Contract Killer or the Killer Contract?

A senior recently contacted The Spectator about how he ended up passing out fruit in the cafeteria for all 10 periods of the day. On the third day of school, he received student contracts for his parents to sign from every single one of his classes: AP Calculus ABC, AP Music Lunch, AP Dean’s Lunch, AP Drafting, AP Juulry Design, AP Shoestring Theory, AP Underwater Basket Weaving, and AP Regeneron. All of these were due the next day.

So, after going home and spending an entire night finishing his college apps and waking up and spending his entire commute finishing even more college apps, how many contracts did our beloved senior end up getting signed? Zero. Nada. Zilch. He walked all the way up to the 11th-floor pool, sat in his favorite spot in his AP Underwater Basket Weaving class, taught by the infamous Michael Phelps, and almost drowned when his jaw hit the floor upon realizing he hadn’t gotten any of his contracts signed!

He whipped out his favorite click pen and tried forging his mom’s signature, but the ink kept leaking into the water and irritating his neighbors’ noses to the point of making them sneeze. Ah… ah… achoo! He knew this wasn’t going to work, so he asked to use the bathroom. He snuck his folder into his swim trunks, made it there in record time, and was barely able to dodge a cloud of noxious JUUL smoke. Whew!

After successfully completing all of his contracts, he went back to class, and life went back to normal until the very next day, when his AP Dean’s Lunch teacher, Ms. Josina Dunkel, pulled him into the hallway and told him to go to Mr. Brian Moran’s office. The door was open, but the lights were off, and there was not a single speck of light to be found. He sat in a nearby chair, and a spotlight suddenly blinded him! He could make out Moran’s silhouette as it slid a paper toward him.

“We got a pretty big alumni donation this year, so instead of fixing the escalators, we sank a couple million dollars into the Sham Scram 9000.” He fed the paper through a slot, and the machine’s lights lit up like the eyes of a freshman hunter who had just seen a lost freshie.

“Cool,” the senior said. “Does it work for academic dishonesty?”

“No.”

“Awesome! That means… er… fuhgedaboutit!”

Moran raised an eyebrow before taking the paper back, sitting down, leaning in, and T-posing to show his dominance.

“You, sir, have forged your mom’s signature. Do you see this section over here?” He pointed to a line of white text in 8-point Comic Sans that read: “Forging a parent’s signature will result in having to spend 10 periods a day, every day, passing out fruit in the cafeteria for the rest of your life.”

And so it came to be that our senior became a cafeteria worker, without any pay, free lunch, workers’ compensation, or even waivers for his SAT IIs. When asked about it, he said he hated it. “My first day, I tried reminding this big football-player-type dude that he needed an apple. He sucker-punched me so hard that I got a black eye with a color that somehow looked more appealing than any of the fruit I was offering. Don’t forge your parents’ signatures, kid.”

I’m going to take that advice to heart. But first, I need to forge my mom’s signature on a couple of checks with a lot of zeros.