WE NEVER DID get to the hospital.

Mr. Mann hadn’t broken his pelvis, after all. We later heard from Grandma Dotty, who had broken her pelvis learning how to ice dance (don’t ask), that breaking your pelvis is just about the single most painful thing a human being can break without dying and, if Mr. Mann really had broken his pelvis, his screams would have been heard from Saskatchewan to Siberia and back again. I’m not saying Mr. Mann was what you’d call comfortable or anything, but it only took about five minutes for him to be up on his feet again, so I think his pelvis was fine.

The time it had taken for Mr. Mann to recover from the broken pelvis that wasn’t really broken had given me time to think things through, to come up with a clever Khatchadorian strategy for getting to the bottom of the Blister Mystery. I wasn’t going to blunder in like some hayseed klutz—not me, no way. I was going to play things super-cool, do it the new, uber-laidback, Rafe Khatchadorian hipster style. And the first thing I needed to do was make some sort of cool, laidback hipster remark to let him know I knew (if you know what I mean). I took a deep breath and concentrated on making this the coolest sentence Niki Blister the Rock Legend had ever heard.

“You’re Bliki Nister, Mannster Miss!” I blurted out in a great, big, splurgy mixed-up word salad of complete garbage. “Biki Nibster, Miss Mannster! Blanster Blister, Sister Mister! Bicky Blaster, Mossy Moan!” I stopped, squeezed my eyes shut, and with a superhuman effort, practically screamed the right words in Niki’s face. “Niki Blister, Mr. Mann! You’re Niki Blister!” I sank back, exhausted.

Kasey rolled her eyes all the way up to a nine.

Miller the Killer looked puzzled. “Who’s Niki Blister?” he asked.

“Me,” Niki Blister said.

“But you’re Mr. Mann,” Miller said.

Kasey rolled her eyes again. “He’s Mr. Mann and Niki Blister. He’s a missing Australian rock star from the 1980s.”

The Changmeister nodded wisely. He was so brainy he’d probably figured everything out three weeks ago. “Of course,” he murmured, like everything made sense.

“So you’re not Mr. Mann, our substitute music teacher?” Miller said.

Boy, this was going to take a while. To expect Miller to understand the situation would have been like expecting an aardvark to translate Chinese poetry into Swahili.

Mr. Mann/Niki Blister nodded and shook his head, which was confusing in itself. “I am Mr. Mann. I’m both people.” He limped across to an upturned crate and sat down on it carefully. He looked at the four of us and nodded to himself, as if he was turning something over in his head. “Okay, perhaps I’d better tell you what happened …”