That morning at Scream Academy, the five Scary School kids walked down Corridor Two for the day’s class. Charles had still not shown up, and his friends were very close to giving up hope, but they still held out a glimmer that Charles might be sitting in the classroom waiting for them when they got there.
Unlike the previous day’s corridor that made the kids scream by freaking them out with falling insects and moving paintings, this hallway had a different method. The armor of past monster knights stood against the walls, holding monstrous swords and maces. It was quiet. Too quiet.
The Scary School kids decided to huddle together and walk as a unit. Jason and Fred were looking straight ahead when something moved. They immediately shouted, “Sword!”
All five kids ducked in the nick of time as a knight swung its broadsword over their heads. Then Wendy shouted, “Claw!” and all five took cover on the ground as a claw from above reached down but grabbed only air.
Then a monster walking in front of them screamed, “Waaaaah!” as it fell through a trapdoor that opened in the ground. It was now clear what this corridor was all about: booby traps. While the walkers were distracted by knights swinging their maces, trapdoors would open, walls would spin around, and claws would reach down to snatch you!
A scary moment occurred when a trapdoor opened right under Petunia’s feet. But the Scary School kids were all holding on to one another’s arms, and they were able to keep Petunia above ground so she didn’t fall into the darkness.
The classroom door was dead ahead. It seemed like more than half of the students who had entered the corridor were already gone. The Scary School kids were just steps away, thinking they had made it through the worst, but then a barrage of arrows shot out from the doorway straight toward them. The five closed their eyes, thinking it was all over, but when nothing happened, they realized that Lattie had caught the arrows in mid-flight using her lightning-quick ninja reflexes.
“Wow! Thanks, Lattie!” they all said.
Lattie snapped an arrow in half and said, “A single arrow is easily broken, but not five in a bundle.”
When all five Scary School kids entered the classroom, they looked around for Charles, but he wasn’t there. The monster students who had made it looked shocked when the human kids entered.
“Greetings, young ones,” they heard from three voices speaking in unison.
The teacher was already there, but it wasn’t just one teacher. There were three old witches with long gray hair and black robes. None of them had eyes.
“We are your teacher, Ms. Coven,” said a witch with a shaky voice, holding what looked like an eyeball against her forehead.
“Give me the eye!” shrieked one of the other witches. “I want to look at them.”
One of the witches grabbed the eyeball from the hand of the first witch and placed it against her forehead. “Ah yes, humans are adorable at this age, aren’t they?”
“Adorable and delectable,” said another witch, causing them to cackle in unison.
“Please take a seat. The brew is almost ready,” said the witch holding the eye, offering them an aisle of empty seats.
“Hey!” grunted a furry brown monster with fangs jutting up from its lower jaw. “Yesterday there were six thousand human kids. I count only five million now.” The kids did some quick Monster Math and deduced he meant five.
“One of our friends fell down a chasm yesterday,” said Petunia as she took a seat in the front row.
The class erupted in laughter. A troll girl with pink pigtails on her lumpy gray head giggled, “Hardy-har-har! Dumb-dumb human. Can’t avoid a chasm!”
“Mmmm . . . they look sooo delicious,” said a spotted monster who drooled and licked its chops.
“I bet the purple girl tastes like grapes!” said a rotund ogre.
“Patience, students,” said Ms. Coven. “There will be no eating of the exchange students. Unless, of course, we give you permission.”
The Scary School kids gulped. The witches were slowly stirring the bubbling liquid in their cauldron and throwing in ingredients that ignited sparks.
Then vents opened in the ceiling. The sounds of screaming drew closer and closer until monsters started dropping through vents and into chairs at their desks. They were the same monsters who had fallen through the trapdoors and gotten snatched up by the claws in the corridor. It appeared the trapdoors were tunnels that led all the way back to the classroom. Now the Scary School kids were upset they didn’t fall through. It seemed like a lot of fun!
“Now that we’re all here,” said Ms. Coven, “it’s time to teach you how to make a potion that should be in every monster’s arsenal. The potion of—whoops!”
The eye slipped out of the witch’s hand and started rolling across the floor.
“My eye! Give me my eye!”
The witches started crawling along the floor with their hands out, desperately searching for the eye.
The monsters in the class were laughing. Whenever one of the witches got close to the eye, a monster kicked it across the room to one of their friends like a game of eyeball soccer keep-away!
“Where is our eye?” the witches continued pleading. “Why won’t any of you give us back our eye?”
Eventually, the eyeball landed at the feet of Ezelba the Witch Girl. She was again eating a box of human-shaped chocolates and refusing to share with anyone else, but she stopped stuffing her face to pick up the eyeball. She put it in her backpack and zipped it shut.
“It’s so dark!” moaned Ms. Coven. “Where’s the eye? In a mouse hole?”
Ezelba put a finger to her lips, ordering the class to stay quiet. The monsters obeyed and told the teacher they couldn’t find it.
“Fine,” said Ms. Coven. “We will teach you without the eye. But if we find one of you is keeping it from us, you’ll wish you were never born!”
The threat seemed to have no effect on Ezelba, who just smiled to herself and got wand fives from her friends.
Gathering back around the cauldron, the witches continued, “We’re not going to even tell you what this potion does anymore. You’ll have to find out on your own.”
“Unless you give us back the eye!”
Ms. Coven went back to throwing items into the cauldron. “Take notes on the ingredients that go into the brew!” Ms. Coven had to feel and sniff each ingredient before throwing it in, which made everyone snicker.
Petunia was diligently taking notes when Wendy tapped her on the shoulder and handed her a note. Rolling her eyes, Wendy said, “The boys wanted me to give you this.”
Petunia unfolded the note. It read: Who do you like more? Jason or Fred? Circle one.
Did she really have to pick one right then? Was that the rule of note passing? She turned around, and Jason and Fred were flexing their muscles.
Luckily, she didn’t have to decide at that moment because the note flew out of her hand and floated across the room, landing on the desk of Ezelba.
“Rules of the class,” said Ezelba the Witch Girl. “If someone passes a note, everyone gets to read it.”
Ezelba read the note aloud and started cackling. “Those boys must be blind. How could they like someone purple? You look like you took a bath in prune juice!”
“Quiet!” Ms. Coven shouted. “You should be writing down the ingredients of the potion. Toe of tiger, feet of frog, nose of newt, and eye of hog. Speaking of eyes, has anyone found our eye yet?”
Nobody was paying attention to Ms. Coven. The class saw Petunia was getting upset and wouldn’t let up. “Purple girl! Purple girl! We’ll eat you, then we’ll burp a girl!”
Petunia wanted to dig herself into a hole, but then Fred and Jason stood up on their desks.
“Enough!” Fred shouted. “If you have a problem with Petunia, you have a problem with us.”
Then Jason pulled out his hockey stick from his backpack, and Fred pulled out his silver hammer. Jason tossed a hockey puck in the air and smacked it with his stick. The puck flew around the room, ricocheting off the walls and shattering jars of specimens. The students ducked out of the way. Then Fred raised his silver hammer and smashed his desk into a million pieces.
“What’s going on?” Ms. Coven demanded. “We can’t see what’s happening! We have no eye!”
Wendy pulled out her Monster Math calculator and shouted, “Negative thirty-six!” The monsters in the class felt their blood curdle in fear at the horrifically small number.
With the students distracted, Lattie leaped out of her seat, did a triple somersault in the air, skipped over a troll’s head, then landed on Ezelba’s desk with the grace of a cat. She looked her right in the eyes and said, “Before dispensing your opinion, remember first if anyone asked you for it.”
“O-okay,” said Ezelba, shaking. “I won’t tease her again. Just don’t ninja me or something.”
Petunia smiled, seeing that her classmates actually cared about her enough to stand up for her.
Lattie snatched the note out of Ezelba’s hand, bounced off the ceiling, and dropped the paper in Petunia’s lap, capping her maneuver with a spectacular backflip onto the rim of the cauldron, where she placed Ms. Coven’s eye back in her hand. Like a sleight-of-hand artist, she must have sneakily snatched the eye back without anyone noticing! I gave her a standing ovation but no one could hear my ghost hands clapping.
“You found our eye! Thank you so much young . . . human? Well, perhaps we won’t be feasting on you after all.”
A zombie girl turned to the witch girl and said, “Hey, Ezelba, maybe we shouldn’t mess with these human kids.”
Suddenly, the door burst open and Silence the Yeti entered, carrying a young seal that was wearing a polka-dot tie.
“Ms. Coven,” spoke Silence. “I wanted to make sure this seal wasn’t one of your students before I ate him.”
Ms. Coven examined the seal with her eye. “Nope. Never seen him. Eat away.”
“Hurray!” said the yeti, getting ready to stuff Charles the Seal into his gigantic mouth.
The seal barked, “I’m not a seal! I’m Charles Nukid. I got turned into a seal by a fizard!” At least that’s what Charles thought he said, but all the class heard was the bark! bark! of seal calls. Charles couldn’t believe he was about to meet his end by being eaten by a yeti. Talk about embarrassing.
The yeti was just about to chomp down on Charles’s seal head when Petunia yelled, “Wait! That’s not a seal. That’s Charles Nukid!”
“Huh?” said the yeti, taking Charles out of his mouth.
“Look on his flipper!” On Charles’s flipper was the backpack with the guitar sticking out. Then Millie the Millipede crawled up the guitar neck.
“Millie!” Lattie shrieked in a rare outburst of emotion. She leaped onto the yeti, and Millie crawled onto her shoulder, coughing up seawater and nuzzling her cheek.
“If this is your friend,” said Ms. Coven, “a student transforming into an animal is the number one rule not to break! You may continue with your meal, Mr. Yeti.”
Hearing that he was breaking the rules filled Charles with renewed vigor. If it was his time to die, by golly, he would die following the rules. He began thrashing and squirming in the yeti’s hands. A slippery oil exuded from his seal skin, and he slid right through the yeti’s grip, landing on the floor. Then he paddled his flippers and slid on his belly up and down the aisles as the angry yeti chased after him.
Lattie was still riding on the yeti’s shoulders and covered its eyes. “You cannot hunt what you cannot see!” Lattie exclaimed. The yeti tripped over a desk and crashed down onto two other desks, smashing them to bits.
The class cheered, “Go seal! Go seal!” Even Ms. Coven cheered with them.
Ezelba pointed her wand at Charles, and he rose into the air. “There’s one way to settle this,” she said. “Abra vitulina!” There was a flash from her wand, and Charles transformed back into his human self, wearing the gray shorts, white dress shirt, and polka-dot tie.
The class erupted in laughter.
“Look at him,” cackled Ezelba. “What kind of silly outfit is that?”
“Yeah, and he’s as skinny as a toothpick!” laughed the troll girl.
“Let’s call him Toothpick!” the zombie girl suggested.
“Toooothpick! Toooothpick!” the class mocked.
Charles sighed. Even halfway around the world, he couldn’t escape that dreaded nickname.
“Don’t call him Toothpick,” said Ms. Coven. “Charles is a part of our class now.” The class begrudgingly quieted down. “Besides,” Ms. Coven added, “he has no chance of lasting long here. He has the skinniest noodle neck I’ve ever seen.”
“Noodle-neck! Noodle-neck!” the class chanted.
Charles didn’t like that nickname any better. His friends didn’t care what his nickname was. They were so overjoyed that he was back they gave him high fives and patted him on the shoulder.
Class resumed with a few small changes. Silence the Yeti was passed out on the floor, so the students whose desks had been crushed by his fall were using his white fluffy back as their desk.
Finally, Ms. Coven finished her brew by chanting, “And the final step so you won’t die, the wing set of a dragonfly.”
She placed a dragonfly wing in the cauldron, and the potion dramatically changed color from sludgy black to bright green. Then she placed small black cauldrons on everyone’s desks and ladled a scoop into each one.
“Since you’ve been paying such close attention,” said Ms. Coven, “I’m sure you’ll know exactly what to do with these.”
Nobody had been paying close attention. Not even me.
The ogre took a small sip. He turned into a newt. A brown furry monster rubbed some on his hand. He turned into a toad.
Ms. Coven cackled, “Nobody is allowed to leave this class until you’ve used this potion properly.”
That’s when Charles had an idea. He remembered seeing the painting on Marlin’s wall of a Scream Academy soccer team with dragonfly wings. Didn’t Ms. Coven just add a dragonfly wing into her brew?
It was a long shot, but he decided to take a chance. After all, it couldn’t be any worse than being a seal, right?
Charles took a spoonful and poured it down his back.
“Charles! What are you doing?” his friends shouted. But a second later, dragonfly wings sprouted from his shoulder blades and he started flying around the room.
“Whoo-hoo!” he cried. “This is awesome.”
Soon everyone had copied him, and they were flying around the room. “Good job, Noodle-neck!” said the troll girl. “We’ll call you Charles Nukid from now on!”
The lunch bell rang, and Charles flew straight into the lunch hall. But the potion wore off unexpectedly, and he fell right into a big tub of noodles.
Lattie fell from up near the ceiling, but was caught in the arms of the same troll she had saved the first day at Scream Academy. “Now we even,” said Tommy the Troll. It stomped away before Lattie could even express her gratitude. I guess some creatures have their own way of saying thank you.
Charles crawled out of the tub and was covered in noodles. All the monsters laughed.
His nickname went back to being Noodle-neck.