieking at him.
The mayor. Principal Klieglight would recognize his voice anywhere. His shivers gave way to the shakes.
“Klieglight!” the mayor yelled. The mayor was in his usual form. To the voters of Lone Tree, Mayor King was the most reasonable man in the world. His voice was so calm and mellow, he could talk a cow out of a flank steak. Those who worked with him every day, however, knew him to be quite different. The mayor, when there were no voters about, was a screamer. Ms. Blandishment, from the remove of Principal Klieglight’s door, could hear him on the phone.
“Klieglight!” the mayor repeated. “This may be your last day as principal of Lone Tree High School, but I want you to spend that last day picking up and destroying every copy of that newspaper of yours. Panic! There’s panic in the streets! Of my city! Do you understand me? Get it done. Now!”
“Certainly, sir,” said Principal Klieglight. “Certainly. Absolutely. Right away. I’ll get right on it. Only….”
Ms. Blandishment heard the voice of the mayor go up a notch. “Only? Only???”
“Only…which newspaper would that be, sir?”
It took a few heated minutes, the mayor’s voice rising through the octaves past the normal male register, but finally he led Principal Klieglight to understand it was the Gazelles Gazette that was the root of the problem. An article in the paper was causing an uproar about town…something about a monastery on the lake. Klieglight knew of no monastery in the area, but he vowed to find it.
“Yes sir. Right away sir. I am to find the monastery and destroy it.” His mind was such a whirl of activity, it didn’t even occur to him that destroying a monastery wasn’t usually held to be within the purview of a high school administrator. “I’ll do it, brick by brick if necessary.”
Ms. Blandishment took it upon herself at this point to aid Principal Klieglight. From the sound of things, it might be her last chance to do so. She went to his desk and retrieved the newspaper that she had handed him earlier. She unrolled it, stuck it in front of his nose, and pointed to the photographs on the front page.
The poor man took the paper from her with a trembling hand. He had been accosted from all sides this morning, and was about at the end of his reserves. He looked at the photographs that appeared in front of him on the page. His voice, ordinarily a nice strong baritone, sounded like that of a child. “What,” he asked, “what is this?”
Finally, everything fell together for him. Monsters! There were monsters in Lake Maebiewahnapoopie! His lower lip trembled a bit.
Klieglight, stunned to silence, stood there, the paper in one hand and the phone receiver in the other. He stammered. He stuttered a bit. Neither of these behaviors befitted a man in his position, but he was helpless to stop them. Finally, he gripped the phone tightly and asked one last question. “You say this paper came from our school?”
The mayor, Ms. Blandishment could tell, had had enough. His voice raised one final, impossible notch. “Every copy, Klieglight. Every copy. Retrieved and destroyed. By the end of the day! Sooner!” He hung up with a sound like a pistol shot, leaving Principal Klieglight paralyzed where he stood.
In the end, Ms. Blandishment took the receiver from him and guided him into his chair. “You just sit down here for a little while, and I’ll bring you a Diet Coke,” she said. A Diet Coke was often required to calm the nerves of Principal Klieglight.
“Get…” he said meaninglessly and hopelessly. “Need to g g get…. retrieve….destroy….um….”
“Let’s just have a nice Diet Coke,” Ms. Blandishment repeated. “Then we can start tracking down those newspapers.”
Principal Klieglight held up the paper in his hand. “Hmmmm? G g g get? Monastery?”
“See?” Ms. Blandishment said. “You’re already on your way! You already have your first copy! Less than six hundred to go!”