Chapter 11 - Sponge Toss
My rushed getaway from Josh meant I arrived the Sponge Toss booth ten minutes early, so I had an opportunity to get a feel for the game before I started getting hit with wet sponges.
Mr Mitchell the P.E. teacher was on-deck, his wet and smiling face mounted above the brightly coloured body of a clown painted on the outside of the booth, while a line of senior boys tried and mostly failed to hit him with large, wet rectangular sponges. It didn't take long to work out that this game was a lot harder than it looked. The size and shape of the sponges made them hard to throw, they wouldn't fly straight, and if you threw them too hard then the water would all fly off in transit.
Notwithstanding the fact that the game was clearly rigged to get people coming back for more (it would be no fun if every throw hit the target), I wanted to have a go too.
"Can teachers play?" I asked the supervising parent who was collecting money and making sure that most of the rules were followed.
"Sure thing, Miss Granger," he said (well that was embarrassing – I didn't recognise him at all). "Your money spends just as well as the kids'. Two bucks gets you two sponges, or five bucks for five," he said with an ironic grin. "But making good with Mr Mitchell afterwards is your own lookout."
"This isn't going to make for an awkward moment in the staff room, is it Mr Mitchell?" I joked to the face in the booth.
"Only if you hit me Jeannie," he said dryly. "Just remember whose turn it is next."
"Oh, I'm well aware," I laughed, paying my two dollars and arming myself with a sponge. "I just want to have a go now before I lose my sense of humour."
I find the expression 'he or she throws like a girl' pretty offensive, but whoever came up with it was probably watching me throw at the time. In my defence, I spent most of my childhood reading books, not playing cricket or softball or skipping stones on a pond. Rather than enduring the crowing from the boys that would surely come if I tried to throw over-arm, I looped a gentle under-arm lob in Mr Mitchell's direction and I almost got him. The look on his face was in some ways better than a bullseye; he braced for the direct hit, but it just dipped at the last moment and hit the chest of the painted clown to a cry of "O-o-o-h" from the crowd of onlookers.
"A bit more pepper on the next one, Jeannie," he teased, obviously trying to goad me into a rash throw that would surely spray wide.
"Just finding my range, Mr Mitchell," I called, still using his surname in the presence of the kids. "Hold your breath for the real one!"
I threw my second sponge with the same underhand loop and this time I got him! "Yes! Woooo!" I celebrated perhaps a little too grandly with the gathered group of seniors as it plopped wetly into his face. I admit that it wasn't as satisfying as the loud THWACK of a full-blooded throw, but I'll take my wins where I find them.
"The sponge I can forgive, Jeannie," Mr Mitchell spluttered, blinking water from his eyes. "It's the victory dance you're going to pay for when I get out of here!" Uncowed, I did another little lap of high-fives and danced an arms-in-the-air backside-wiggle to the universal cry of the poor winner: "Oh yeah-eah! Uh ha-aa!" All of this to the great delight and cheering from every boy who had ever been ordered by Mr Mitchell to run extra laps before they hit the showers.
I watched a few more kids try to hit him with varying degrees of success, and then Mr Smith approached carrying a large, flat cardboard box. This would be my surprise, I suppose.
"You're excused, Mr. Mitchell," the principal said in his most commanding baritone. "We need to prepare the booth for the soon-to-be Mrs Marsh." All eyes were on me now, but I wasn't nervous; it was a good kind of attention and everyone was smiling and having fun.
They all gathered around the principal to see what was in the box, but I already had a fair idea; it looked like exactly the type of thing you might use for long-term storage of a dress. A
wedding
dress, for instance. Sure enough, Mr Smith lifted the lid and drew from within an atrocity of white tulle and satin that we can only pray time will forget. With enormous puffy sleeves and every square inch fairly bristling with frilly adornments, it was almost physically painful to look at.
"Why Mr Smith," I said as deadpan as I could manage. "That looks
just
like the one I'll be wearing next month!"
"Then my sympathies go to your fiancé, Miss Granger," he shot back with Dumbledore-like understated mirth. "This belonged to my dearly departed maiden Aunt Beatrice. And yes, before you say anything I do understand the paradox of a maiden aunt with a wedding dress."
In the bottom of the box was a hammer, a few two-inch nails and a pair of bulldog clips. As he was talking he began to hammer nails into the Sponge Toss booth at the top of the painted clown's shoulders.
"It was Aunt Bea's great unfulfilled dream to have an enormous fairy-tale wedding," he continued. "And to that end, in her impetuous youth, she bought this enormous fairy-tale wedding dress, anticipating the day when a dashing young man would sweep her off her feet and make her his bride."
"Dare I ask what happened?" I offered. This had all the hallmarks of a funny story, but with references to a dead aunt whose dreams were unfulfilled, I think we were all waiting for permission to laugh.
"Well, my sainted mother had a saying about how their parents' genes had been divided," Mr Smith finished hammering in the nails and began hanging the dress on bulldog clips beneath the hole from which my head would soon project. "She would say that she had inherited the good-looks …"
"Whereas Aunt Bea had inherited the brains?" I finished for him.
"Well, that's what I used to think," Mr Smith turned and smiled through his false beard. "But my mother tactfully never finished that saying. When I received this dress and some other items from Aunt Bea's estate, I began to understand why not. Perhaps we can just say that Aunt Bea was an impetuous woman and an ambitious woman, however she was not a woman especially blessed with either looks or brains."
There was polite laughter all round.
"Why did you keep it?" I asked.
"It was simply too hideous to donate to Good-Will," he shrugged. "And you never know when something this unique will come in handy."
"Today being a case in point," I said flatly, imagining the moment a minute from now when I would be appearing to wear it.
"Precisely," he answered brightly. "Now get thee into that Sponge Toss booth, Miss Granger. These students have money burning holes in their pockets and the Building Fund is a few thousand shy of buying us a new technology centre."
~~~
I suspect that our school's Sponge Toss booth was built and donated by a civic-minded parent, one with a tendency towards over-engineering would be my bet. I've seen Sponge Toss games before and they're just a vertical wall with a hole cut in it. Ours really is a "booth" though and it's built with a much grander vision in mind. It's a small, self-contained, collapsible room with a door in the back, and instead of a hole to show just the victim's face, it has this recessed box in the front wall with a hole in the bottom. From the front it looks a bit like a ticket-window. From inside the booth, you duck underneath the box and pop your head up through the hole, then fit a couple of foam batts around your neck to stop the sponges dropping down through the gap. From the outside, the effect of a disembodied head sitting on a shelf is quite creepy, but it's mitigated by the painted clown body underneath.
I let myself in and shut the door behind me. It wasn't exactly spacious, but then I wasn't exactly there for a zumba class, either. There was a bar stool to sit on with a gas lift to get you positioned just right regardless of height. Over-engineered it may be, but it looked like you could sit there comfortably for half an hour or more, and that's not something that can be easily said for a simple hole in a plywood wall.
