The Smoky Corridor

84

“Can that pistol blow stuff up?”

The boy named Benny kept asking Eddie the same silly question, over and over.

“Can it, like, shoot exploding fireballs and junk?”

Daphne DuBois kept smiling. Pretending to like these children, most of whom she knew from her nightmarish lunches in the cafeteria.

“All right, children,” she said, putting on the sickly sweet voice she had used to fool them all into thinking she could tolerate their company. “Time for everybody to go home. Isn’t that right, Zack? Tell your friends to go home. Zack?”

“He left,” said Chuck Buckingham, the boy Daphne DuBois wished would just go have a heart attack and die already.

She started blinking. Couldn’t control her twitching eyelids. “He left?”

“Yeah,” said Benny. “Maybe he went to get a musket or something. Maybe a cannon. A cannon could blow up all sorts of stuff!”

“Eddie? Inside. Now! Children? Go home! Or I swear on my dead uncle’s grave, I’ll flunk every stinking one of you!”

The gaggle of giggly children instantly grew quiet.

The heartbroken clump of them just stood there.

The look on their faces?

Why, it made Ms. Daphne DuBois smile.