The Craziest Things That Happened at Our School

The bathroom mirror shattered before anyone even screamed.

“Don’t go in there, girls.”

“You don’t tell me what to do.”

We didn’t listen. All we saw when we ran in was Ryan sprinting past us toward the door — he didn’t get caught, and he made sure of it. Behind him was his best friend, holding his own wrist, glass everywhere on the floor. He’d punched the soap dispenser bolted to the mirror. Just decided, mid-conversation, that it was a punching bag.

Nobody moved for a second. The hallway just stood there, glass and all.

Both of them got three weeks of in-house suspension.

That one’s not even the craziest thing that happened that year.

The Kid Who Got Suspended for Mumbling

There was a rule at our school: during a test, you were allowed to ask a classmate what page something was on. Nothing more. Just a page number.

So when a kid — quiet, a little mumbly, the kind of kid who talks to himself without meaning to — muttered something to himself during a test, a teacher decided that was cheating. Flipped out. Started screaming at him in a classroom that was, generously, the size of a large closet.

He tried to explain. “Whoa, whoa, whoa — I’m not cheating. I’m literally just mumbling to myself.”

It didn’t matter. The yelling got loud enough that the principal came in to see what was happening. And in the two seconds before she reached the door, the teacher made up an entire story — on the spot — about a kid who was screaming, throwing things, cussing people out.

None of it happened. We were all sitting right there.

He got suspended for a month.

The Book

This is the one. If you ask any of us what actually got us in trouble at that school, this is the story.

It started as a joke. Five of us — me, Ben, and three others — wrote a book. Posted it to Wattpad, just for laughs. It picked up over 5,000 views before anyone thought twice about it.

The plot: our PE teacher and the vice-principal were secretly dating. We also had some things to say about the principal and the school secretary. The vice-principal’s own son helped us write it, which felt like the funniest part at the time.

“If you’re gonna do this, do it at home,” I told one of the others, who wanted to print a copy at school instead.

“No, no — I’ll just put it on the school’s computer.”

The printer glitched. It printed the same page twice. Nobody thought about the second copy sitting in the tray.

Until lunch.

The door didn’t open. It got kicked open. The principal was standing there, and in her hand was a stapled printout — the second copy, still warm.

She pulled the whole class. Read the book out loud, front to back, in front of everyone. Some of my co-writers thought it was hilarious. I did not.

Then one of the boys, trying to save himself, started pointing around the room. “That one. That one. That one. Angelina.” All day.

“It’s okay, Angelina,” the principal told me afterward. “I knew you wouldn’t do something like that.”

I had. It just wasn’t what they thought it was.

It didn’t stay contained. An email went out to every parent in the class. One of the five was expelled. I got in-house suspension with two of the others — mine meant vacuuming the entire top floor, every single day after school.

So we tag-teamed it. Split the floor in half, moved as fast as we could, finished before anyone had time to ask why it was taking so long.

Bella still didn’t know.