The Secret Pooper

On the way to school the next morning, I plan on telling Grace that we want to be a People Puppets host family. I’m leaning out the window, staring at an addition to a house that seems to have sprouted up overnight, which is when Teddy pokes me on the arm.

“Someone’s been pooping at school.”

“Well, I should hope so,” I say, distracted by a monstrous three-story turret-like-silo jutting out of the left side of a blue-black Gorey-esque Victorian. “That’s what bathrooms are for. And it’s bad to hold it in every day, by the way, if that’s what you’re still doing. There’s no shame in doing your business at school if you have to. Everybody poops.” I wonder if I’ll ever pass up an opportunity to bore him with a teaching moment.

“No, Mom. They didn’t poop in the bathroom. They pooped in the hallway in front of the bathroom. Like on the floor.”

I turn to him. “On the floor?” He nods. I’m certain that I’ve missed something. “Start again.”

He does—and this time he describes, in a fair amount of detail, how the first incident started when Ms. Grace, as the students call her, ran into the classroom, wild-eyed and almost in tears and yelping in a high-pitched squeal to Mr. Noah: “Oh my God! There’s something you need to see right away!”

The middle-schoolers—all ten or eleven of them, gangly and awkward and barely coordinated—somehow rushed into the hallway before Mr. Noah could get in front of the troubling tableau and block their view of it: “it” being a perfect pile of poop, much like the ubiquitous cartoonish emoji: tiered, piled high, deep brown. Grace squealed in horror again, as did Mr. Noah, before they managed to corral the students back to the classroom and call the janitor, Ms. JoJo, to remove the mess. The teachers—rattled, whispering in the corner—could then be overheard assessing the possibility that the excrement had been produced by a dog that had somehow entered the building, done its business, and then let itself out—all without being seen or heard. But the “dog theory” was debunked as quickly as it had been suggested, since both teachers, who had several dogs between them, knew, as did their pet-owning students, that there was a clear difference between animal poop and human poop. No one who had ever picked up after the family dog in the backyard or on a walk in the woods would mistake what they’d seen on the buffed wood floor of the second-floor school hallway for anything other than what it was: people poop.

The second time was the morning of my presentation. The students and Mr. Noah were already in the multipurpose room when Grace, who had lagged behind the others to prepare a handout for a pre-Inhabitancy PowerPoint presentation—“Puppetry Through the Ages”—came upon the pile of feces in a slightly different spot—this time, on the floor inside the unisex bathroom: outside the stalls and in front of the row of sinks. Later that day, the students were questioned, one by one, in the science lab adjoining the main middle school classroom, by the teachers who tag-teamed, continually checking the hallway for another pile of poop.