The next day at school, while the kids were doing their math problems, Miss Shelly took Franny over to one side and talked to her.
“How’s the experiment going?” she asked.
“It’s great. I understand them, and I think we’re becoming friends. They seem to like me better if I just go along with the things they like.”
“Are you sure that’s for the best?” Miss Shelly asked.
“Well, that’s what the data seem to suggest,” Franny said, and showed Miss Shelly some graphs to back it up.
“But I like the real you.” Miss Shelly was about to continue, when a piercing scream tore through the room.
“The trash can!” a little girl shrieked. “It’s moving!”
Franny’s mad scientist brain raced. That was the trash can in which she had dumped her crab ravioli in pumpkin sauce two days ago. But an old lunch, all by itself, was not enough to start a paranormal reaction.
“Who else put something in that can?” Franny said.
“I spit out my gum in there,” one girl said.
“I threw a pair of old gym shoes in there,” another boy said.
“I saw the janitor dump some trash in there,” another girl said.
“Egad,” said Franny. “That was close. Well, as long as NOBODY put any unstable industrial waste in there, we should be fine.”
“Oh, yeah,” said one little boy. “I forgot. I put some unstable industrial waste in there.”
“Gadzooks!” Franny shouted. “That is the exact formula for a Giant Monstrous Fiend.”
The other kids looked at her. They looked scared, not just of the mention of a Giant Monstrous Fiend, although the prospect of a Giant Monstrous Fiend was no comfort. They were also afraid of Franny. They were looking at her the way they used to, before they had become her good friends.
“I mean,” Franny stammered, “that’s what I would think if I was a weird mad scientist-type little girl, which, of course, I’m not.”
They all smiled at her again.
Just then the trash can erupted like a volcano. As the smoke settled, the kids saw, for the first time, the type of Giant Monstrous Fiend that a mad scientist-type girl would have predicted.
