2

The Daring Rescue

For the next hour, Petunia sat down with Mr. Grump and taught him the basics of math.

Mr. Grump wrote everything down as fast as he could, holding the paper with his hands and scribbling with his agile trunk.

When first period ended, Mr. Grump was so happy he couldn’t wait for the next subject.

“What’s next? What’s next?” he asked excitedly, jumping up and down, causing the whole room to shake.

Petunia looked around the empty room. She was becoming very worried. There’s no way the whole class would be gone the first day of school. Something must be wrong.

“We have to go find the rest of the class now,” Petunia said to Mr. Grump.

“Okay,” said Mr. Grump. “You lead the way.”

“But I don’t know where to look,” said Petunia.

“They could be anywhere.”

“Hmmm,” murmured Mr. Grump, scratching the top of his head with his trunk. “When I misplace something, which I do constantly, I always retrace my steps. Where’s the last place you saw them?”

“The last place I saw them was at Jacqueline’s haunted house on the last day of school. They all went into the Room of Fun, but I decided not to go in.”

“Well then, that’s the first place we’ll look! Excellent remembering, um…um…” Mr. Grump slyly looked at his sheet of paper. “Petunia. I won’t forget it again. Let’s go, ummm…”

“Petunia,” said Petunia, rolling her eyes.

Petunia led the way to the school yard. Jacqueline’s haunted house stood beside the path that leads through the playground, which some kids like to call the slayground because of the high probability of injury or demise. Take, for instance, the alligators at the bottom of the slide. Brave kids still like to ride it, though. It’s a fun slide until that last part with the chomping and dismemberment.

In case you don’t remember, Jacqueline is my eight-year-old sister. She’ll be nine in a month. She built the haunted house for me last year so that I would have a place to haunt. The school building was so uncomfortable. I don’t know how living kids can stand sitting at those desks for so long.

Petunia and Mr. Grump stepped up to the front door of the haunted house and knocked. Neither realized that I had been watching them all morning and writing everything down. Naturally, I followed them to my haunted house, whereupon I made myself visible.

Petunia knew me and said hello. Mr. Grump had apparently never seen a ghost before and got very scared.

“Gh-gh-ghooosst!” he howled. He trumpeted a deafening noise through his trunk and started stampeding across the school yard.

In his panic, he ran into a tetherball pole with a clang, staggered about dizzily for a few seconds, then collapsed unconscious on the lawn.

“Don’t worry. Your teacher should be fine,” I said to Petunia. “Please come in.”

I opened the door for her and we walked into the foyer. Ghosts circled the black chandelier above the great white fountain. Petunia remembered what to do. She plucked one purple hair from her head and placed it carefully in the fountain’s pool. Jets of water shot up and the ghosts cheered with joy. One flew down and opened the door to the rest of the house.

“Thank you,” said Petunia.

“No, thank you,” said the ghost, placing Petunia’s hair on its white ghostly head.

As we walked down the haunted corridors, I told Petunia how lonesome I had been all summer with none of the kids around to write about. She said that she had had a very similar summer, with nothing to do but read.

“That’s funny,” I replied. “I couldn’t read a book even if I wanted to. My hands go straight through them.”

“How sad,” Petunia said, trying to pat my shoulder, but whooshing right through me.

“Luckily, I have a ghost pad and a ghost pen that never runs out of ink, so I can write all I want.”

We came to the end of the hallway to the door marked ROOM OF FUN.

“Is my class still in there?” Petunia asked me.

“I remember that everyone except you went in there on the last day of school. They started going down a slide and they haven’t come out since.”

Petunia opened the door to the Room of Fun, and a wave of sound crashed upon our ears. It sounded like a symphony of screaming and wheeing. Petunia bravely stepped into the pitch-black room and had to quickly catch her balance. She was standing on a ledge overlooking a deep, dark pit.

“Hello!” she called down into the pit. “Is anybody down there?”

“Petunia? Is that you?” It was the voice of her best friend, Frank, which is pronounced “Rachel.”

“Yes, it’s me!”

“Help us, Petunia! We’ve been going down this slide for three months and can’t get off!”

Petunia thought it was very strange that they had been sliding downward for so long, but they were still able to hear her. At a normal rate of descent, they should have already gone straight into the Earth’s core and been liquefied.

As Petunia’s eyes became adjusted to the darkness, she began walking gingerly along the edge of the pit, feeling the stone wall with her hands. When she got to the other end of the room, she felt something strange. One of the blocks of stone was much warmer than the others. She knocked on the stone and it crumbled away like sand, revealing a glowing lever behind it.

As soon as Petunia pulled on the lever, the symphony of sound came to a halt. Petunia realized that the screams and whees were not coming from her classmates. They were being blasted through speakers in order to mask another sound—the din of churning gears.

Lights came on, and Petunia could see into the pit. It didn’t look that deep at all. Perhaps twenty feet to the bottom. Her classmates were piled on top of one another.

The walls inside the pit showed projections of a moving background so it looked and felt like they were sliding down, when in fact they were staying right in place the entire time! Just like a super-slippery treadmill.

Petunia began to recognize her classmates. There was Jason, still wearing his hockey mask. Fred, the boy without fear. The three Rachels, Wendy Crumkin, Penny Possum, Fritz, and even Ms. Fangs. They looked haggard and hungry, but were in a surprisingly good mood. Petunia guessed it was because they had been having nonstop fun for the last three months.

There were also empty water bottles and food wrappers all over the ground. Those items must have been regularly placed on the slide to keep the kids alive. My sister thought of everything.

As it dawned on the class what was really going on, most of them slapped their heads in frustration for not figuring it out sooner. Not even the teacher, Ms. Fangs, had had any clue.

The problem at the moment was that her class was still stuck at the bottom of the pit with no way to get out. Thinking quickly, Petunia sent her bees swarming down. The kids screamed, thinking they were being attacked, when in fact the bees were grabbing hold of them and airlifting them out of the pit one by one.

Soon the whole class was out of the pit. They were so grateful to Petunia that nobody made fun of her purple complexion for a whole week. Frank hugged her best friend so hard she could barely breathe.

Ms. Fangs was looking even more pale than usual. She snatched a rat crawling along the floor and sucked out all its blood in one big gulp.

“Eeewww!” the class moaned, gawking at the disgusting display.

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Ms. Fangs assured them.

“Tastes like rat juice.”

Wendy barfed.

As the class stepped outside into the bright sunlight, they noticed Mr. Grump lying on the ground, snoring through the side of his mouth. Petunia explained that he was their new sixth-grade teacher. The kids pulled him up off the ground. His tusks were stuck in the dirt, so it wasn’t easy.

Mr. Grump opened his eyes.

“Are you okay, Mr. Grump?” Petunia asked.

“My head hurts, but I’m feeling better. Thank you, Petunia.”

“Hey! You remembered my name!”

“I did, didn’t I? My memory must be improving. Now if only I could remember why in the world I was dragging those coconuts up that snowy mountain!”