#75: Jessi’s Horrible Prank
As a teacher I can already tell I’m going to find this book triggering, LOL…
Jessi’s new Short Takes teacher is a tall, skinny, nerdy man with a slight speech impediment named Mr. Trout. The kids in her class all tease him and Mr. Trout is timid and not good at classroom management, so the class is kind of a zoo. This makes it easy for the sixth-graders to constantly prank Mr. Trout, like by all dropping their books on the floor at exactly the same time. These kids are a bunch of assholes, amirite? Meanwhile, Jessi is participating in the sixth-grade Follies, a sort of variety show in which there’s an emphasis on poking fun at school staff and SMS in general. Jessi fancies herself a comedy STAR, so she’s sure she’ll be the star of the Follies and she’s also annoyed at how boring her classmates’ pranks are.
Then a bunch of them decide to expose the fact that Mr. Trout wears a toupée. (Fucking cruel.) They use a fish hook to pull it right off his head while he’s at the front of the classroom. Jessi feels terrible but also can’t help but laugh along with everyone else. Mr. Trout just seems… pathetic. (Poor guy. I advise him to make a career change, ASAP.)
Jessi gets a plum role in the Follies and she’s named the “assistant choreographer/dance captain” and her ego inflates like a balloon. She is asked to play bald-Mr.-Trout-as-a-Klingon in the Follies and, despite her reservations about it being mean, she accepts. She gets roaring laughter in response to her imitation, so she’s on cloud nine and all her reservations go out the window. (Also, who are these teacher directors approving this???) Jessi has her star turn in the Follies and everyone tells her how amazing she was (except Mr. Trout, who was in the audience).
When Jessi returns to school on Monday, she finds out that Mr. Trout didn’t come to work and didn’t even call in a sub. Rumors swirl about what happened to him, and a lot of kids think her impression of him was the final straw that made him nope right out of SMS. The sub who takes over in Short Takes is a much better teacher (and a disciplinarian) but Jessi still feels badly. She starts a petition to bring Mr. Trout back and give him a second chance, but other adults at the school gently explain to her that Mr. Trout just wasn’t cut out for teaching. (He did, after all, bail with no notice and call the principal from a pay phone in Vermont to quit.) Jessi decides to write a letter to Mr. Trout apologizing, and he replies kindly but says he doesn’t want to return to teaching and is instead going into a graduate program with a focus on research.
In the sub-plot, the BSC charges have decided to put on their own BSC Follies, in which they lightly roast the BSC members. A little too lightly, if you ask me… I would love to help em out.
Side note: in Chapter Two, Jessi refers to Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Stacey as “The Big Four” (the original BSC members) and I think I will totally refer to them as that from now on.
