Book of Screams by Jeff Szpirglas

Author:Jeff Szpirglas [Szpirglas, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2023-05-25T20:00:00+00:00

Supply and Demand

Our substitute teacher, Mr. Edward, was a complete and utter jerk. I didn’t say it lightly, but it was true. He was also the only substitute that Mr. Stevenson would hire.

I didn’t know why. We kept telling Mr. Stevenson about Mr. Edward. How he shouted and banged his fist on the desk and made us stay in at recess if we got too loud. There was a reason Mr. Edward had never become a real full-time teacher, and it was that he was the worst.

Mr. Stevenson was our homeroom teacher. He was the best teacher I’d ever had. Why? He took the time to get to know us. He knew how much I liked science, for example. And building spaceships out of LEGO. He even remembered the details of all the stories he had us write for assignments. And he listened. Whenever there was a fight at recess, he had us sit in a community circle to hear both sides of the problem. Usually we could come to some kind of agreement. Mr. Stevenson got our respect.

What I loved most about Mr. Stevenson was how much he tried to share his passion for science with us. He managed to get the science room for our homeroom. It was the one attached to the giant storage closet where the teachers kept all the old books and science equipment that never got used anymore. There were piles of dusty old encyclopedias but also cool stuff, like a real projector that you could turn on and use to show ancient educational films. Mr. Stevenson showed us one once, and we all laughed at it together.

The room also had equipment from back when our school went all the way up to tenth grade and they’d held high-school science classes here. The shelves had old beakers and Bunsen burners and even some chemicals stored in jars super high up on the shelves. We weren’t allowed to touch the chemicals. I didn’t think anyone had used them in years. They’d probably all gone bad.

“Why are you looking at the closet door, Robert?”

I shifted my glance from the closet over to the hulking figure of Mr. Edward. He had a smell about him that was hard to ignore. But if you could, you’d get lost in the thick tangle of his beard, which he probably kept to hide his skin, which was red and puffy like it had been soaked in a pickling vat. The whites of his eyes and his teeth had a yellow tinge, and his features were fixed in a permanent scowl. Right now his fists were clenched so tightly that the veins looked like they were going to pop right through the skin.

“I was just thinking of the answer,” I muttered, trying to remember the lesson at hand.

Slam!

I jumped, heart in my throat. Mr. Edward had smacked his fist against the desk with such force that it sounded like a thunderclap. He looked like he wanted to use that fist to pound against something softer than a desk, but I could see him thinking twice.

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