Class Six and the Nits of Doom (6 page)

Emily gave a long shaken sigh of relief.

‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘But then, where
is
Rodney?’

They all thought about it.

‘Wherever he is, he’s missing school,’ said Jack, with a trace of envy.

‘I bet he’s gone to the doctor and got some banana medicine,’ said Slacker, envious too.

And then the bell went and they all trooped in to class.

‘Now all of you stand up, please, Class Six,’ said Miss Broom, after she’d called the register. ‘Good. Now I want everyone to touch their right ear with
their left hand. No, their
right
ear, Jack. That’s it. Now everyone try to touch the ceiling! Stretch! Excellent. And now let’s try running on the spot. Come along!
Left-right-left!’

Class Six ran until they felt woken up. Then they ran until they felt full of beans. At the front Miss Broom was running too, her little plump legs in her brown stockings pumping up and down so
fast that all you could see was a blur.

‘Jolly good!’ she cried. ‘Faster!’

Class Six ran until they were scarlet in the face and they thought they might be going to explode. Even Slacker pounded away until the classroom windows were rattling in their frames.

‘Marvellous!’ said Miss Broom at last. ‘All right, everybody, you can sit down again now.’

Class Six sank gratefully into their seats, so red in the face they looked like uniformed tomatoes. Though actually, Slacker looked more like a uniformed aubergine.

Miss Broom looked round at them all. Her eyes were sharp as holly prickles. ‘Well, you’re all obviously quite fit,’ she said. ‘That’s good. For a moment I was
afraid you might be allergic to my special…er…
teaching methods
, and that would have spoiled everything.’

Class Six did try to summon up a little weak coughing, but it only managed to sound pathetic and desperate.

Miss Broom waited for the noise to die down, and then she smiled, showing her sharp little pearly teeth.

‘So now,’ she said. ‘I think it’s time to do some spelling.’

And she took a black wand out of her desk drawer.

Class Six sat up and blinked. There was a bell sounding. But…

‘Is that the fire alarm?’ asked Slacker Punchkin groggily.

‘No, no,’ said Miss Broom. ‘That’s the bell for playtime. Off you go, all of you!’

Class Six, very puzzled, stumbled into the playground. They squinted round. The sky was grey, but it still seemed very bright.

‘I think I must have been asleep,’ mumbled Jack.

‘Me too,’ agreed Slacker, yawning like a hippopotamus. ‘Hey, hang on a minute! I was so fast asleep I’ve gone and left my breaktime snack in my backpack. There were three
Fatso Bars and two cheese pasties in there! What am I going to do now?’

Winsome was still blinking.

‘But we can’t
all
have fallen asleep,’ she said. ‘Not unless…’

‘She’s gone and enchanted us, hasn’t she?’ said Serise, outraged.

‘She must have done,’ agreed Anil. ‘There’s no way we’d all have fallen asleep otherwise. So the question is, what’s she done to us?’

Winsome frowned.

‘Does anyone remember anything?’ she said. ‘Because I seem to remember all the books in the reading corner diving off the shelves and then flapping round the
classroom.’

‘Yes, I remember that,’ said Emily. ‘And all the letters and pictures fell off the pages as they went, until they were as white as seagulls.’

Slacker grunted.

‘Those letters,’ he said. ‘They tasted of vinegar toffee.’

Jack gasped. ‘You mean you
ate
them?’

‘Course I did,’ said Slacker. ‘It was better than letting them all dive up my nose, wasn’t it? At least I got to taste them. They were quite rubbery, though.’

‘I could taste them even though they went up my nose,’ admitted Anil. ‘But to me they tasted of peppermint.’

Winsome clutched at her hair. ‘But this is impossible,’ she said. ‘It just
must
be a dream.’

‘Yeah, and we all dreamed the same thing,’ said Serise, rolling her eyes. ‘That was no dream, Winsome. That was wa-wa-wa-
wigglecraft
.’

‘I remember, now!’ exclaimed Anil. ‘She got a wand out of her drawer and then she said something about spells.’

‘No, not spells,’ said Jack. ‘
Spelling!
’

And then Class Six were chattering as fast as they could, remembering the taste of the spiky letters and the sound of the books flapping round the room.

Suddenly Emily gasped.

‘I can spell
necessary
,’ she announced in amazement.

Everyone stopped chattering and thought about it.

Jack blinked. ‘Hey, when I think about how to spell
necessary
two little lizards sort of pop up in front of my eyes holding a banner with the word NECESSARY written on
it.’

‘Red lizards, wearing green ties?’ asked Slacker.

‘That’s right. On pogo sticks.’

Class Six all stood and thought, and then Serise let out a small shriek.

‘I can spell anything!’ she said. ‘Even
queue
!’

‘And
meringue
,’ said Slacker Punchkin, licking his lips.

Jack began jumping up and down.

‘I can spell anything at all!’ he shouted. ‘Anything! I can even spell… I can spell… I can even spell
DIARRHOEA
!’

And then he stopped jumping about quite suddenly and looked a bit puzzled for a moment. And then he put up his hand to his head and he began to scratch and scratch and scratch.

‘I don’t know what it is, but it itches like mad,’ said Jack.

‘You’ll have to sit at the back of the class and hope Miss Broom doesn’t notice you,’ said Winsome, despairingly.

‘A fat lot of good that’s going to do,’ muttered Serise. ‘Jack’s gone and caught Rodney’s lurgy, that’s what’s happened. And if it’s that
catching then we’ll
all
be getting it!’

Anil hunched his shoulders.

‘We’re going to die, then,’ he said.

‘Nooooo!’ shrieked nearly everyone. ‘
I don’t want to die!
’

But Winsome drew herself up bravely.

‘We don’t know what’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget that Anil’s always looking on the bad side. Remember the time he said Mr Wolfe had
grown a tail? And that turned out not to be true.’

‘You don’t know that,’ said Anil. ‘He probably keeps it tucked down inside his trousers.’

‘Or the time Anil said that when he went to the seaside he saw Mrs Elwig swimming in the sea with a pod of killer whales? And then when we got back to school there Mrs Elwig was, as
usual.’

‘Sitting in her wheelchair smelling of fish,’ muttered Anil. ‘With a rug over her legs, singing songs about sailors, and hardly ever bothering to breathe.’

Winsome waved all that away.

‘And as for Rodney,’ she said, ‘we’d have heard if he’d dropped dead. You know what grown ups are like, they’d have been talking about nothing else. Rodney
will be—’

‘Over there!’ screeched Jack, pointing.

And there he was, just getting out of his mum’s car.

‘But…that can’t be Rodney,’ said Emily. ‘That’s someone with black hair.’

They watched Rodney walk through the school gate. When he got closer they could see that his hair wasn’t really black—it had purple and green glossy streaks, like a magpie’s
back.

There was something else a bit odd about him, too, but it took Class Six a while to work out what it was.

‘Your nose has got bigger!’ said Emily, in horror. ‘It’s…it’s…’

‘It looks a bit like a trunk,’ said Serise.

It was only a very small trunk, but there was no doubt about it.

‘Yes,’ said Rodney. ‘My mum took me to the doctor’s, but he says it’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Well, at least your voice is back to normal,’ said Winsome. ‘Perhaps all these other symptoms will go away by themselves too.’

Rodney shrugged.

‘It is quite odd, though,’ he told them. ‘Because my toes have gone bright green. And when I sneeze…’

As he said it his trunk began to twitch and his face got redder and redder. Class Six all screamed, and they were throwing themselves sideways when it happened. There was a sound like someone
punching a sack of flour, and Rodney sneezed.

Inwards.

His trunk shrunk until it was the size of a surprised caterpillar, and his belly ballooned outwards. There was a whole series of small explosions as the buttons on his shirt popped off.

One other thing happened, too. His ears shot out from the sides of his head as they were if on elastic—and then they whizzed back into place again with a sharp and painful snap.

Class Six got up slowly from where they’d thrown themselves out of the way of Rodney’s sneeze.

‘Well, at least if Rodney’s sneezes are going inwards then he isn’t going to give us anything nasty,’ said Winsome.

‘But he already has!’ squeaked Emily. ‘Look at Jack. He keeps scratching and scratching, and that’s what Rodney was doing yesterday.’

Jack shrugged, and scratched some more.

‘I’ve only got an itchy head,’ he said. ‘It’s probably a case of galloping dandruff or something. Or nits.’

Slacker shook his chins. ‘That’s not nits,’ he said. ‘Nits are ordinary, like veruccas and tooth rot. They don’t make your nose get bigger.’

‘They don’t make your toes turn bright green, either,’ said Serise.

‘Ordinary nits don’t,’ agreed Anil. ‘But don’t forget Rodney was wearing Miss Broom’s hat yesterday. Perhaps he caught them from that. Special
wer-wer-wer—oh bother it! Special
magic
nits.’

Class Six exchanged glances.

‘Jack did have his head really close to Rodney’s yesterday when he was answering for him,’ said Winsome. ‘He could have caught them then.’

Jack scratched his head again, and as he did everyone else’s scalps began itching and itching in sympathy. Class Six folded their arms and gritted their teeth and vowed that they
weren’t going to start scratching. This tickling was just in their minds. It was. It
was
.

‘I don’t want to get magic nits!’ whimpered Emily. ‘I don’t!’

Everyone’s shoulders had begun to twitch, now, as the itchiness of their scalps got worse. It felt as if little spiders were crawling through the roots of their hair. As if tiny needles
were pricking into the skin. And they just had to…

‘This is terrible,’ said Anil, suddenly. ‘If these are nits then they’re incredibly powerful nits. These are NITS OF DOOM!’

And at last Class Six put their hands up to their heads and began to scratch and scratch and scratch.

As soon as Miss Broom arrived in the classroom she gave out lumps of modelling clay and asked Class Six to write stories. Everyone was so keen not to attract Miss Broom’s
attention that they sat as still as statues, apart from the occasional twitch and wriggle to try to soothe away the itching, and wrote like mad.

Writing a story was easier than usual because the lumps of clay squeezed themselves into the shape of everything they wrote about and acted out the story for them.

Ten of Class Six’s stories were about football, seven were about ponies, six were about winning talent shows, six were about bullying and one was about cake.