11:55 p.m. Friday: As usual, I’m doing what I always do in the middle of the night. Slipping my hand under my sister’s heinie every half hour to make sure she hasn’t wet the bed, working on my lists, shadowboxing, practicing my impressions, a couple of sure-fire jokes that will get the crowd going, and the “Favorite Things” song that I’m going to perform for the talent portion of Miss America someday in honor of my father.
I’m also thinking how I really don’t know if things could have gone more smoothly at the fish fry tonight, except for when Sister Margaret Mary got up to announce that our school was given a “clean bill of health.” Termites had something to do with the basement steps collapsing under Tommy “Two-Ton” Thomkins, and it wasn’t the dangerous kind of “gas” that building inspector Mr. Hopkins thought he smelled, but I was wrong, too. It wasn’t Beans and Wienies Wednesday that was causing the awful stench in the school basement. The sulphur smell was coming out of janitor Mr. Wayne “Creeper” Carlson’s little room. Turns out that just like everybody else around here, he has a hobby that makes his life worth living. Mr. Hopkins discovered Creeper’s hard-boiled egg collection in a hole in the wall behind the incinerator. According to the gossip, the eggs that were found behind the Betty-Grable-loving-the-tractor-too-much calendar were beautifully decorated with the faces of movie stars.
FACT: Painting hard-boiled eggs is a normal hobby to have during Easter time, but it’s a very weird way to spend your leisure hours during other parts of the year.
PROOF: I am definitely sending this story into Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
After hearing the back-to-school news, I usually would’ve joined in the rumble, but considering what our principal did for Birdie, and that I regular-promised her brother that I would try to go easier on her, I did not pelt Sister Margaret Mary with potato pancakes after she made the announcement at the Friday Fish Fry tonight, so I did not get instantly expelled the way half of the juvenile delinquents did, including that maniac Butch Seeback, thank you, sweet Jesus.
Because I am working very hard to follow Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst enemy” Bellflower’s detecting directions to the letter, I reach under my pillow and pull out my detecting notebook and stubby pencil. In Chapter Seven of the best book ever written on the subject, he wrote, “Once an investigation has reached a conclusion, it is important to create a case file,” so by the light of my Roy Rogers flashlight, I jot down most of everything that happened tonight.
FACT: I bumped into Kitten Jablonski in the little girls’ room and after I stepped back far enough to make sure one of her pimples didn’t parachute down to my face, I told her what Sister Margaret Mary wrote in the note Sister Prudence found, but not why she wrote it, because her hurrying over to the cemetery to talk to her brother about the stolen Pagan Baby collection money is none of Kitten’s damn business. I just left it at, “Sister had an emergency situation to attend to.”
PROOF: Of course, my confidential informant didn’t apologize for daring me and putting me under so much pressure, because her saying she’s sorry for anything, well, that’s not one of her business policies. What she did was punch me in the arm and tell me, “I absolve you of the dare, Finley,” and then she made sure that her snitch, Linda O’Brien, who is a slave to the nuns this week for telling her mother that she didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground the way Charlie said she was, told every single kid that passed in front of her in the cafeteria line to get two fish sticks slapped on their plates, “Finley completed the dare so lay offa her, and if ya say one word about this hairnet, you’ll be eating your perch with a busted lip.”
FACT: What’s-his-name will not be coming around and beeping the ah-OO-ga horn of his souped-up Chevy every morning, or keeping our mother out late at night, not for a while at least, because I did #4 on this list:
JUST DESSERTS
1. Find out where the numbskull lives and smear black shoe polish on his Chevy’s whitewalls.
2. Put a bag of burning dog doo-doo on his porch, ring the doorbell, and run.
3. Call him at his “alleged” job at the American Motors plant and use that impression you learned from watching gangster movies where wops are always threatening their enemies: Dis is Three-Fingered Louie Galetti and you-a better stay away from that doll Louise Finley if you-a don’ wanna be fitted for a cement raincoat, ya goomba.
4. Doctor up his food, if you ever get to meet him face-to-face.