Penny Possum was the quietest girl in Ms. Fang’s class. She hadn’t said a word to anyone in over two years, and that was fine with her. She has short black hair and very large round eyes that give her extraordinary night vision.
Penny Possum has a unique way of surviving Scary School.
Whenever she’s in trouble, she drops to the floor and plays dead. That way, the angry teacher or monster just ignores her, and she lives to see another day.
She was so good at it, she decided that playing dead would be her game for the Ghoul Games.
Penny didn’t ever talk in class. Whenever Ms. Fang called on her, she would fall over and pretend to die so that she wouldn’t have to answer the question. The first few times, her parents had to come pick up her body, and then, to no one’s surprise, she’d be back in school the next day. After the first week, Ms. Fang stopped calling on her.
One day, Ms. Fang asked Penny to deliver a note to Dr. Dragonbreath.
Penny walked into the room and interrupted Dr. Dragonbreath’s lecture on the Dragon-Caveman Treaty of 30,000 BCE. Penny tried to hand him the note, but before she could, Dr. Dragonbreath said, “Before you speak, my dear, I would advise you to read the five rules on the board so that you don’t say the wrong thing, which might get you eaten.”
Penny didn’t plan on speaking, but she began reading the five rules anyway. Charles Nukid was waving at her, trying to warn her, but she didn’t heed his warning and read Rule Number Five. She realized right away that she was in big trouble.
“I’m sorry, young girl. When you’re in my classroom, you have to follow all my rules,” said Dr. Dragonbreath, removing his glasses.
Dr. Dragonbreath’s wings burst out of his shirt and he flew toward her, but when he reached her, he saw that she was already dead on the floor. He couldn’t tell she was just pretending to be dead. Penny was even able to stop her heart from beating and make her body completely rigid so that it really appeared utterly lifeless.
“Oh my, the poor girl must have had a heart attack—I can’t eat her now because she’s not totally fresh. Dead humans are so chewy. Charles, will you please drag her out into the hall so she doesn’t smell up the room?”
“Yes, sir,” said Charles Nukid, and he dragged Penny out into the hallway. As soon as she was out the door, she took a deep breath and sprang up. Charles nearly passed out, he was so frightened, and he very quickly had to fix three hairs that sprang out of place. Penny put her finger to her lips, telling Charles to keep quiet.
“Okay,” said Charles, “I won’t tell.”
Penny handed Ms. Fang’s note to Charles, then ran off.
The next day, Penny gave Charles a piece of hard candy to thank him for trying to warn her about Rule Number Five. Since she didn’t speak when she gave it to him, Charles didn’t know what the candy was for, so he brought her a piece of candy the next day as a thank-you. Penny didn’t understand why he gave her the candy: she thought they were already even, so she brought him another candy the next day. Every day they gave each other a piece of candy, not sure exactly why they were doing it.
It was April Fool’s Day at Scary School. The Ghoul Games were a little over a month away.
Penny Possum overheard some of her classmates saying they were going to play an April Fool’s Day prank on “the new kid.” She knew they meant Charles Nukid. They were going to convince him to go into Mr. Spider-Eyes’s office, a place not many kids came out of alive if they were bad enough to get sent there.
As you may remember, Mr. Spider-Eyes is the strict hall monitor who has one hundred tiny eyes on each side of his head. His wife is Mrs. T. Because he has so many eyes, being in bright places for too long gives him a bad headache. He therefore keeps his office pitch dark, which is the perfect amount of light for him. Nobody is sure what his office looks like since he keeps it so dark.
During lunch, Stephanie, one of Lindsey’s friends, handed Charles Nukid a note that said to report to Mr. Spider-Eyes’s office immediately.
Great, thought Charles to himself. What did I do this time? Wear the wrong color socks?
Charles got up from the table and left the lunch hall for Mr. Spider-Eyes’s office. All of Lindsey’s friends started giggling to themselves. Penny Possum left her lunch and followed him out.
She considered Charles to be her only friend and didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. Charles didn’t consider Penny to be a friend. He thought she wouldn’t talk to him because she didn’t think he was cool enough. Since he wasn’t in Ms. Fang’s class, he had no idea she never spoke to anybody.
As Charles walked down the hallway, Penny ran in front of him and started jumping, waving her arms, and doing a dance to try to stop him, but he thought she was making fun of his skinny arms and kept walking.
When he got to Mr. Spider-Eyes’s door, Penny tried to pull him back, but Charles squirmed away and opened the door.
A rush of light poured in, Mr. Spider-Eyes hissed, and for a moment, Charles and Penny saw the figures of Mr. Spider-Eyes and another man, who was thin with gray hair and wore glasses and a drab gray suit. Charles and Penny did not recognize him in the dark, but you, my sharp readers, know him as Franz Dietrich Wolfbark, the chairman of the Ghoul Games.
“Close the door! Close the door!” shouted Mr. Spider-Eyes.
Charles went inside and closed the door behind him as Penny sneaked in with him at the last second.
It was pitch black inside and Charles couldn’t see a thing, but with her large eyes and extraordinary night vision, Penny saw everything. Mr. Spider-Eyes was reclining against a large spiderweb. Franz Wolfbark was standing next to him, and they seemed to be drinking glasses of blood and eating bats on a skewer.
Mr. Spider-Eyes hissed sharply, “What are you doing here?”
“I got a note that you wanted to see me?” said Charles.
“You?” said Mr. Spider-Eyes. “You follow every rule to the letter every second of every day. Why in the world would I want to see you? I think someone is playing an April Fool’s prank on you.”
“Oh. Okay,” said Charles, “I’ll leave then.”
“Wait,” spoke Franz Wolfbark. “These two have seen us together. Surely we can’t let them report what they’ve seen.”
“Good point, Franz. Sorry, kids, looks like this is your unlucky day.”
Mr. Spider-Eyes hopped off the web and suddenly turned into a giant spider. Franz Wolfbark removed his glasses and his tie, and turned into a giant werewolf. Penny would have normally played possum right then, but instead, she was only thinking of saving Charles.
Penny tried to turn the door handle, but the door was locked.
“Please,” Charles begged, “we won’t say anything. Just make it a rule, and you know I’ll follow it.”
“Sorry,” said Franz Wolfbark, “we can’t take that risk and jeopardize our plan for the Ghoul Games.”
Mr. Spider-Eyes and Wolfbark the werewolf lunged toward them. The kids were about to be torn to shreds, but at that moment, Penny felt something inside her that she hadn’t felt in years.
Her voice.
It stirred in her belly then burst from her mouth as she screamed, “Noooo!”
And because she hadn’t spoken in so many years, her voice had been building up inside her all that time, and it exploded with the force of ten fighter jets soaring into the sky.
It was so powerful that Mr. Spider-Eyes and Franz Wolfbark flew against the back wall like they had been hit by the wrecking ball from the goblin Halloween show. Seeing stars, they remained on the floor, muttering unintelligibly.
Penny saw a chain of keys sitting on the desk and grabbed them. She opened the door and pulled Charles out into the hallway. They ran as fast as they could back toward the lunch hall, but when Penny heard a loud roar from around the corner, she pulled Charles into a crevice between lockers 217 and 218, a secret hiding place many of the kids used when they were in a pinch.
As they sat and caught their breath, Charles lifted his hand to fix his hair, but before he could even touch it, Penny was already fixing it for him.
When Penny finished, she smiled at Charles and Charles did something very strange by his standards. He put his hands in his hair and mussed it so that it was a complete mess. He then smirked at Penny as if to say, “Fix that.”
Penny laughed, and that made Charles laugh for the first time since he could remember.
“What happened in there?” Charles said through his laughter. “It was so dark, I couldn’t see.”
Penny, with her newfound voice, gleefully told him everything that had happened in Mr. Spider-Eyes’s office, but Charles didn’t hear a word Penny said because his ears were still ringing from her mighty yell.