Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People Hardcover - 2011

Excerpt

Donald was a juice box with a terrible attitude. Out of nowhere, he’d whale on the other juice boxes, slamming them with plastic lunchroom trays and puncturing their sacred tinfoil puncture holes with bobby pins he swiped from the girls who sat at the popular girls’ table.
 
After lunch hour, when the cafeteria staff held respectful farewell ceremonies for all the juice boxes that had donated their nectar to the student body that day, Donald would run around the kitchen looking for things to throw into the deep fryer. This was annoying, but also kind of amusing—like when he dropped an entire lost and found drawer full of cellphones and dental retainers into the melted lard left over from Catfish Friday.
 
That actually made him a bit of a hero to the lunch ladies and the teachers, but Janitor Schwinn had to cancel his line dancing class that evening to stay late to drain the deep fryer and scrape melted iPods from its bottom. As far as Janitor Schwinn was concerned, Donald should have been buried in the recycling bins months back. But in the end, it took a truly fiendish deed to get Donald expelled from the school.
 
You see, Donald was obsessed with getting other juice boxes squished beneath the wheels of cars coming out of the teachers’ parking lot. It’s obviously amusing to see things get squished, but Donald carried it too far.
 
There was something about watching hundreds of pounds of pressure from a moving vehicle blow out the bottoms of his fellow juice boxes that made Donald crazy—crazy for destruction.
 
He’d lure his juice box targets out to the teachers’ parking lot by telling them lies. For example, he told one box that he’d heard of a new type of drinking straw that allows a person to drink without puncturing the foil hole on the top. It was a silly lie, but juice boxes are pretty stupid, and luring them to the scene of their deaths was never difficult.
 
Once Donald had snagged a box, he’d position his victim on the south side of the big speed bump where the teachers’ lot exits onto the main road. He told each victim that if he waited there, he’d be right back with an example of the Magic Straw, or whatever it was he’d promised that time. So, while the juice box was waiting for a non-existent straw, Donald would hop up onto a traffic cone and do something to distract the teachers driving out of the lot.
 
Sometimes he’d throw pebbles at the cars; sometimes he’d throw little metal stars made by the guys in shop class who smoked out behind the asbestos storage bins. If there weren’t an innocent juice box about to meet a fiendish and horrible death by squishing, Donald’s behaviour would be funny. But their imminent murder gave the scenario a bad taste: a taste of evil.
 
One day after math class, Donald was walking around removing chewing gum from beneath chairs and putting it up on the seats when he overheard the math teacher, Miss Burnside, on her cellphone screaming at someone from an online dating website. Something had to be wrong with their service, she said, because she hadn’t had a nibble in months, and she wanted her money back. From there, she went on a rant about her life in general. Talked about the scary dates she’d had over the years, with one train wreck after another. Then she lashed into her students, saying how cow-like and stupid they were, and that there was no point teaching them math because they could barely speak, let alone do long division. She wanted out of her life, but didn’t know how to do it.
 
That was when Miss Burnside saw Donald, hiding behind a trash can. She went running after him, but it was too late: Donald had seen her true self, and she knew that soon he would begin to torment her.
 
Later that same afternoon, when Miss Burnside was driving her car out of the teachers’ parking lot, Donald placed a victim juice box by the speed bump of doom.
 
When Miss Burnside’s car approached, he hopped up onto a traffic pylon and did something more extreme than usual.
 
Miss Burnside shrieked. The menthol cigarette she was smoking dropped onto her lap and then rolled beneath the seat. Startled, she hit the gas, and the car lurched forward. She collected her wits, braked to a stop then got out of the car, only to see that the doomed juice box had shot out its guts in a massive, fruit-flavoured explosion. Donald danced with happiness atop his pylon.
 
The next day when Donald showed up at school, he was met at the door by Principal Reeve, Janitor Schwinn and Miss Burnside. They told him he was a horrible little juice box, that his attitude stank, and that he was no longer welcome at the school. Both Janitor Schwinn and Miss Burnside wore gloating smiles that made Donald angry. He turned and walked away, but when classes began, he went to the parking lot, jimmied open Miss Burnside’s and Janitor Schwinn’s gas caps and stuffed their gas lines with dirt and litter before putting the caps back on. He thought, That’ll teach them not to mess with my life!
 
And, sure enough, their cars never worked, ever again.
 
Donald then went off in search of a new school at which to inflict mayhem. Walking down the roads and highways of the city, he resembled litter, so nobody paid him any attention except for the fast-food trash he passed along the way, who taunted him: “You’re only a lowly juice box. You’ll never be a carton. You’ll never be a can. You’re just a dumb little juice box that nobody cares about.”
 
That did it. Donald used a piece of broken pop bottle as a magnifying lens and set fire to the fast-food trash that had been sassing him. With a demented cackle, he walked away as the trash burned. Then he burst into a military marching song:
 
I’m a juice box, I’ve been told.
Doom and mayhem good as gold.
Don’t you ever mess with me.
I will steep your bones for tea.
1. 2. 3. 4.
Juice box guts are on the floor.
5. 6. 7. 8.
Death and I are on a date.

Media reviews

“Roald Dahl meets Stephen King in seven warped children’s-story parodies where Coupland’s understated prose is made all the funnier by Roumieu’s gleefully depraved illustrations. With such cuddly heroes as a murderous juice box and an alcoholic, kleptomaniac minivan, the duo take a sly dig at corporate capitalism—think Generation X-cess.” —National Post
 
“The mind of Douglas Coupland must be a scary place to live…. Those of you who have ever wondered what kind of trouble a Hobo Minivan with Extremely Low Morals can get into can take a soothing breath: the wait is over this month.” —ELLE Canada
 
“Playful, simple and winking…. Disturbing and hilarious.... A well-executed series of quirky stories that are imaginative and often funny.” —Edmonton Journal
 
“Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering.” —Quill & Quire