Health Room Skeleton Reanimated, Scientists Blame Contaminated Water
Brady Santoro (12-3)
Masterman’s latest medical marvel is not a promising young scholar, but instead a bag of bones: in this case, the Health Room Skeleton. Just in time for Easter Sunday, a mischievous student liberally doused the skeleton with water from the art room sink as the skeleton and its stand were momentarily parked outside for a figure drawing exercise. At the time, the water was contaminated with borax and other mysterious chemicals. The same day that several fifth-grade fish inexplicably (though not unsurprisingly) turned up dead, the skeleton, on the Monday after Spring Break, was observed by several anonymous climate staff to be wandering the basement before school and telling ribald jokes to anyone who was within shouting distance. Somehow, over Easter weekend, the skeleton, according to chemical tests performed by the water department, was reanimated.
By first period, the skeleton had broken into the Stage Crew room, found itself a top hat and cane, and was spotted by a sixth-grader tap-dancing in the empty auditorium during second period. The skeleton then proceeded to attempt a magic trick in which it tried to extract a rat from its top hat and hurl it at the sixth-grader but instead ended up getting bitten by the rat and then went in search of a bottle of whisky to prevent a [second?] death by rabies, which the chemistry department could not supply. The skeleton then made quite a mess by ingesting an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide. During the same period, the skeleton, seemingly unaware of being a skeleton, attempted to steal an orange from the cafeteria and had a rather public meltdown upon realizing that the orange merely bounced around their rib cage like a Plinko chip and landed, after every attempt to consume it, on the floor. By third period, the skeleton had been restrained by Officer Taylor and was taken to the precinct headquarters and booked on charges of breaking and entering. It was at this point that it was ascertained that the skeleton was indeed a skeleton and not Mr. Saint Clair, as the sixth-grader had supposed.
Upon further investigation out of sheer curiosity, the skeleton was determined to be somewhere around 119 years old. According to the skeleton (potentially named Phil?), its last memory was working on the Ben Franklin Bridge as a welder. Presumably, the skeleton became deceased by falling from its worksite (which accounts for the strange cleft in its head previously supposed to be the work of a sixth-grade vandal) and somehow ended up mounted on a stand in various public schools (the base reads “Prpty of S Philly High”). The skeleton has remained in the precinct through the end of the month, playing poker with the desk sergeant and trying to honk the horn of police cruisers. A new skeleton has been purchased by the school. It is currently being kept in an undisclosed location.