The Locker

While in high school one Friday morning, I was on the way to the campus and met my friend Ashby. As we passed a refuse heap, we saw a dead rat in it. Talk about the devil in your mind, we both had the idea to take this thing in and put it in a locker. Nobody ever locked a locker in those days unless you had money in it. Most held gym clothes and maybe a book between classes. One of our friends, "F", had always told us that he had been born without the ability to smell. We were going to test this. One of the guys in the picture above is F.

So, the deed was begun. We entered the hall where our lockers were and placed the rat under a pile of dirty gym clothes in F's locker which was not too far from ours. If we had not been somewhat stupid, as most teenage boys are, we would have chosen a more remote spot. We did reckon with whose locker it was but not that it was Friday.

School was out, and we went about our part time jobs, dates, looking for girls, etc. for the weekend. When Monday AM arrived, we didn't give the dead rat a thought until we arrived at school to find that the entire east wing had been closed off until further notice due to something dead in it. After an hour or so, the announcement came that those of us who needed to get into our lockers could go into the east wing. Our home room was in that area, and Ashby and I were about to bust a gut to see what had happened. We ran into the hallway where the lockers were to find F standing in front of his locker holding a pair of gym shorts dripping with maggots. It was true; he could not smell a thing.

Well, the principal went ballistic. He knew that F would not do such a thing to himself, so there had to be other guilty parties. There were about eight of us who had been buddies since kindergarten, so we were immediately excluded from suspicion. There was about a dozen others who were grilled throughout the day, but of course, no one could confess. This was the most fun that we had had since a condom had been affixed to a water fountain tied in the open position. Have you ever seen a condom with about four gallons of water in it? Better yet, how would one remove it without a flood?

We did have a lot of fun in high school. We confessed our rat deed to F after some years, and we all remained friends.