Class Six and the Nits of Doom by Sally Prue Page B

beetles and bats and mice.
    Half-eaten beetles and bats and mice.
     
    Class Six tottered pale-faced out into the playground at break time and stood in a trembling group, too shattered even to think about playing. They were too shattered to speak,
too. They stood, completely silent except for a strange slurping, crunching sound behind them like the turning of a badly rusted washing machine.
    But that was only Slacker Punchkin eating his breaktime snack of three meat pasties, so they were used to it.
    At last Winsome took a deep brave breath.
    ‘At least we’re alive,’ she said.
    ‘We are for now,’ said Serise dourly. ‘But who knows if we’ll be alive by lunch time. We’ve been at School Assembly ever since registration. By lunch time Miss
Broom might have turned us into gerbils.’
    ‘Lamp posts.’
    ‘Pies.’
    ‘Zombies. Or mummies.’
    ‘Not mummies,’ said Slacker, spraying Class Six with pie crumbs. ‘She’d never find enough bandages to wrap me up.’
    Rodney was looking at them as if they were mad. ‘That’s stupid. There’s no such things as witches. You all know that. Miss Broom’s just an ordinary boring old
teacher.’
    And now it was Anil’s turn to stare at Rodney as if
he
was mad. But that was fair enough.
    ‘
What?
’ Anil said. ‘So where do you think all those owls came from? And that shower of bus tickets?’
    ‘The owls came out of a hole in her desk,’ Rodney answered. ‘You don’t have to be a witch to keep pets, do you? My nan’s got a ferret. And the bus tickets
probably...’ He frowned for a moment, thinking hard, and then his face brightened. ‘The bus tickets probably came off a bus!’ he finished up, triumphantly.
    ‘And where do you suppose the bus tickets all went, Rodney?’ asked Winsome, quite kindly. ‘I mean, once they’d stopped flying round the classroom like jet-powered moths
and singing that really high-pitched little song about always trusting Miss Broom and always doing as we were told?’
    Rodney shrugged. ‘That was just an optical delusion.’
    ‘And so were all the gibbons,’ said Serise scathingly. ‘
And
the thunder and lightning coming out of the art cupboard.’
    Rodney pulled up two bunches of scraggy weeds from the flowerbed behind him, rolled them up carefully, and stuck them in his ears.
    That was the sort of thing he did all the time. No one knew why. Least of all Rodney.
    ‘There’s no such thing as witches,’ he said stubbornly. ‘And I bet I can prove it, too. All we have to do is make Miss Broom really annoyed, and if we don’t get
turned into toadstools then we’ll
know
she’s not a witch.’
    The bell went for the end of break. Jack screamed and jumped so violently he ended up with his arms and legs wrapped round one of the netball posts.
    ‘That’s it,’ said Serise grimly. ‘We are
so
going to be dead.’
    ‘Well, at least if Rodney goes and annoys Miss Broom then he’ll be dead first,’ pointed out Anil, as they went to line up. ‘That’s something.’
    But Winsome, who was very kind and sensible, pulled the bunches of weeds out of Rodney’s ear holes.
    ‘I think you’d best be good, Rodney,’ she said.
    ‘No,’ said Jack, flapping his fingers between horror and a sort of dreadful delight. ‘Go on, Rodney! You prove to us all that Miss Broom is just an ordinary human and not a
witch, and that all those sardines that Emily found in her drawer had swum there by themselves during the holidays.’
    Rodney smiled happily. Not only was he easily the stupidest person in the class, he was probably the most obstinate, too.
And
the least able to recognise a really, really bad idea when he
heard one.
    ‘All right, then,’ he said, and led the way back to class.
    Miss Broom wasn’t in the classroom when Class Six arrived. The children looked round anxiously, checking for sharks in the sink and ghosts hanging from the coat hooks, but everything
looked more or less normal. Even Emily’s drawer, once