The Bad Boy Ate My Shirt

Shirt Rampage

"Hey, have you heard about the missing gym clothes phenomenon?"

Brad tried to ignore his classmates' idle gossip. Especially because this bizarre new rumour, that someone had been going around stealing people's gym clothes, didn't affect him since he wasn't even in a gym class this semester.

The rumour was nearly impossible to escape. All day, in every one of his classes, there would be at least one group of students talking about the mystery of the missing gym clothes that was supposedly affecting almost every male student in a gym class.

But right now Brad was too distracted to pay them any mind. All he could think about was the mysterious text from Drew. What did he mean 'just wondering?' And what was with that smiley face?!! Did he mean anything by that?! And why did he want to know in the first place?? These questions had been running through Brad's mind at a mile a minute ever since he read Drew's message.

Before Brad's thoughts could consume him any further, there was a loud knock at the door. The person closest to the door, a small rat-like boy named Ben Dover, went and answered it.

"Can I come in?" a familiar voice asked, and Brad nearly jumped out of his seat.

"Ah, Watson! Come in! What brings you here?" Mr. Joster said warmly (but still menacingly).

"Mr. Dharbie sorta dismissed us and then ran off again in the middle of class, so I just came here to hang around," Drew said, looking over and meeting Brad's eyes. Brad's heart pounded. Master came to see me! Brad was glad that he was sitting, because he was starting to get dizzy and would have surely fallen over had he been standing.

"Well feel free to stay for the rest of class. Today we're just doing worksheets, so you won't be interrupting anything." Brad had never seen Mr. Joster in such a good mood. Granted, he wasn't very well behaved and thus frequently invoked Mr. Joster's wrath, but Mr. Joster was also notoriously menacing and rarely reacted so pleasantly. As Brad thought, Drew was truly amazing. Drew came over and sat down at the desk in front of Brad's, turning to face Brad.

"Um, hi," Brad said. Smooth. "Uh, what're you doing here?" Drew made a face.

"Weren't you listening, Brad? I was in birdwatching class when Marisa and I spotted a dodo. Mr. Dharbie got really excited and ran off. So I came to see you," Drew said. Brad started to short-circuit as his face became hot and he froze before slamming his face on his desk once he finally became able to move again. "Hey, wanna see a picture of the dodo we saw?"

Meanwhile in the gym...

A mysterious figure snuck around. There were no gym classes currently going on, so the gym was completely empty and the lights were off. They entered the boy's locker room and started breaking the locks on each locker. Since students were required to leave their clothes in their lockers, the figure was able to grab gym bags and piles of clothes from each locker, extracting the shirts from each. They put them into a bag and continued moving from locker to locker. When the bag was completely full, the figure sneakily exited the locker room and gym.

They hid in a janitor's closet and sat down on the floor cross-legged as they opened the bag and started sniffing each individual shirt.

"Tch," they clicked their tongue, "Still no luck." They stood up and headed down the hall, stuffing the bag in a locker and grabbing another large bag before heading down the hall repeating the process on other lockers...

Back with Brad and Drew

"You really need to start actually trying, Brad. You're never going to graduate if you skip and fail all your classes," Drew scolded.