The last day of school before winter break is a very special day.
All the hard tests are over, and the whole day is more like a big party than a day at school. Ms. Fang’s class was especially excited and had been waiting all year for this day. Today was the day that Mr. Snakeskin would be visiting their class to give them a lesson in human biology.
How could a class be excited about a biology lesson? I’ll tell you. Mr. Snakeskin was a sixth-grade teacher; however, the sixth graders were old enough to have a holiday party all by themselves, so Mr. Snakeskin left them with their party and walked into Ms. Fang’s fifth-grade classroom, where the kids were anxiously waiting for him.
He was a tall man with short brown hair. He coached all the sports teams and looked pretty much like you would expect a guy who coached all the sports teams to look.
The thing with Mr. Snakeskin is that he’s half human, half zombie, so that means he’s half alive, half dead. When you’re half dead, you can do all sorts of things you can’t do when you’re fully alive. One of those things is to give biology lessons in his unique way.
When he walked in, Mr. Snakeskin was wearing his Scary School Basketball sweatshirt.
“Good afternoon,” said Mr. Snakeskin in his strong, authoritative voice. “I’m here to give you all a lesson in biology that you will never forget. Indeed, I can promise that after this lesson, you will all be experts in the subject of human anatomy.”
At that, Mr. Snakeskin reached down and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. When he did that, he not only pulled off his sweatshirt, but all of his skin, too!
The class yelled, “Whooooa!” as they saw what the inside of a body looks like for the first time. It was a mass of muscles and organs that looked totally gross and weird.
“I can tell you think I look totally gross and weird,” said Mr. Snakeskin, “but you would do well to remember that each of you looks exactly the same under your skin, too!”
“How can you do that?” asked Ramon. “I’m a zombie and I can’t do that.”
“Because I’m only half zombie. To put it simply, I’m still human on the inside, but zombie on the outside. If I were one hundred percent alive, I would be shrieking in pain. If I were one hundred percent dead, all my insides would rot away and disintegrate in an instant.”
“That would be cool,” said Johnny.
“Let’s begin our lesson then,” Mr. Snakeskin continued. “There are many hundreds of muscles that make movement possible. Starting at the arms, there are the biceps, triceps, deltoids, and your finger flexors. Moving across, we have the pectoral muscles, the latissimus dorsi muscles, the obliques, and the abdominal muscles. Playing sports and exercising keeps all of these muscles strong and healthy, but sitting in front of the TV and playing video games makes them wither away and shrink, so get out there and exercise as much as you can!”
“Does sitting down and doing homework make your muscles shrink, too?” asked Fritz, a skinny boy who always wore swimming goggles. More about him in the next book.
“Yes,” replied Mr. Snakeskin. “That’s why you should always do fifty jumping jacks after every math problem you finish.”
Ms. Fang interjected, “He’s just kidding, class. That would be silly.”
“Of course I was just kidding,” said Mr. Snakeskin. “Doing fifty jumping jacks would be very silly. Hardly a workout. You should do fifty push-ups. Moving right along to the organs . . .”
Mr. Snakeskin proceeded to pull off all of his muscles, so now the class could see his inner organs and guts. Some kids retched, some kids fainted, some kids barfed, but most of them cheered.
Mr. Snakeskin continued, “First will be a demonstration of the digestive system.”
Ms. Fang tossed Mr. Snakeskin a small holiday cupcake, and he caught it in his mouth.
As he chewed the cupcake, Mr. Snakeskin explained, “This cupcake is already being predigested by the saliva in my mouth. As I swallow, it passes down this tube called the esophagus and makes its way into my stomach, where the digestion continues. After the stomach is done breaking the cupcake down, it goes into this series of tubes called the small intestine, where it will be broken down into nutrients for my body to use. After that, only the unusable stuff is left, and it travels into this long tube called the large intestine, where it waits patiently until you ask Ms. Fang for a restroom pass.”
The class cheered again.
“There are many more systems of the body that do some amazing things. These two large pink sacs are my lungs, which are controlling my respiratory system. When we breathe in the air around us, our bodies extract the oxygen we need, and then we exhale the carbon dioxide we don’t need. This big slab is my liver, which is filtering out all the bad stuff that my body doesn’t want. These bones in my chest make up my rib cage, which protects my heart and lungs.”
Then Mr. Snakeskin pulled apart his ribs so that the class could see his heart!
“Who wants to come up and feel my heart beating?”
The class jumped out of their seats and lined up. Each student reached out tentatively and felt Mr. Snakeskin’s heart as it pumped in and out at a constant rate.
“The heart is controlling my circulatory system, pumping blood all over the body, delivering nutrients where they need to go, fighting diseases, and maintaining a steady body temperature. Remember, don’t any of you try anything close to this, or you would die instantly.”
“Well, duh,” said Rachael and Raychel.
When everyone had felt his heart, he closed his ribs back up, reattached all his muscles like putting on a suit, then put on his sweatshirt and was back to normal.
The class clapped for him. As he bowed, he took off the top of his head and exposed his brains to everyone.
“Oops!” he said. “That’s for your next lesson.”
“Class,” said Ms. Fang, “before you all leave, I want to wish you a wonderful and fun winter vacation, but I would advise you to think about what you’ve learned so far at Scary School and what it means to you. Also, I encourage all of you to spend your free time practicing for your Ghoul Games event if you want to have the least hope of survival. Class dismissed. Have a very happy holiday break!”
The kids cheered with the sheer exhilaration and freedom of the moment and rushed out to the parking lot, where their parents were waiting for them.
“You know what I learned?” Petunia said to Frank as they ran down the hall.
“What?”
“People are a lot like presents. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.”
