Felicity stopped and stiffened; her grip was cold as stone around Stanley’s throat.
She unclenched his neck, shuffled ahead, and thumped down in her chair. As soon as she was seated, she swiveled her head around to hiss and bare her teeth at Stanley.
“Who would like to hand out the books?” Mr. Baldengrumpy asked.
Felicity’s head swiveled to the front again. Her arm shot into the air, stiff and grasping, like a hand reaching up out of a freshly dug grave.
“Mrmmrngmrmarnnnnn . . . ” she moaned loudly.
“Thank you, Felicity,” said Mr. Baldengrumpy, setting the books down on her desk.
17
ELSEWHERE IN THE SCHOOL, IT WAS CENTER TIME downstairs in Ms. Mellow’s kindergarten and the classroom was bustling with non-gender-specific role-playing activities. Little girls in red firefighter hats were tearing around making siren noises, filling buckets at the Water Station and splashing them on a pretend fire at the Computer Station. Little boys were at the Craft Table, eating crayons and glue. In the Playhouse, one boy was pretending to be the kind of daddy who liked to wear an apron and bake mud pies, while the girl he was playing with was pretending to be the kind of mommy who liked to throw dishes and yell at you to get a job.
And in the middle of the busy room, one child stood all by himself, picking his nose with intense concentration.
In the sandbox, a little girl with pigtails was trying to soothe a little boy who was crying. He was crying because she’d just whacked him over the head with her plastic spade.
“There, there,” said the little girl with pigtails, patting the boy on the shoulder. And when that didn’t work, she dumped a pail of sand on him.
Over in the Story Corner, two boys who both wanted to read the same book were having a tug-of-war.
“Now, boys,” Ms. Mellow chimed in a soothing singsong. “Remember, we always share.”
Ms. Mellow’s voice was so calm and sweet, it worked on the children like a spell: As soon as they heard her, the two boys stopped fighting and put the book scraps down on the floor where they could both read them together, with all the words and pictures upside down. And the kid who was picking his nose stopped and offered some to a girl who was bashing toy trucks together nearby.
At the back of the room, a small boy with glasses was playing by himself in the Doll Corner. Little Georgie liked to play with dolls, and there was nothing wrong with that. He liked to talk to himself in different voices and pretend it was the dolls talking, and there was nothing wrong with that. He liked to make the dolls scream in terror and rip each other limb from limb in a murderous rampage with the gnawing and the clawing and the gnashing and the smashing....
And there was nothing wrong that.
Little Georgie was piling all the dollhouse furniture into barricades when he noticed a strange new toy staggering toward him from out of the coatroom.
It was some sort of stuffy, like a cross between a teddy bear and a stuffed bunny. Except it had fangs like the pointy bit on an electric can opener, claws as sharp as fishhooks, and something unnerving about its eyes.
“Ooo,” Little Georgie exclaimed. “Cute.”
Little Georgie picked up the weird toy. But as he craled it in his arms, it dled it in his arms, it wriggled and stretched its mouth toward his neck. . . .
“Aaaaaah!!!” Little Georgie squealed. “Noooooooooo!!!”
Suddenly the Doll Corner rang with loud, piteous smackings and smoochings.
“Oo—ahh—STOP—ughh!!!” Little Georgie choked. “THAT—oo—ahh—arr—TICKLES—urrff!!!!”
A few minutes later, the little girl with pigtails got bored of burying the little crying boy in sand and came to see what Georgie was doing in the dollhouse.
“That doesn’t go there,” she said, lifting a sofa from one of Georgie’s barricades. “It goes here.”
She started removing all the furniture from Georgie’s piles and placing it in the dollhouse rooms.
“And this goes here . . . . And this goes here . . . . ” she said in a bossy tone.
“Hmmgrgh . . . ” whimpered Georgie. He was hunched over, biting the head off a doll in a tuxedo.
“I want that,” the little girl in pigtails said. She grabbed at Georgie’s doll.
“Mgnhrgnhhh,” Georgie moaned, hugging it to his chest.
“Give it,” the girl said. “You already had a turn.”
She yanked and yanked until finally Georgie snapped at her, sinking his teeth into her wrist!
“Ow! I’m telling!” she threatened. “Ms. Mellow says you have to share, it’s the – oo, I feel straaaaaange. . . .”