“Not now, Howard,” Mrs. Fluggery said. “Not now!” Mrs. Fluggery walked on her little legs—those sticks that popped out from under the barrel of her belly. “Mrs. F-luggery doesn’t like a doily-brain hampsterhead who can’t answer a simple question!”
“I’m sorry,” Fern said. “I got distracted.”
“Distracted!” Mrs. Fluggery screeched. She spun on her heel and careened around her desk. She threw her arms up and down. “Do you think that Mrs. F-luggery isn’t distracted by the fact that her heart is all tightened up? That you children are trying to kill her?” She stopped and leaned on her desk. “Mrs. F-luggery will be back in one-point-five minutes. She is going to the restroom to take her nitroglycerin tablet and to use the facilities, and when she returns, everything must be back in order. Or else…”
“Or else what?” Lucess Brine asked.
“Stop it,” Fern hissed just loud enough for Lucess to hear.
“Or else Fern and Mrs. F-luggery will have it out in the coatroom!”
A hush fell over the class.
Mrs. Fluggery eyed them all menacingly and then marched out.
Lucess said, “Charlie Barrett has a crooked leg because and he and Mrs. Fluggery had it out in the coatroom. Everyone knows it.”
Fern glanced around the room. All the students were nodding except Howard, who shook his head. “You’ll be fine, Fern. You’ve handled worse than her.”
“Oh, you have, have you?” Lucess said. “Carson Wilbert won’t talk about her cloudy eye. But she had it out with Mrs. Fluggery too.”
The other kids whispered fiercely among themselves. Fern heard little echoes of “Charlie Barrett” and “Carson Wilbert”—tales of limps and corrective eyeglasses.
When Mrs. Fluggery walked in, the class stood up and said, in unison, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Fluggery.” Although this happened each time Mrs. Fluggery reappeared from one of her nitroglycerin trips to the facilities, Fern thought it was weird. It was as if they’d all decided to pretend that Mrs. Fluggery had just shown up for the first time. Mrs. Fluggery had taught them this. It was one of her Rules and Regulations.
She cast her steely eyes over the class, but said nothing. She picked up a piece of chalk from the silvery ledge and then turned her back to them and began to write.
What the children saw next is almost too awful to say. It was such a horror that I hesitate to go on. It was so ghastly that some of the kids with really frail constitutions (I was once a kid with a frail constitution) went pale and dizzy and almost passed out. You see, Mrs. Fluggery had mistakenly tucked the bottom of her herringbone skirt into her underpants. And so the children, stricken, horrified, saw in a flash her gigantic white underwear with small lavender flowers. They saw the backs of her pale legs, complete with varicose veins, all purple and snakish. She was naked from there on down to her knee-high nylons. It was a ghastly horror, and the students were so shocked that they couldn’t breathe or move.
Mrs. Fluggery had written the homework on the board—twenty-one pages of it. She sat down on her vinyl seat. That’s when the cold of the vinyl hit her, and she knew the horrible truth. At first she blanched, and then she flushed a deep red. She stood up with her back to the board and rearranged her skirt so that it flopped back into place.
“Mrs. F-luggery,” she said, “is deeply disappointed in this class. Not one of you had the courage to tell Mrs. F-luggery of this error. Not one of you! Instead you let Mrs. Fluggery make a fool of herself! You all wanted to be better than Mrs. F-luggery. You wanted to humiliate her. Well, you are a poisoned group of children.” She grabbed her chest, pulled out her nitroglycerin tablets and put one under her tongue.
Lucess Brine said ever so quietly—so quietly that Mrs. Fluggery must have imagined it was her very own thought—“Poisoned by…?”
And Mrs. Fluggery’s eyes searched the kids as she finished Lucess Brine’s sentence. “Fern,” Mrs. Fluggery said.
Howard closed his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see it. “No, no,” he muttered. “Not Fern!”
This caught Mrs. Fluggery’s attention. She walked up to Howard, stood before him with her arms crossing her bosom. “And Howard,” she said. “Mrs. F-”—Mrs. Fluggery held the captured air of the “F” in her mouth for so long that her face was tight and shining. She emitted a high-pitched squeak. But just when Fern was certain that Mrs. Fluggery was going to blow, the rest of her sentence poured out in a breathless heap: “luggery would like to have it out with you and Fern in the coatroom!”
3
THE COATROOM
FERN KEPT HER EYES ON MRS. FLUGGERY’S narrow ankles swimming in the bagginess of her knee-high stockings, and followed her—clicking, clicking—to the coatroom. Howard was close behind. Fern thought she heard him sniffle. She hoped he wasn’t crying. She didn’t want to see him cry. It would make her cry. She was sure of it. She wanted to tell him to be tough. She wanted to say, Accountants don’t cry, Howard, even though she wasn’t sure this was true. She wondered if royalty cry. She’d have to figure that out.
It dawned on Fern, too, that she shouldn’t even have to be here. She should have been on her way to the city beneath the city, where she could be useful in important matters like why there are dark winds brewing, and why it’s a bad time to be an Anybody, and why there are dead books. She was needed. She was going to battle the Blue Queen, wasn’t she? But, no, she was here, marching to the coatroom to get in trouble for something that wasn’t really her fault.
The door to the coatroom was brown and covered with one of Mrs. Fluggery’s Rules and Regulations posters. This one was devoted to the importance of saying thank you to Mrs. Fluggery. YOU MUST THANK MRS. FLUGGERY, BECAUSE SHE HAS GIVEN EVERYTHING TO YOU, AND IN FACT, YOU ALL ARE PROBABLY KILLING HER BIT BY BIT!
The coatroom is easy for me to describe. It so happens that I have a lot of experience with coatrooms. My teacher Mrs. Glutten at the Alton School for the Remarkably Giftless put worthless children in the coatroom as a punishment. But because all the students at the Alton School for the Remarkably Giftless were fairly worthless—I, for example, was dim, easily distracted, and occasionally senselessly unruly—all the students were jammed in the coatroom while Mrs. Glutten made extra money as a medical transcriptionist while chain-smoking. (I have used Mrs. Glutten as one of my disguises, minus the pack of Avioli Darks.)
Mrs. Fluggery’s coatroom was like most class coatrooms. A small space, its walls covered with coat hooks, most of which had coats dangling from them. It smelled like the gunky heads of schoolchildren. Books and stacked chairs stood in one corner with a janitorial mop and bucket. It was the kind of dirty, moist place where fungi would grow nicely. In fact, Fern was pretty sure that things were growing at this very moment, inside of gym shoes, and greening the edges of bread crusts in forgotten lunch bags. The room had more in common with a terrarium than a normal grown-up coat check of furs and overcoats.
Mrs. Fluggery told Fern and Howard to each get a chair. She pointed to a spot along the wall of hooks. “Put them side by side. Right here.”
Howard and Fern did as they were told, and then sat on the chairs.
“No, no, no! Mrs. F-luggery needs to look you in the eye! Stand on the chairs.”
Fern and Howard stood, and, both very nervous, they unsteadily climbed up. Fern looked into Mrs. Fluggery’s face. She’d never seen it up close before. She noticed the brown spots near the top of her forehead, the pinkness of the loose skin under her chin, the tiny red veins on the sides of her nose. Mrs. Fluggery lifted her gnarled hands with their knotty knuckles, and in one quick motion, she pulled the tags out of the backs of Fern’s and Howard’s shirts, twisting them over the hooks on the wall behind them. Then she kicked the chairs out from under their feet. They each dropped a few inches, their feet dangling in air as they hung from the coat hooks. “Ha, ha!” Mrs. Fluggery cawed. “Mrs. F-luggery has got you now!”
“This is chaffing me under the arms!” Howard said.
“You can’t do th
is!” Fern shouted. “We have rights, you know!”
“Rights?” Mrs. Fluggery said, and then she turned to a pair of sneakers twisting on the hook near Howard’s head. “Do they have rights, Mr. Tennis Shoe? Do they?” She paused. “Speak up! I can’t hear you, Mr. Tennis Shoe!” She turned back to the two kids. “Well, well, Mr. Tennis Shoe agrees with Mrs. F-luggery! And Mrs. F-luggery has decided to do this the right way! The old-fashioned way!”
She went to the tallest hook near the stacked chairs, where her own long overcoat was hung. She reached into the sleeve of the coat and pulled out a willow branch.
“What are you going to do?” Fern asked.
“Don’t! I’m allergic to pain!” Howard said, and then lost it. He tried to leap off the hook. He tried to run in midair, and then he began banging his fists against the wall and kicking fiercely.
“Howard!” Fern said. “Howard!” She turned back to her teacher. “You, you, you!” Fern said. “Mrs. Fluggery, are a bad, bad teacher! A bad, bad person!”
Mrs. Fluggery turned to Fern. “Mrs. F-luggery is not to be spoken to like that!”
Fern looked at Mrs. Fluggery in a way she’d never looked at anyone before—not even the Miser when he was evil, not even the vicious mole BORT when he was attacking. Keep in mind that Fern had transformed books from the imagined to the real—paintings, too. She’d helped her father, with the sheer force of love, to change from the shape of a record player into his real, true form. She herself had turned into a grizzly bear to save a friend. But she’d never done any transformations of any kind from sheer anger.
This was the first.
Mrs. Fluggery jerked her head up, as if trying to see her own stiff monument of hair. Fern looked at her hair too. It was as it had been earlier, the shape of the humpbacked pony not quite there. But then suddenly, out of Mrs. Fluggery’s enormous hairdo, an eye peered, and then another.
“Fern,” Howard whispered. That was the only sound until a real, albeit miniature, pony whinnied. The pony, with a small hump on its back, was made out of Mrs. Fluggery’s hair, and was trapped there, woven into her hairdo, perched on top of Mrs. Fluggery’s head. The humpbacked pony shook its mane and tried to rear from its stuck position.
“What?” Mrs. Fluggery screamed. “What is this?”
“I didn’t do it!” Fern said, but what she meant was that she hadn’t done it on purpose.
The pony bucked again, trying to release itself from Mrs. Fluggery’s head. It snorted and pawed Mrs. Fluggery’s scalp with its hooves. Mrs. Fluggery was trying to dislodge the pony, but she was tossed around by its weight and roughness. She banged into one wall of coats and then into the stacks of books and chairs. The janitor’s bucket skidded across the room. “My hair!” Mrs. Fluggery said. “Help me!” For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t referring to herself as Mrs. Fluggery.
But there was little that Fern and Howard could do. For one thing, they were hooked to the wall, and for another, Fern didn’t know how she’d done this in the first place, much less how to undo it.
And then Mrs. Fluggery’s face tightened up. She grabbed her heart and fell to the ground in a clatter. The pony was on its side now too, whimpering.
“Oh, no!” Fern cried.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Howard asked.
“Put your hands together. Make a cup,” Fern said. “Down low so I can put my foot in it and hoist myself off this hook.”
Howard did just that, and Fern pushed herself up, and then, once she was loose, she fell to the floor hard. But she landed right near Mrs. Fluggery. She put her hand on the old woman’s heart. It was still beating. She put her hand to Mrs. Fluggery’s mouth, but she didn’t feel any breath. The pony looked weak and sallow. It jerked its head up and down in a sickly fashion, as if it were fading too.
Fern knew what she had to do. She had to put her mouth on Mrs. Fluggery’s mouth and breathe the life back into her.
“I have to do it, don’t I, Howard?”
“Yep,” Howard said, still hooked. “You’ve got to do it.”
She was horrified. She didn’t want to put her mouth on Mrs. Fluggery’s mouth, which was pruned up, but somewhat open.
Fern bent down. She had to do it. She gave Mrs. Fluggery mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Mrs. Fluggery’s cheeks blew up with air like a big chalky balloon.
The pony was the first to seem to feel better. His ears pricked up and he tottered around, unhooking himself from Mrs. Fluggery’s head. He galloped around the coatroom.
Mrs. Fluggery was next. She woke up with a jolt, her cheeks full-puff. She let out their air and, out of instinct really, said the last part of her name, “luggery,” then glanced around the small room, confused as to what had happened.
“You saved her, Fern! You really did!” Howard said, clicking together the heels of his penny loafers from where he hung on the hook. He clapped his hands.
“Saved Mrs. F-luggery?” Mrs. Fluggery said. “For goodness sake, Fern almost killed her!” The old woman stood up, and once again she towered over Fern. She opened the coatroom door and walked between a row of desks. She stumbled a bit, grabbed Horten Everett’s head to steady herself, then pulled one of her pill bottles from her cardigan sweater’s pocket. All the kids were staring up from their desks.
Fern walked over to Howard. She bent down so he could use her back to lift himself off the hook. The two of them stepped out of the coatroom.
“You two are expelled! You’ll never step foot in Mrs. F-luggery’s classroom ever, ever, EVER AGAIN!”
Fern was overjoyed. She smiled secretively at Howard and he smiled back. She and Howard were expelled! They’d never ever EVER step foot in this classroom again! She glanced at Lucess Brine, and there was that mixed expression again. Part of her seemed victorious and the other quite regretful. Lucess’s eyes looked a little wet at first, and then water rose up in them and tears plopped onto each cheek. “Run away!” Lucess mouthed. “Run away, Fern!” But this time it didn’t seem like something mean to say. It seemed like an urgent plea. Fern wasn’t sure how to take it. She wanted to tell Lucess that she didn’t care one bit! She was free! But it was as if Lucess knew something Fern didn’t.
Fern and Howard walked out behind Mrs. Fluggery, the small pony galloping wildly around their feet.
4
THE INVITATION DISCOVERED
FERN AND HOWARD WERE SITTING IN FRONT OF Vice Principal Wattley’s desk. Vice Principal Wattley was brand-new. Anyone could tell that just by looking at his bald head, which still had considerable shine. If there are classes in vice principal school devoted to shining up a bald head, as I suspect there are, then let me tell you, Vice Principal Wattley did very well on his head polishing classes: A+++. His head glowed so much that he didn’t even look like Vice Principal Wattley as much as he looked like a gold trophy version of Vice Principal Wattley.
The real, true, actual principal of the school, a bony woman named Sneed, had been out of town at an educators’ convention for a number of years. Fern knew her from photographs, one of which was life-sized and propped in her office chair. Fern and Howard had spied it through her open office door, and thought it was odd.
The school ran through vice principals quickly, perhaps because of Principal Sneed’s absence. The vice principals did all the work, but a propped-up photograph in a chair got all the glory. Vice Principal Wattley, however, seemed like he was prepared to stay. He’d decorated his office elaborately; he’d bought a souped-up wooden rolltop desk with carved lion’s feet and flanked by potted ferns. There were so many ferns that the place had a transplanted jungle feel. Fern, herself, felt like a very small fern in a sea of ferns. Bookcases, yes, but they were filled with cardboard displays of books—the kind you see in discount furniture stores.
Vice Principal Wattley had already called and talked to Dorathea and the Bone, as well as the Drudgers. Those conversations had invigorated him. He had never expelled anyone before. He was trying to sound grim, but he was trul
y breathless with joy. “This is what I’ve been preparing for! Expulsion! And now the time has come!” He had that aggressive air about him like a new bagger at the grocery store checkout, how they tend to pounce, crying, “Plastic or paper?” Fern had the sense that he was really feeling it—the vice principal vibe.
Fern and Howard were relieved to never be allowed to step foot in Mrs. Fluggery’s classroom ever again. But Dorathea and the Bone were on their way to pick them up. They would drive them back to Dorathea’s boardinghouse, where they would wait for the Drudgers—who were at an actuarial conference, assessing insurance premiums—and would come as soon as they could, though it might be late. “They have a schedule to adhere to,” Vice Principal Wattley said, and Fern knew it was a direct quote. The Drudgers loved adhering to schedules. What would the Drudgers have to say? Would they understand at all?
Mrs. Fluggery was swimming through the ceiling-hung ferns around Wattley’s desk. She was ranting and huffing and flapping. “Tell the parents that they’re beastly children! Chigger bites! Hampsterheads!” Finally she ran out of steam. She had flopped into a fern-hidden armchair by the window and had only a little flap left in her. “Tell them about the violent pony! Tell them that I was nearly killed! Tell them, tell…them.”
Vice Principal Wattley gave a frustrated sigh. He didn’t believe in the violent pony part of Mrs. Fluggery’s story, even though he should have! The pony, hidden in the pocket of Fern’s hooded sweatshirt, was tired now too, but what if it began bucking wildly? Fern was very nervous.