Free Slob by Ellen Potter Page A

too. She pointed a finger at him and said, “That was massively inappropriate, Gene.” She didn’t bother to keep her voice down either, so that we all heard her scolding him but more importantly, we caught that his name was Gene.
    “Gene?!” Someone in our class repeated loudly in an incredulous voice.
    “Settle down, people!” he called out to all of us. He probably would have called us “ladies” instead of “people” if the aide hadn’t been there.
    I was watching Mason. He had been working his jaw for several seconds, his mean little eyes fixed on Mr. Wooly. I suspected he was busy collecting a large glob of phlegm to use as a projectile.
    Yeah, do it, Mason, I thought. Hit Mr. Wooly right in the face with a fat, juicy goober.
    Instant revenge on both my enemies. You can see how much that would appeal to me, I’m sure.
    “Mr. Ragg,” Mr. Wooly said to Mason, “A4.”
    Mason’s jaw stopped churning. He stood there for a moment, glaring at Mr. Wooly, until the aide put a careful hand on his back and guided him to the spot on the slickery gym floor, showing him the A on the wall to his right and the 4 on the wall behind Mr. Wooly.
    Mason was front and center, directly in Mr. Wooly’s line of fire.
    Excellent.
    During our stretches, Mr. Wooly made us do a tricky series of leg hops, which he’d never had us do before. There was a lot of “left, left, right, left, right, right,” so that we had to keep switching legs in this random jig. We were all stumbling around—even Andre managed to look awkward. But today, Mason was Mr. Wooly’s prime target.
    “Keep up, Mr. Ragg!” Mr. Wooly shouted over the sound of furiously pounding sneakers. “This train doesn’t stop for latecomers! It’s sink or swim, pal! I see your feet moving, but the parade is passing you by!”
    That’s three mixed metaphors in a row, in case you didn’t notice. Obviously, Mr. Wooly didn’t.
    I guess I should have felt pretty pleased that he was picking on Mason, but I couldn’t somehow. Maybe it was because Mason’s evil genius face was turned away from me. From my vantage point, all I could see was a kid with fast, skinny legs, hopping around really nimbly. You had to admire it somehow. It reminded me of some of those old cowboy movies, when the bad guy shoots at the feet of the good guy, which makes him dance around to avoid the bullets.
    But Mason was the bad guy.
    Still, at that moment, I admired him anyway.
    Finally, Mr. Wooly called a stop to the idiotic warm-up and said it was time for gymnastics. I felt my stomach twist up.
    “Today, my friends,” Mr. Wooly announced, “we are going to engage in a little healthy competition.”
    Oh, blithering carbuncles.
    I didn’t really think that, you understand. I thought something else entirely, but it’s not printable.
    “I’ll be separating you out into teams and we’ll have a little gymnastic triathlon.”
    From his back pocket, he whipped out a list of all our names and which teams we were on. I tell you, he must have sweated over the thing all night long. For a subhuman bozo, Mr. Wooly could be diabolically clever when he wanted to be. The three teams were set up thusly:
    1. Team A had one kid who was a superstar athlete (that was Andre) and a few other passably athletic kids
    2. Team B had several wannabe superstar athletes who were clawing their way to the top and full of pent-up frustration that they were not the real, actual superstar athlete. They also had a few so-so-ish to poor athletes and one bully magnet whose job was to bring down the entire team. That would be me.
    The combination was designed to not only foster competition between the teams, but also within the teams. Have you ever seen those movies about the Roman gladiator fights, where they tossed a bunch of poor guys into an arena with tigers and crocodiles?
    Yeah.
    That’s right.
    And I didn’t even have a helmet or those nifty sandals.
    But Mr. Wooly had another decision to make. He hadn’t