The Somebodies Read Online Free Page B

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 willbe 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 upand 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, andshe 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