Leon and the Spitting Image Read Free Page B

of a tall, thin woman wearing a long black cape. Not a Batman cape. More the kind of cape Florence Nightingale would have fastened around her neck before heading off to nurse the wounded.

    Leon stared at the clasp on the cape. Fora moment, he thought the clasp was formed from two yellow marbles linked by a chain. But the more he looked at the “marbles,” the more they seemed to look at him.
    All of a sudden he understood why.
    They’re not marbles, he said to himself…. They’re
eyeballs!
    Leon lifted his gaze from the glass eyes to his teacher’s eyes—two dull black beads set deep into a narrow face framed by a helmet of unnaturally black hair. The severe hairdo exaggerated the thinness of the head and drew attention away from a mouth so pinched it looked as though it had been stitched in place by a doll maker who had pulled too hard on the thread.
    The teacher hung up her long black cape and revealed a long black dress underneath. Not
everything
she wore was black. Between the bottom of her dress and the top of her precisely knotted lace-up boots (which were also black), there was a small stretch of leg covered by panty hose the color of cooked liver.
    Leon wasn’t the only one shocked by the new fourth-grade teacher. The rest of the class was equally amazed. They all watched in nervous silence as she marched over to her desk and began emptying her satchel. Leon made a mental list:
    one clipboard
one container of cottage cheese (small-curd)
one box of chalk
one chalk holder
one metal pointer
one brass key
    It didn’t take a hotel detective to figure out that the key must go to the giant padlock on the cabinet. Leon observed his teacher insert a piece of chalk into the sleeve of the chalk holder and adjust it like a lipstick. She then wrote her name on the blackboard with terrifying neatness:
    Miss Hagmeyer
    P. W. leaned over to Leon and whispered, “
Hag
is right.”
    “Suspend the verbal games at once!” Miss Hagmeyer snapped.
    P.W., lowering his voice to a murmur, said, “How’d she hear us?”
    “Must have radar,” Leon whispered back.
    “I do,” Miss Hagmeyer said. “So I advise all of you to keep quiet and concentrate on the matters at hand.” She went back to writing on the blackboard.
    “There,” she said moments later, turning to face the room. “I would like all of you to read out loud what I have written.”
    The students dutifully repeated the phrase. “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
    “Louder,” Miss Hagmeyer commanded.
    The class said the phrase once again.
    “Better,” she allowed. “Those nine words will guide us throughout the year. There will be a proper place for books, a proper place for supplies, and a proper place for worksheets. There will be a proper place for study, a proper place for play, and a proper place for each of you to sit.”
    With that, Miss Hagmeyer put down the chalk and called everyone up to the front of the room. She then reached for her clipboard and pointer and began reading off the names of students—last name first, first name last. The roll call started with “Brede, Antoinette” and finished, inevitably, with “Zeisel, Leon.” After stating each name, Miss Hagmeyer aimed her metal pointer at a chair.
    Leon ended up at the very rear of the room, sandwiched between a desk assigned to Warchowski, Thomas, and the padlocked cabinet. Though the seat assignment separated Leon from his friends, it did have one advantage. It was beyond the range of Lumpkin’s spitballs, noogies, and dead-arms.
    Brede, Antoinette, wasn’t so lucky. Because of the configuration of the chairs, she got stuck directly in front of the class bully.
    The moment Lumpkin thought Miss Hagmeyerwasn’t looking, he reached forward to give Antoinette a poke with a brand-new highly sharpened No. 3 pencil (No. 3s being the ones with the extra-hard lead). But before he could complete his attack, Miss Hagmeyer whipped around.
    “Stop that at once!” she