Every school has, I think, a sort of unique legend or story in it. At my middle school, it was something about a kid who got suspended for climbing up on the roof and then throwing his pants at the principal when he came to get him down. It really should have been the Joke Hole. Problem is, half the class of 2002 saw that pair of jeans arc gracefully through the air and smack Principal Henderson right in the kisser. But as far as I know, I was the only one who ever saw the Joke Hole in action.

It was literally just a hole in the wall, about a foot up from the floor. Probably could have fit a Coke can sideways. Right straight into the cinderblock wall, back as far in as you could see. It was in the back hall behind the gym and the band room. I was shuffling down the hall on hands and knees, looking for some stupid junk I'd dropped, when I really noticed it first. I looked in it. Hey, I was twelve. That's the kind of thing you do when you're twelve. You look in mysterious holes.

This mysterious hole contained a folded-up scrap of rumpled notebook paper. I took it out, curious. There was a knock-knock joke written on it in blue ballpoint. It was a dumb joke, but I had never heard that one before and it was funny, so I stuck it in my pocket.

I came back to look in the hole again the next day. That probably tells you something about how bored I was. But I mean, it paid off. There was another scrap of paper in it, and another joke. I put that one in my pocket, too.

“Hey guys,” I said to the other kids at my lunch table. “I found a joke in the wall, wanna hear it?”

The other kids at my lunch table were the sorts of kids to understand looking in mysterious wall-holes. A lot of them were probably diagnosable with something or other. I had no excuse.

“In the wall?” the girl who wore only rainbow-striped clothing asked.

“Yeah, in a hole. There was a hole in the wall and I found a joke in it. On a piece of paper. Wanna hear it?”

“Sure,” she said.

I suddenly couldn’t remember how it had gone. “Yeah it was like—hang on, it was—” I pulled the slip out of paper out of my pocket to read it out loud. It’s been so long I don’t remember what it was now, but it was something like “Why do the carpet hat? The floor! Yes, the ceiling!”

Everyone kind of stared at me. “I don’t get it,” said the boy with the Spiderman lunchbox. I frowned at the piece of paper, aware that something wasn’t translating, but not sure what it was.

“No,” I tried to explain, “that’s not it. Here. You have to read it.” I passed the paper to him. He stared at it quizzically, then slowly broke into a grin.

“Ohhhhh,” he said. “Ohhhhhhh.”

“I don’t get it,” rainbow girl protested.

The kids next to Spiderman-lunchbox leaned in to read it. “Oh!” one of them said. “Yeah, you read it weird.”

“I don’t GET it,” rainbow girl repeated, on the verge of tears. Spiderman-lunchbox passed it to her. She stared at it. “Oh,” she said, after a moment. “I get it. I get it now.”

“See?” I said, relieved. I was starting to lose the joke myself, like when a word suddenly stops looking right even though you know it totally made sense a second ago. I snatched it back and read it again. It totally made sense. It was funnier the second time around. “Anyways, I found it in a weird hole. I guess someone leaves jokes there. There was one there yesterday too.”

“Do you just crawl around looking in other people’s weird holes?” one boy asked cheerily, and that was pretty much the end of the useful conversation.

I found another joke in the hole the next day. I think that’s when I started collecting them. The first one I’d found had accidentally gone through the wash in my pocket, rendering it totally illegible. I was pretty upset that I couldn’t remember whatever the joke had been. So I started bringing them home and putting them in a little wood box that had previously housed the noncommittal start to my baseball card collection. I still think it’s kind of too bad that I ended up tossing them all.

That sort of became my thing for a while. Every morning before class I’d go check for the joke and read it on the way to homeroom, and then pass it around during lunchtime. I had to pass it around, because they were sort of hard to read out loud. You could say all the words, but they never sounded right. I don’t know what it was. The handwriting, maybe? I tried copying down the jokes how they were written a few times, line for line and stroke for stroke, but my handwriting kind of sucked, and I got so frustrated I gave up.

Because I was a weird kid with nothing better to do, I thought a lot about the hole in the wall and who might write those jokes. There was only ever one a day, and it seemed to be placed there either really early in the morning or after school sometime. The mystery writer couldn’t have gotten them out of some book, they were just too GOOD and original. No repeats. Besides, it was such a unique sense of humor. I started listening in to other kids’ conversations when I heard them laughing, sure that if I heard the culprit tell one of those jokes out loud I’d instantly know. But no luck.

The obvious thing to do was to leave a note back for them. Still, I held off on it for a while. I felt like I had to come up with a really good joke, one that was worth replying to. I knew I couldn’t do it, but I felt like I had to at least try.

I think what I settled on was this:
Why did the chicken cross the road? No.

And then, underneath in smaller letters:

(Hi!!! I like your jokes!!! What’s your name?)

I took the day’s joke, and then I put my own paper in the Joke Hole, and I waited.

The next morning was pretty disappointing. My paper hadn’t been taken, nor was there a new joke. When I unfolded it, I saw that there was new writing on it, and for a second I got excited. But then I looked closer and my excitement turned to confusion and concern. It was just nonsense. Every inch of the paper had been written on, and it was absolute meaningless gibberish, not even words, just letters. Right over my note. Like it hadn’t even been read at all.

“Do you think it’s a secret code?” I asked the lunch table nervously.

“I think it’s just junk,” declared rainbow girl.

“They probably don’t want you poking around in their holes,” said a boy with the really bad acne. There were assorted snickers. “And touching their junk,” he said, to more snickering.

I crumpled the paper up and threw it at him. Secretly, I felt like it was punishment for me for my sub-par joke. I’d failed.

I tried to leave my own message only one other time, to the exact same result. I stopped checking the Joke Hole every day after that. I still checked it a lot, at least two or three times a week, because I was always curious to see what it would be next. But I felt like the mystery joke-author had been rather mean to me. I still feel like that sometimes, even after seeing who put them in there.

Anyways, yeah, I did find out where the jokes came from eventually. It was kind of by mistake. We were going to a late-night football game at the high school and it ran late and I really had to use the bathroom, so I ran around into the empty middle school, and as I was walking back from the restroom I saw that back hallway and decided to check the Joke Hole joke for the day, since I hadn’t that morning. I got about halfway down the hall when I started to hear the sound.

It was this sort of hissing sound. Not like a snake hissing sound, but like water in a pipe starting to flow through the walls and floor in an old creaky house. Our school was pretty old and not in great shape—I mean, there was a hole in the wall—but I’d never heard this sound before. Maybe this was a normal sound, I told myself. A normal sound I had just never noticed before. I was used to these halls being full of yelling, running kids, but now the place was deserted. Every familiar classroom now seemed strange, dark and shuttered, and it was blowing the cobwebs out of every dark corner of my imagination.

I stopped in place and tried to keep my heart from bruising itself against the inside of my ribs. Why were there pipe sounds if I was the only person in the building? Well, I’d just used the bathroom, I realized. It was probably me flushing that did that. I managed to calm myself down a bit. It’s a good thing I did, too, or I probably would have had a heart attack and died right there when I saw the movement inside the Joke Hole.

As it was, I ducked into a doorway so quickly I almost knocked myself out on the doorframe. The hissing slithering sound was louder than ever, and there was a new soft sound of something sliding over floor tile. Not knowing what was happening  was worse than knowing. I peeked out.

Something was coming out of the Joke Hole like toothpaste out of a tube. It was a soft-looking beige tube that looped and coiled on itself as it unspooled. I held my breath, somehow already able to tell that it was alive and might hear me. About twelve feet of it came out before it stopped (although the end of it still vanished back into the hole, so who knows how long the whole thing was). The coils shifted and moved aside, and with a small grunt the end came into view. It had a head that looked like a grouchy old man whose neck simply merged into the featureless tube. Two stubby, scrawny baby arms protruded from the base of the head. One hand held a pen. The other held a scrap of paper. As I watched, it uncapped the pen with its teeth, then began slowly, laboriously writing something.

I watched it write without daring to look away for what seemed like forever and a half. Once it was done, it recapped the pen, glared at the paper for a moment, and then began retracting into the wall again, loop by loop, sliding in as though the hole was made just for it. Or by it.

I stood paralyzed until the last trace of the sound had gone. All my terrified kid brain could think was: I need to get back to mom and dad. I need to get out of here.

Try as hard as I might, I just couldn’t make myself walk the twenty feet to the door outside. Not if it meant walking past the Joke Hole. The combined force of every ounce of willpower in my twelve-year-old-body wasn’t enough to make me do it. I turned around and ran as silently as I could to the second-nearest exit, imagination writhing with greyish-brown tubes and withered faces as I went.

The next morning, there was a new joke in the Joke Hole.

I couldn’t bring myself to take it. As always, it sat right near the edge, but I couldn’t stick my hand in that little hole. I used the tip of a pencil to gingerly drag it out, heart pounding the entire time. I unfolded it. I think that one was something like, “what do you get when you cross ten colors and a tin can? Blueberries, of course!” But it was funnier than that. I don’t know, that’s not the right wording.

I went to the principal. I was twelve and I was dumb. I thought he might actually do something about it.

“There’s a hole in the wall,” I told him. He sighed.

“I know,” he said. “We’re getting that patched up next month. Can you just tell Mrs. Graves to seat her kids away from it until then?”

“No, there’s one in the hall behind the gym and the band room.”

“Oh.” He didn’t care. I don’t blame him, but at the time I was outraged.

“Hey! There’s a HOLE in the wall and there’s something living in it!” I shouted. “Aren’t you supposed to do something about that?”
He scowled at me. “Lower your voice, or I’ll have you removed from my office at once.”

“Can you get the janitor to tape it up or something?” I whispered.

“Probably I could.”

“Will you?”

“No.”

I wanted evidence. It’s probably lucky I was a kid at the time. Adults are good at realizing when they’ve accidentally seen something impossible. Then, we just remember that impossible things don’t happen and therefore that thing must have never happened. As for me, I grabbed a disposable camera and stayed after school again.

The waiting was definitely the worst part. I didn’t have a smartphone or anything, so I basically sat in a doorway and drove myself up the wall for three hours. In my initial horror, I’d thrown out all the jokes I’d collected from the Joke Hole when I got home. I was starting to regret doing that, so I grabbed a piece of paper and tried to think of some more good jokes. I’d used one side of the sheet and a third of the other side when I heard the slithering sound again.

Somehow, it was a lot less scary the second time. It still made no sense, as I watched it sprawl like overcooked spaghetti, but at least I knew what was happening next. I gripped my camera. Several points of my bad planning were occurring to me at once. First of all, the disposable camera was a bright black and yellow design, and I couldn’t exactly peek it around the corner without attracting attention. Second, I would need to step into the light to get a photo, or use a flash. It unfolded its paper. Time was running out, unless I sat here again next Monday, and as much as I feared this thing, it was the waiting which I really dreaded doing again. It uncapped its pen. Hey, I wondered, if it wrote jokes in English, could it speak English, too?

I steeled myself.

I stepped out and approached the mass of coils on the floor. The wizened head didn’t even look up from what it was writing.

“Hey,” I said nervously. If you even think about getting closer to me I will stomp your weird long worm-body to death with my sneakers, I thought at it as loudly as I could.

“Hey is for horses, not for cows,” it replied. It sounded like a grumpy old man, too.

“I like your jokes,” I said, trying to break the ice a little bit.

“They’re messages.”

“I like your messages,” I repeated. “Thanks for leaving them for me.”

“I’m not leaving them for you,” it replied.

“Oh. Then who are they for?”
It finally looked at me, with bright, piercing eyes. “Can’t tell you,” it said, shifted its dull coils to a more comfortable position, and kept writing.

“I’m sorry for taking them,” I tried.

“Does your brain itch?”

“Does my what itch?”

“Does your brain itch? How many have you read?”

Suddenly, my entire head itched. “Uh, I don’t know, a lot?”

It clicked its tongue. “Don’t take ideas that aren’t yours,” it rasped. “It’s rude and it’s dangerous for the braingerous. Don’t eat food that’s not yours.” It folded the paper and recapped the pen, and I felt a sudden pang of panic. “Wait,” I called, “can I take your photo?”

“No,” it snapped, and like an idiot, I just stood there and watched it retract its length all the way back into the wall, leaving the paper in its wake.

As soon as I was sure it was gone, I balled up my paper of drafted jokes and plugged the hole with the resulting ball. It wasn’t a good plug at all, it just made me feel better. It was taken out by the next day.

I think the Joke Hole jokes continued to be swapped out after that, but I don’t really know. I stopped reading them. As far as I know, nobody else was weird or stupid enough to go looking in strange holes in the wall. And they knocked the place down in 2012 anyways. The new place they built already has its own weird legend-story, because the 8th graders released live goats in the upstairs hallway the very first year. But as far as I know, the new place doesn’t have the Joke Hole. I just wish I’d saved or remembered some of those one-liners. Maybe, even if they didn’t work out loud, I could have learned to write them down.