A Zombie Middle School Diary, Book 4: My Home Economics Teacher is a Pigman
Copyright 2016 Mark Mulle
Author’s Note
This short story is for your reading pleasure. The characters in this "Minecraft Adventure Series" such as Steve, Endermen or Herobrine...etc are based on the Minecraft Game coming from Minecraft ®/TM & © 2009-2013 Mojang / Notch
Table of Contents
Day One: The Last Day of Summer Vacation
Day Two: The First Day of Middle School
Day Three: Introducing...
Day Four: Home Ec? More Like Hilarious Ec.
Day Five: Snow and Tibby’s Adventures
Day Six: The Assembly
Day Seven: Talking with Roarbert
Day Eight: Zombie Meets Overworld
Day Nine: Sewing
Day Ten: A Meal with the Girls
Day Eleven: Signing Up
Day Twelve: A Sewing Situation
Day Thirteen: Behaving Better
Day Fourteen: Happy Birthday to Me!
Day Fifteen: Time to Chill
Day Sixteen: The Cooking Club
Day Seventeen: Other Clubs
Day Eighteen: Club Meets Classroom
Day Nineteen: Kitchen Tutor
Day Twenty: The Bake Sale Bake Off
Day Twenty-One: Boys Only!
Day Twenty-Two: A Day Out with the Girls
Day Twenty-Three: The Cooking Club, Again
Day Twenty-Four: Grunt’s Grunts
Day Twenty-Five: Roarbert’s Brotherly Advice
Day Twenty-Six: Finally Talking
Day Twenty-Seven: Summer Memories and Autumn Ideas
Day Twenty-Eight: Fencing
Day Twenty-Nine: PARTY!
Day Thirty: What Next?
About the Author
Other books by this Author
Day One: The Last Day of Summer Vacation
Dear Diary,
My name is Ugh, and I’ve finally finished summer school. Of course, that just means that I need to start going to my normal school tomorrow. I’m a little nervous about it, but I’m mostly excited. I worked so hard to be able to get into middle school, and now I’m going to do my best in school this year so that I don’t end up in summer school again.
When I was in fifth grade I was young and foolish. I skipped a lot of my classes to hang out with my pal Grunt, even though I could have just passed him notes during class...now that I think about it. Anyway, I’m not a slow learner or anything, but since I skipped so many classes I had to go to summer school for the WHOLE summer. Well, except for weekends, but it was still most of the summer.
I had a few crazy teachers while I was in summer school. I had this really cool history teacher. Her name was Ms. Skele and she was so old that she actually helped to make history. I had another teacher named Miss Enchantment. She was kind of strict, but I did learn a lot in her class. She was half-human and half-witch, which I didn’t even know was possible. We learned how to make a mix of experiments and potions. It was actually really cool. My last teacher was a gym teacher. His name was Mr. Inferno. He was a Blaze, but he didn’t have the temper of a Blaze. I wasn’t very good in that class at first, but as time went on I got better. I actually made a couple friends in that class, too.
Speaking of my friends, they all passed summer school, too. That means that they’ll be moving onto middle school with me! My best friend is Grunt. He’s a zombie like me...and also a little bit of a slacker like me. I guess that’s why we get along so well. My second best friend is Snow. We met in summer school. She’s not a slow learner, either. She transferred schools in a weird part of the year, so she fell behind. She’s actually pretty smart and cool for a girl Skeleton. Another girl Skeleton who I’m friends with is Tibby. I met her in my gym class. She’s just as tough as any guy, but she still likes some girly stuff too. She’s pretty cool. Lastly, I’m also friends with this guy named Will who I met in my gym class.
I can’t wait to see all of my friends at school tomorrow. I hope it goes well. Whatever happens, I’ll write all about it tomorrow!
Day Two: The First Day of Middle School
Dear Diary,
Today is the first day of middle school. I was so excited to go to school right away and put away my things in my locker. That’s one cool new thing about middle school, having lockers. In elementary school, we had to keep all of our books in our desk. We sat in the same room all day with the same teacher. Now that we’re in middle school we get to put all of our books in lockers, switch classrooms every once in a while and have a different teacher for every subject. It’s a lot more complicated than elementary school, but I think it’s going to be a lot more fun, too.
A lot of the kids were really tired today. I bet they weren’t used to waking up as soon as the sun sets like I was. I was probably the most awake person around the place, and that’s counting the teachers. Because of all of this, I didn’t really get to talk to my friends much today. All they wanted to do was take naps, which was pretty lame.
I didn’t even have to do much in class today, which was cool and boring at the same time. A lot of teachers handed out those syllabus things that Miss Enchantment gave me a couple months ago. We were just told what the rules were, what the homework was going to be like, and what would happen if we needed anything or if we broke the rules. The good news is that the teachers were so busy doing this that we didn’t get any homework.
Today was kind of lame, but I’m sure that tomorrow will be cooler. When it is, I’ll write all about it.
Day Three: Introducing...
Dear Diary,
I just realized today that I forgot to mention some important things in this diary, like who my teachers are and why I’m even writing this diary in the first place. I think I’m going to start with the latter.
So, in the summer my mom made me write in a diary as a bonus punishment for getting stuck in summer school. She didn’t read it or anything, but she did make sure to check that I wrote something. Her eyesight is really bad, so whenever she did look at it, everything just looked really blurry to her. She’s not making me write this diary, but I kind of liked writing in a diary in summer school, so I decided to keep it up, at least for a little bit. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to write in this thing before things get really busy at school, but I’m going to try to keep up on it for as long as I can.
Moving on to the other thing I wanted to write about, I have a lot of funky teachers this year. Miss Enchantment got a full-time job teaching here, so that’s one familiar face, but none of my other summer school teachers are here. Most of the teachers were Skeletons or Zombies, so there’s not really anything exciting to write about.
The teacher that really caught my attention was this pigman named Mr. Nocab who is teaching my home economics class. He’s probably the fattest pigman that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why the principal put him in charge of food. I mean, he’ll probably just end up eating it all. He just looks like the sort of guy who could get in some sort of silly problems, like a cartoon character that keeps bumping into stuff and who does everything wrong. I think I’ll actually write about how that class goes tomorrow. I bet it’ll be hilarious.
Day Four: Home Ec? More Like Hilarious Ec.
Dear Diary,
The first few days of my home ec class were mostly just safety tips like, don’t cut yourself when you’re cutting food, don’t do this, don’t do that, blah, blah, blah. It was all pretty boring. Nothing funny happened at all. Today was the first day
that the class actually did anything, so I was just waiting for something silly to happen. Let’s just say that I did not leave the room feeling disappointed.
Today we went out into the school’s garden to learn how to know when the plants were ready to pick. Luckily, the school’s garden was pretty big so everyone got to pick some stuff. It was actually kind of fun to get my hands dirty to pick stuff, but that wasn’t the funny part about all of this.
The funny part of the class happened when I caught Mr. Nocab munching on some of the carrots that he had just pulled out of the ground. I go to school at night, but since I’m a zombie I can still see pretty well in the dark. I was able to see that Mr. Nocab took the carrot out of the dirt and then just ate it! He didn’t even try to wipe off the dirt or anything! It was gross.
The grossest part of all of this was that he didn’t even do it just once. Whenever he thought that someone wasn’t looking he would pick up another carrot and just eat it right there. With every bite, he took I could hear him chomping down on the crunchy carrot. I’m sure that everyone else could hear it, too.
When it was time to eat after class almost all of the kids were doing something to make fun of what Mr. Nocab had done. Some kids were chomping on carrots extra hard, and I even saw one kid dip his carrots into chocolate pudding to pretend it was dirt. It was gross but really funny. I knew this class would be great for some laughs.
I’ll make sure to write some more super funny stuff tomorrow.
Day Five: Snow and Tibby’s Adventures
Dear Diary,
I don’t know if I ever mentioned it before, but Skeletons don’t really need to eat unless they want to, and a big part of home ec is learning how to cook different things. Because of all of these things, Tibby and Snow aren’t in my home ec class. We have some other classes together, but we can pretty much only hang out when it’s time to eat. Man...do I miss recess right about now.
Anyway, Snow and Tibby wanted to tell us about the class that they were in since they didn’t have to suffer through home ec with Mr. Nocab like Will, Grunt, and I had to. They had to take a class that was made just for Skeletons. It kind of sounded like they were doing arts and crafts, but they weren’t doing any baby stuff like finger painting (bone painting?) or anything like that.
From how they explained it, they were making art like how Skeletons used to make art before they merged in with monster society. It was all very...cultural. It was actually kind of neat. Tibby said that they would eventually learn how to make their own bows and arrows. I was pretty jealous of their class. It sounded like it was going to be a lot more fun than this home ec class that I was stuck in. I wonder if I could disguise myself as a Skeleton...I probably couldn’t. I don’t have much meat on me, but I have way too much to look like a Skeleton.
Anyway, I promised to write about something funny, but nothing super funny happened today. I found a joke in a book I was reading today, so I’ll just write that instead: What did the human say to the angry Creeper? “Looks like you’ve got an explosive temper!”
I’m sure something funnier will happen tomorrow so I don’t need to make up my own jokes. I’ll write more then.
Day Six: The Assembly
Dear Diary,
While I was sitting in my homeroom classroom today there was an announcement that went out on the speakers in every room. “The club assembly will begin in five minutes. Anyone who is interested in joining a club or team may leave their homeroom at this time.” Was I super interested in joining a club right now? Nah. Was I super interested in ditching homeroom? Yeah. Maybe my class skipping ways coming back to haunt me? I hope not. Besides, this time, I have a real excuse. I just need to make sure not to make a bad habit of it.
It seemed like all of my friends were interested in checking out the clubs too, so we all left the room together and made our way down to the gym where the clubs were going to be setting up their stuff. When I got there I just saw tables and tables full of flyers and free pens. I hadn’t thought about joining a club up until now, but seeing how many clubs my school had made me kind of want to join a club.
Eventually, my friends caught up to me and we looked around at the tables together to see if there was anything we would want to join. Within minutes the girls broke off from the group to look into some Skeleton-only clubs, so I was left with just Grunt and Will to hang out with.
My guy friends can be a bit mean sometimes, I’m not going to lie. All of the mocking started when we passed the cooking club table. Who was sitting in the chair behind the table? None other than Mr. Nocab himself. “I dare you to sign up for the cooking class,” Grunt said.
“How is there even going to be a cooking class with Mr. Nocab running it? He’ll just eat everything before it gets cooked,” Will said.
“You mean like those carrots he was chomping on the other day?” I added in. We had a good laugh.
I didn’t really see any clubs I was super into, but I think I’ll probably sign up for something anyway just to get involved with something. I guess there was a pretty cool Zombies-only club that sounded a lot like the cool art class Snow and Tibby were taking. I think I might sign up for that later. I’ll do my best to remember, but right now I’ve got to go back to class. I’ll write more tomorrow.
Day Seven: Talking with Roarbert
Dear Diary,
My big brother Roarbert doesn’t know a lot about anything other than video games and pizza, so I don’t really ask for his advice on a lot of things. Of course, I do ask him what to do when I really need his help, like when Grunt and I used to argue a lot during summer school, but since then I haven’t really needed to talk to him about much. Granted, summer school did end about a week ago, so I guess I might actually ask for his advice more than I would like to think I do.
Today I wanted to ask him about something that he had a few years of experience on, and that I didn’t. Roarbert is a few years older than me, so he just finished middle school last year. I knew that this meant he was busy dealing with the complicated problems of high school, but I figured that he could at least give me some advice on how to act during my three years in middle school.
I knocked on Roarbert’s door and asked if I could ask him something. To this, he only replied, “You just did ask me something,” and slammed the door. Man, teenagers sure can be annoying sometimes. I knocked on his door again and told him that it was important, and he finally let me in.
“What’s up little bro?” He asked him. I didn’t like it when he called me little bro. It made me feel like I was a baby or something.
“I was wondering if you could give me some advice on middle school,” I felt dumb saying it out loud, but if anyone could help me with this I knew it would be Roarbert.
“I’ve actually been waiting for you to ask me this,” Roarbert said. This surprised me, mostly because I didn’t know that Roarbert knew how to wait for anything. Then again, he’s surprised me before. “I can see that you’re gonna set yourself up for failure.”
“Geez, thanks,” I told him. He really wasn’t helping.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I mean it like...how do I put it? You were kind of a slacker in elementary school, and I know that you’re not going to do that again. You just try to act cool and tough, and that’s not going to get you anywhere in middle school.”
“It’s not?” I asked. I guess I did kind of have a tough guy routine in elementary school.
“It’s not. You need to be yourself. I know that it sounds like something that Mom would say, but it’s true. You’ll make way more friends that way and get into way less trouble. If you just do that, then you’ll be fine.”
“What if I’m actually a tough guy, though?” I asked him.
Roarbert punched me in the arm and I yelled something that I don’t want to write in here. “You’re not a tough guy,” he said. I guess he proved me wrong.
At least I got what I wanted out of him. I guess that Roarbert’s good for something, even if his words of
advice come with a bruise every once in a while.
Day Eight: Zombie Meets Overworld
Dear Diary,
I know that I asked Roarbert for advice, but he only gave me one thing of it. I didn’t even know if it was good advice. I did know of one great source for advice about middle school: Zombie Meets Overworld.
One of my favorite shows is called Zombie Meets Overworld. It’s about this great Zombie who gets into all kind of mischief with his friends at school. At the end of every episode, there’s always some sort of lesson that the characters are supposed to learn. I figured that I could watch a few episodes of it today to figure out if Roarbert’s advice is real or not. I’ll write more after I watch some of this show.