“Come on, students, everyone out of there!” I heard Mademoiselle Morrow call. I ducked down beneath the rows and started crawling so that she couldn’t see me. The sprinklers were raining on my head and the lights were kind of blinking too, but I crawled along the wet floor without stopping. I was on a mission.
“Be smart. Take care of each other, folks!” I heard Dr. Dixon’s booming voice in the hallway outside the auditorium. “Walk, don’t run, students. Get outside to your meet-up places to join your homerooms!”
The sprinklers were still going and alarms still blaring, but I was pretty sure from the quieting down of the auditorium that it was finally empty. Now was my chance to find Shady Sadie before she left the school grounds. But when I grabbed my backpack and straightened up, I was shocked to find myself nose-to-nose with Not-by-the-Hair-of-My-Cheni-Chen-Chen.
The principal’s clothes were wet and her pink glasses so water-streaked I couldn’t see her eyes, but her hair was even more twisty-curly and standing out from her head than before. She swiveled her neck, like she wasn’t looking at me but somehow around me, hissing, “Illegal!”
I took some serious offense, sputtering through the sprinkler water, “Illegal? I’m a human being! No human being is illegal!”
“Illegal! Trespasser! Dimensional interloper!” Principal Chen shrieked to make herself heard over the alarm. Her teeth were kind of bared now in a creepy way. I mean, I knew she was strict, but this was ridiculous.
“Dimensional interloper? What do you mean?” I blinked through the water streaming over my face, trying to stall for time. Now I hoped Dr. Dixon or one of the other teachers was still hanging around and would see us. I was starting to think there was something really not right with old P. Chenny.
“You dropped into the wrong story, girl!” Principal Chen hissed as she clamped an alarmingly clawlike hand over my wrist. “But never mind, we’ll make do!”
“Let me go!” I shouted, trying to pull away from my surprisingly strong principal. Even as I did, her words started to take hold in my mind. Wait a minute, what did she mean I was a dimensional interloper? That I’d dropped into the wrong story? Oh, jeez, maybe my suspicions were right! This wasn’t some temporary story-smushing thing—like what had happened to Neel or my moon mother or Bunty. This was something to do with string, or membrane, theory! I bet I’d dropped into a parallel dimension that was near my own, but not quite. Maybe that dysfunctional wormhole had dropped me and Tiktiki One into a close but ultimately wrong version of New Jersey!
Principal Chen was pulling me along now, despite my best efforts to get away from her. “Let me go! Let me go!” I demanded as she dragged me down the empty hallway outside the auditorium. I was so off-balance, trying to break free from her, that I almost slipped on some soggy Valentine’s Day decorations that had fallen to the wet hallway floor because of the overhead-sprinkler rain. I slipped and skidded on construction hearts and overly fat baby cupids with bows and arrows, which seemed to be mocking me. Man, now was a really bad time for me to have left my weapons in a frozen tree. I needed some help. Like, pronto.
As if in answer to my call, Tiktiki One slipped out of my backpack and onto my shoulder. The lizard flicked its tongue, hitting me in the ear.
“Tell Neel and Mati I’m in trouble!” I yelled. The time for secret messages had obviously passed. “Tell my friends I need help!”
Even as Principal Chen whipped her head around, I yanked off the gecko’s rubbery tail with my free hand and watched my lizard friend go scampering down my side and off along the tiled hallway.
“No one can help you, girl!” sneered my obviously unhinged principal as she yanked me along at a frightening pace out the front doors of the school.
As soon as we were outside, with the freezing February air hitting our cheeks, the principal ran, flat out, away from the flagpole, which was the emergency meet-up place for most of the sixth grade. As she booked along, her big belly not slowing her down one whit, she dragged me with her.
“That’s not the right way!” I tried to break my hand free of her grip, but it was steel. Even my thick-soled combat boots were slipping in the muddy, frosty grass, and my backpack swung crazily back and forth on my shoulders. “I’ve got to go find my homeroom teacher!”
“No worries, you’re with the principal!” cackled Principal Chen in a disturbing way. “You know how to remember the spelling of principal, don’t you? The principal is your pal!” She cackled again, and I felt goose bumps come up across my arms. And it wasn’t just because I was freezing in my sopping clothes.
I half tripped, half stumbled as Principal Chen pulled me along the cafeteria-side wall of the middle school, out behind the building to where the giant metal dumpsters stood. Within seconds, I couldn’t feel my lips or fingertips. My nose was running something fierce. Principal Chen was wearing her normal office suit with no winter jacket but didn’t seem to be feeling the cold at all as she yanked me along with alarming strength. I mean, I’d heard of pregnant women’s hormones making them powerful, but this was beyond beyond!
On the way along the edge of our middle school, we passed a few students running in the other direction, but no one thought to stop us. The screaming fire alarm was still bleating from inside the building, and now, from a distance, I could hear the whine and screeching tires of fire trucks speeding toward the school.
The principal didn’t stop power-walking and yanking until we were out behind the cafeteria dumpsters, where the reek of lunchtime garbage was vomit-inducing. Finally, in the smelly shelter of the giant garbage area, I shook myself free of her grip.
“Who are you?” I built up my courage to ask. I stomped my feet and rubbed my arms. I could barely feel my face from the cold.
To my alarm, Principal Chen turned on me with a decidedly non-Principal-Chen-like look. To tell the truth, she looked a bit like a very familiar villain from a very familiar myth. Her curly hair was weaving around her head like it had a mind of its own. It looked alarmingly like, well, a headful of snakes.
“Haven’t you guessed who I am?” she hissed. Her eyes glinted dangerously behind her pink cat-eye glasses. And her hair was looking more and more snaky by the second. “I thought you knew your Greek myths!”
“Medusa?” I squeaked, thinking of the story I’d read about so many times with Zuzu. But if this was Medusa, why wasn’t I already turned to stone?
“Wrong!” Principal Chen—or who I still thought of as Principal Chen—sneered and spit on the ground. She went on in a whiny voice, “Everybody’s so terrified of my sister. It’s always about Medusa … I mean, MEDU-SA, MEDU-SA, MEDU-SA! What about me, huh? What about Stheno and our other sister Euryale? Just because we can’t turn people to stone, no one remembers to fear us—oh, nooooo. We’re just the cut-rate Gorgons, aren’t we? I’m just the middle sister, aren’t I? I mean, like, it’s so unfair!”
What? Maybe she wasn’t Medusa, but standing before me was one of her Gorgon sisters! I was starting to really freak, my body shaking not just from the freezing February temperatures, but from fear. I didn’t have my weapons, I didn’t have my friends, I didn’t even have my lizard anymore. What was I going to do?