Rule the School Read online

  5. Use Fantastically Frigid Freeze Ray to Rule the World! MUAHAHAHAHA!!!

  I stayed in bed until noon that first Saturday. Who knew junior high school could be so exhausting? Without my wondrous weapons and diabolical devices, the only advantage I had over the Farding staff and students was my magnificent mind—and I was about to put it to sinister use! After getting my evil juices flowing with a quick game of Superhero Shin Kick—and eating a bowl of cinnamon Teddy Grahams, and watching six episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants— I set about devising a plan to dispose of Commander Virtue, an EVIL PLAN so incredibly, incomparably, inconceivably incomprehensible that none save Vordak himself could possibly have come up with it!

  “Wow. That was a really long sentence.”

  Sixty words, to be precise. Each and every one of them a work of pure evil genius. I said back in the beginning of the book that I would not be “dummying” things down for you, and I meant it.

  Anyway, without even trying very hard, I came up with a diabolically brilliant, foolproof EVIL PLAN to finally rid myself, and the rest of the world, of that good-for-nothing goody two-shoes. Not to brag, but this is easily in my top five diabolically brilliant, foolproof EVIL PLANS of all time. Probably number two, in fact, right behind Refuse to Bathe Until the Entire Planet Surrenders. And this one is going to work! And Armageddon will be much happier.

  VORDAK THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE’S

  Diabolically Brilliant Foolproof EVIL PLAN 1793

  Commander Virtue’s Incredible Career Day Comeuppance

  Step 1. Organize a Career Day at school. Parents will be invited to talk to the students about what they do for a living. There’s no way that babbling blowhard will be able to pass up the opportunity to talk to kids about how wonderful he is.

  Step 2. Disguise my most powerful robot as my dad.

  Step 3. Schedule Dadbot to come in at the same time as Commander Virtue.

  Step 4. Bring in cupcakes for the whole school.

  Step 5. While Commander Virtue is speaking to the students—and thus at his most vulnerable— my Dadbot will apply a whooping of epic proportions on him. The children will be so disappointed in the pathetic Commander that they will boo him unmercifully and fling my frosted foodstuffs at his floundering form.

  Step 6. Aware that he has let so many children down, the cupcake-covered Commander will slink off in shame, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Step 7. Unleash Evil Laugh—MUAHAHAHAHA!!!

  Step 8. Craig Virtue will probably cry. This isn’t really part of the plan, but I’ll enjoy it, nonetheless.

  Back at the lair, Professor Cranium spent the weekend conducting his second round of experiments with the freeze-ray prototype.

  “Still no ‘Fantastical’?”

  Hah! He’d had some success recently with the icecube tray, so he thought he would freeze the neighbor’s pool while their kids were playing Marco Polo (okay, I have to give him some credit for evil creativity). Not only did the ray have no effect on the water, it actually melted the kids’ Popsicles! I left him another note.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I could scarcely believe I was starting a second week of school, and yet here I was. I had come up empty the previous week on my hunt for the balsoid coil, but, honestly, even if I located it five minutes from now, I was going to remain a student until I saw my Virtue destruction plan through. I strode defiantly into Principal Combover’s office first thing Monday morning and demanded we have a Career Day. My years in Supervillainy have provided me with vast experience in demanding things, and I was not to be denied. I pounded my fist on his desk repeatedly and flailed my arms and cape about in a highly intimidating fashion. I jutted my jaw and clenched my teeth and let it be known, in no uncertain terms, that I was used to having my way. It was obvious I was someone not to be trifled with. That’s when Miss Fnarbarbler, Combover’s administrative assistant, came in.

  EXCUSE ME, YOUNG MAN, BUT WHY ARE YOU POUNDING ON THAT DESK AND CARRYING ON THAT WAY?

  WHY, TO LET PRINCIPAL COMBOVER KNOW I MEAN BUSINESS.

  WELL, AS YOU CAN SEE HE’S NOT HERE. IF YOU LEAVE YOUR NAME, I’LL LET HIM KNOW YOU MEAN BUSINESS THE SECOND HE RETURNS FROM HIS MEETING. IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN HELP YOU WITH?

  INDEED! I DEMAND WE HAVE A CAREER DAY HERE AT FARDING!

  WELL, AREN’T YOU CUTE, WITH YOUR LITTLE HELMET AND CAPE AND GLOVES AND ALL, DEMANDING THINGS.

  CUTE?! HANDSOME— YES! STRIKING—INDEED! STUNNING—WITHOUT QUESTION! BUT IABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, AM NOT CUTE!

  MY, YOU ARE PRECIOUS.

  GREAT GASSY GOBLINS! ARE WE GOING TO HAVE A CAREER DAY OR NOT?!

  ACTUALLY, WE USED TO, BUT STOPPED A FEW YEARS AGO AFTER AN UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT INVOLVING A MOM WHO RAISED BOA CONSTRICTORS. I SUPPOSE IT COULD START UP AGAIN, BUT THAT WOULD BE UP TO THE STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT

  AND WHO MIGHT THAT BE?

  OH, THERE ISN’T ONE.

  MISS FNARBARBLER, YOU ARE TRYING MY PATIENCE!

  GOODNESS, BUT YOU’RE ADORABLE. WHAT I MEANT WAS THERE ISN’T ONE YET. THE ELECTIONS ARE IN THREE WEEKS. MARLENA LURCHBURGER IS THE OVERWHELMING FAVORITE. SHE’S A WONDERFUL YOUNG LADY. EVERYONE IN THE SCHOOL LIKES HER.

  NOT EVERYONE.

  I found Marlena in the cafeteria during lunch hour, surrounded by fawning classmates. I doubt Commander Virtue himself would be any more popular among the students. She actually appeared to be glowing, although that was probably just the sunlight through the windows reflecting off her perfectly white teeth. I relayed my Career Day idea, but Marlena would have no part of it. I tried to intimidate her, but the problem with being an adult Supervillain in a twelve-year-old body is no one takes you seriously when you threaten to turn their eyeballs into petroleum jelly. I found out later that Marlena’s parents own and operate Wiggle’s Nightcrawler and Cricket Stand in town. Apparently, she was embarrassed by the thought of them talking about their careers as bait-shop owners.

  So the die was cast—if I was to have my Career Day, I, Vordak the Incomprehensible, would have to win the election and TAKE OVER THE CLASS PRESIDENCY OF FREDERICK FARDING JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL! MUAHAHAHAHA!!! Lurchburger had already begun her election campaign. And I began mine before I left school that very day.

  By that second week I had begun to notice that there was something peculiar about a couple of members of the school’s staff. Well, there was something peculiar about everybody on the staff, but two in particular seemed especially unusual. First there is the lunch lady, Agnes Lipwartz, who, strangely enough, has a large wart on her upper lip. It’s funny how many of the adults at the school have oddly descriptive last names. I just hope I’m out of here before Vice Principal Skunkbreath returns from National Guard duty. Anyway, whenever I would go through the lunch line, Lipwartz would give me much smaller portions than the other students, which was probably a good thing, particularly when the menu called for “Chef ’s Choice.”

  Then there’s Burfus Waxclog, the janitor. Again with the name—Waxclog suffers from tremendous amounts of waxy buildup in his ears. Whenever I walk past Waxclog, he stops whatever he is doing and watches me go by. When I am at my locker, he always seems to be busy fiddling with something nearby.

  I occasionally say hello, but he never responds. I don’t know whether this is because he is ignoring me or he just can’t hear anything through his wax-congested ear canals. Either way, there is something about this curious custodian that’s just not right. Besides the earwax thing, I mean.

  “Attention, students. This is Principal Combover. Our own Miss Chowdersox is recovering nicely and should be back at school in a few weeks. She says it’s too quiet sitting at home by herself and she really misses all the noise you Farding kids make.”

  Speaking of sitting at home, have I mentioned how much I despise homework? It’s bad enough that I’m stuck in this infernal institution for seven hours a day, but then they have the nerve to expect me to do additional work at home? That may be fine for the other students—I’m sure they want to
learn everything they can. But I am not them. I am ME! And ME has too much to accomplish to waste any more time with schoolwork.

  Take Mrs. Tuvier, my English teacher. She is actually substituting for Miss Chowdersox and, oddly enough, she started at Farding the same week I did. Well, one afternoon Tuvier spent fifty-five minutes discussing poetry in class, which is about fifty-four and a half minutes too many. Honestly, when am I ever going to use poetry in my everyday life? I don’t know of one instance where an Evil Mastermind reached the heights of villainy through the use of rhyming verse. But did that stop Tuvier? Of course not. She droned on and on and on until my brain tissue had been reduced to cottage cheese.

  And then she assigned … homework: Write two poems describing yourself. That’s the real beauty of homework for teachers. It takes them 1.7 seconds to assign it and you all night to finish it. Well, I didn’t have all night, so I went down to the lab and threw together yet another ingenious invention, which I named Vordak the Incomprehensible’s Short-Term Rapid Rhyming Pill. One dose and, for the next sixty seconds, everything you say or write will rhyme. So, in order to get those two poems out of the way, I took one of the pills myself, and this is what I came up with:

  Well, that was quite simple.

  Great poems, perfect timing.

  But what’s going on here?

  My writing’s still rhyming.

  My rhyme pill was faulty.

  Now others will scoff.

  There seems to be no way

  To turn my rhymes off.

  No matter how greatly

  I try not to rhyme,

  My words come out flowery

  Ev-er-y time.

  And for an Arch-Villain,

  Now, what could be worse

  Than having your writing

  All come out in verse?

  I can hear Virtue laughing.

  He’ll find this amusing:

  The uncontrolled rhyming,

  The nonstop Dr. Seuss-ing.

  If more ultimatums

  I’m ever to send,

  This poetry garbage

  Must come to an end.

  I’ve come up with a plan!

  It involves the word orange—

  There’s no rhyme for THAT—

  So I’m free of this … snorange.

  Ack! That’s not fair!

  Now I’m making up words.

  The next thing you know,

  I’ll say something like shlurds.

  Well, I guess I’ll admit

  That my villainy’s over.

  Can’t rule worlds like this,

  So I’ll keep undercover.

  Hey, wait just a minute!

  That last rhyme was lousy!

  The pill’s wearing off,

  And that makes me quite … happy.

  Needless to say, I won’t be taking that pill again.

  “If it was needless to say, then why did you say it?”

  Because some peabrained pains in the patoot need to be told even those things that don’t need to be said.

  “Are you talking about me?”

  Does a bear live in the woods?

  “Well, yeah. Where else would he stay? I mean, his paws probably can’t turn a doorknob.”

  That was a “rhetorical” question, you muttering muttonhead. Rhetorical questions aren’t meant to be answered. Do you understand?

  Well, do you?

  What insolence! I demand you answer me!

  “Oh, I thought that was another ‘rhetorical’ question.”

  ACK! You’d best be careful, my friend. You’re skating on thin ice.

  “Actually, I’m sitting in my beanbag chair.”

  I know you aren’t really skating on thin ice! That was a metaphor—you know, when you say one thing but actually mean something else!

  “So, when you said I was skating on thin ice, you actually meant I was sitting in my beanbag chair?”

  Of course not! I meant that you’d better be careful with the smart-alecky remarks or something unfortunate might happen to you. Got it?

  “I have a Spider-Man toothbrush.”

  WHAT?!

  “That was a metaphor. When I said, ‘I have a Spiderman toothbrush,’ I actually meant ‘yes.’”

  THAT’S NOT HOW A METAPHOR … ZOUNDS! I hope you’re proud of yourself! You just wasted an entire page and a half!

  The whole bus thing hadn’t worked out as I had hoped. My helmet had endured unsightly scratches and my cape carried the stench of Sminion armpit perspiration. Not to mention every time I heard the sound of the brakes, I thought Commander Virtue’s propulsion boots were landing behind me. So Wednesday I drove my giant robot to school. But there was no good place to keep it.

  Fortunately, Dad had kept my Roscoenator up in the attic all these years. I’d named it after my pet hamster, Roscoe. That’s him on the handlebars.

  Thanks to the pavement-scorching scooter’s miniaturized Turbojet engine, I made it to school Thursday morning in seven seconds flat. It would have been faster, but my helmet provided a great deal of wind resistance. I must admit, the scooter looked absolutely stunning chained to the bicycle rack. And, of course, the other students simply oozed jealousy.

  The joy I radiated from riding my remarkable Roscoenator was sucked away as soon as I took my seat in Mr. Shinetop’s science class. And the joy sucker was an irritating eyesore named Benny Yoshida.

  Benny was assigned to the desk next to mine, which was unfortunate, since he has some sort of nasal disorder. A greenish-yellow liquid streams down his upper lip continuously. He blows his nose at a rate of twice per minute— and he doesn’t use Kleenex. His mother says it’s too expensive, since he would run through five or six boxes a day. Instead, he has this horrifying handkerchief that leaves a huge wet stain in the area of his shirt pocket. Every half hour or so he wrings it out over the wastebasket.

  When I first came to class, I sat three rows down from Yoshida. The second I laid eyes on that mucous manufacturing misfit, I demanded that Shinetop require him to wear a bucket over his head at all times. Not only did he refuse my demand, he moved me right next to Benny. He claimed it was because I needed to learn to have “tolerance” for others. Once I Rule the World, Shinetop will learn to have tolerance for vats of sulfuric acid.

  That evening, the more I thought about Lunch Lady Lipwartz and Waxclog the janitor, the more those names seemed familiar. I decided to look back through my Scream-Inducing Scrapbook of Evil to see if anything came up. Since I was little (the first time) I’ve saved articles about all my evil endeavors. When I’m not feeling particularly fiendish, I pull out the scrapbook and relive my moments of misery-making mayhem. It usually perks me right up. Anyway, this is what I found:

  Ah, yes. I remember that day well. That was by far the most successful of my soil-dwelling-creature weapons. (You don’t even want to know what happened with my Miraculous Mole Beam.) It appeared that Waxclog and Lipwartz may be holding a grudge against me.

  That worm-ray article got me thinking it would be best not to eat the school lunches anymore. It was probably only a matter of time before Lunch Lady Lipwartz decided to put something really unhealthy in my mashed potatoes, like rat poison or broken glass or … more mashed potatoes. Fortunately, Professor Cranium, although he’s a lousy Evil Genius, happens to be a great cook.

  Unfortunately, I have found that junior high school has a way of ruining pretty much everything. We have assigned seats in the cafeteria and I happen to be stuck across from Jonah Shtorp. His dad packs him a lunch every day—in his Commander Virtue lunch box! But that’s not the worst of it. He has a tuna sandwich every day. Not tuna salad, mind you, where the tuna is all mashed up and mixed with mayonnaise, but an entire stinking, reeking, stench-emitting tuna between two pieces of bread.

  When I was buying the school lunches, that sandwich didn’t bother me as much. But now that I was bringing meals that actually looked, smelled, and tasted like food, I was not about to let Jonah Shtorp ruin them
with his famously funky fish. Since I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day in Combover’s office, I let Shtorp know, as pleasantly as possible, that I would appreciate it if he brought a slightly less odoriferous sandwich for lunch from now on.

  Lunch Lady Lipwartz saw what happened, threw down her serving spoon, and rushed right over. That’s what I get for trying to be pleasant.

  I SAW THAT, YOU LITTLE HOOLIGAN! THAT WAS A HORRIBLE THING TO DO!

  WHAT? I ONLY PULLED IT OVER HIS HEAD. IT’S NOT LIKE HE CAN’T STILL MOVE HIS ARMS AND WALK AROUND AND STUFF. AND LOOK, I JUST FIXED IT SO HE CAN SEE WHERE HE’S GOING.

  YOUNG MAN, TAKE THAT FISH OFF YOUR HEAD RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

  DO I HAVE TO? THIS IS ACTUALLY PRETTY COOL.

  YES, YOU HAVE TO! AND WHY DON’T YOU JUST BUY THE SCHOOL LUNCH AND AVOID THIS PROBLEM ALTOGETHER?

  MY DAD WON’T LET ME EAT YOUR SCHOOL LUNCHES.

  WHY NOT?