A Rumour

Funny Short Story – A Rumour
Photo credit: mimiliz from morguefile.com

I am not the kind of girl whom a teacher would usually peg as a troublemaker. But I am quite a little actress. I have a dual personality. When a teacher is in the class, I put on a most angelic and innocent smile on my face but the moment she steps out of the door, I jump up from my place and assist my friends in all their pranks. I am quite good in my studies and I never get blamed for the pranks I play. Let me relate to you an incident which occurred solely due to my mischievousness.

It was one of those drowsy Fridays with everybody saving up their energy to have fun in the weekend. We had just come from recess and everybody was feeling sleepy with their stomachs full. I hardly lended an ear to our geography teacher who was lecturing us about the various natural regions of North America. Suddenly our class was disrupted by the loud sound of many running feet. Our classroom door flew open and the frightened face of a teacher looked in. “Get out of here.” she shouted, “A fire has broken out. Go away, quickly.”

There was a stunned silence for about a second and then the class rose as a whole and swarmed out like a horde of rats fleeing a drowning ship. We assembled in the basketball court.

While I was moving through the crowd searching for my friends, an excellent idea came to me. I had no wish to study for the rest of the day and from the looks of it, it seemed that this business would be cleared up within an hour and we would need to go back to our classes and resume our studies. But if I did spread some amount of panic among the children, especially the lower forms maybe we could linger here for a longer time. I decided to put my plan to action.

I moved among the throngs of students searching for my brother and pretending as I was terribly worried for him. When I found him, I fell on him and told him to tag along with me. He looked a bit surprised at my intense tenderness. I instructed him to press a handkerchief to his nose and when he asked the reason I told him that he wouldn’t understand. He shrugged and put a dirty handkerchief to his nose.

I took my brother along with me to my friends and shouted at their faces. I spoke quite loudly as I wanted to scare them.

“Why have you not put handkerchief to your noses? There is poisonous carbon monodioxide gas coming out. The fire is huge. Go, run away from the building quickly. It is not safe. Don’t inhale the smoke at any cost.”

My plan worked to perfection. The girls among whom I had spread the rumour had believed me at once and didn’t stop to think that what I said might not have been true. These girls babbled my warning to all the other students (with some exaggeration) and the rumour spread like wildfire. Quite soon there were hundreds of panicked girls running about yelling that they were going to be sick because they had inhaled the smoke.

The fire had actually been very small but there was a lot of smoke. I told a few students that some of my friends were violently sick because they had not heeded my warning. This scared the girls further. They started crying.

The fire was doused and the mess cleared up in about an hour. Everyone was ordered to go back inside. Nobody obeyed this order because most of the students were too terrified of going anywhere near the school. The students from the lower classes tried to run away and the teachers had to chase them to round them up. The teachers had to convince the other students that what they heard was only a rumour and no harm would come to them. They tried to find out the girl who had started the rumour but to no avail. No one remembered me as the culprit and they all started blaming each other. Total confusion and disorder ensued.

At last our PE teacher blew her whistle loudly and told us that the next person who uttered a word would have to run 30 times around our school grounds. This immediately silenced everyone. She warned us that if such a thing were to happen again all of us would be given extra homework for a month. Everyone trudged back to their classes in pindrop silence.