Bruno looked around, as if he hoped that someone in the class would feed him the correct answer. “No?”
Mrs. Frabbleknacker lunged forward and grabbed Bruno by the ear. Bruno winced in pain, muttering ow, ow, ow, ow! She pulled him to the front of the class and threw him into a wooden chair. Bruno trembled as Mrs. Frabbleknacker placed a box of toothpicks in front of him.
“P-please don’t stab me with those,” Bruno said.
Mrs. Frabbleknacker leaned forward and breathed into the ear she almost pulled off. “You won’t leave this classroom until you build a tower. Just one toothpick on top of the other. Longways. Use them all.”
“But that’s impossible,” Bruno said. “Not without glue.”
“I hope you said good-bye to your family this morning,” Mrs. Frabbleknacker said, and then she burst into a deep, hearty laugh.
When Mrs. Frabbleknacker finished laughing, she snapped back to the rest of the class. “Well? You’ve had ten minutes to learn the words. Now it’s time for a test.”
The entire class gasped.
“Allison!” Mrs. Frabbleknacker snapped. She walked up to Allison’s desk and breathed her banana breath in Allison’s nervous-looking face. “What is REPUGNANT?”
“Um,” Allison stammered. “Is it a kind of dog?”
Mrs. Frabbleknacker flipped Allison’s desk over and tossed her papers across the room. “NO!” she shouted. “IT’S YOU! YOU ARE REPUGNANT, YOU LOATHESOME CHILD! YOU ARE THE UGLIEST, SMELLIEST, ROTTEN-BEYOND-ROTTEN LITTLE GIRL IN THE WHOLE WORLD!”
Allison ran from the classroom crying.
“Next,” Mrs. Frabbleknacker said. “Francis. Demonstrate TACITURN!”
Francis was too afraid to move, blink, or even breathe. He sat there in silence.
Mrs. Frabbleknacker frowned, clearly disappointed. “Correct. Now class, demonstrate TACITURN.”
Every student imitated Francis — his straight posture, his nauseated expression, his still and silent demeanor, and even his tiny eye twitch. And without knowing what TACITURN was, the whole class became it.
“Kaleigh — CLAMOR.”
“Oh! My daddy had mussels and CLAMORS for dinner last night!”
Mrs. Frabbleknacker smiled wickedly. “Did I not ask the class to be TACITURN? Did I ever say to stop being TACITURN?”
“Wh-what’s TACITURN?”
“SILENCE!” Mrs. Frabbleknacker shouted. “SILENCE, SILENCE, SILENCE! AND WHEN YOU SPEAK, ARE YOU SILENT?” Mrs. Frabbleknacker licked her lips, her long tongue fluttering in and out of her mouth like a snake. “ARE YOU TACITURN, KALEIGH?”
“No, but you asked me a question.”
“TACITURN! TACITURN, TACITURN! AND YOUR FATHER DID NOT HAVE CLAMORS FOR DINNER BECAUSE I AM CLAMORING NOW. DO YOU HEAR WHAT I AM DOING?”
Kaleigh nodded taciturnly.
The whole room buzzed with silence. Then, Rupert heard the sound of a hundred toothpicks falling against a table. Poor Bruno, he thought.
“And now that I have you all silent,” Mrs. Frabbleknacker said, “I will demonstrate the last vocabulary word, ABSCOND.”
Mrs. Frabbleknacker walked out of the classroom, slamming the door in her wake.
Two hours later, Rupert and his classmates decided it was finally safe to move. Mrs. Frabbleknacker wasn’t coming back.
New Lair, Where?
WHEN RUPERT ARRIVED AT HIS HOUSE, WITCHLING Two was waiting for him on the porch.
She waved to him, grinning. “Hi, Rupert!”
He was almost too stunned for words. Finally he stammered out, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see my apprentice! What are you doing here?”
“I live here.”
“Well, there we have it,” she said with a nod.
Rupert climbed the porch steps, but as he got closer, the smile slid off her freckly face. She wiggled her nose and sniffed loudly. “You smell funny,” she said.
“Do I smell like bananas? Mrs. Frabbleknacker may have rubbed off on me.”
“No, you smell more like pigeon liver,” she said matter-of-factly.
“What are you doing here?” Rupert said. “You said I didn’t know anything about magic.”
“It’s called perverse apology. Nebby and Storm use it on me all the time, so I thought I’d trick them for once.”
Rupert scratched his head. “Perverse apology? I think you mean reverse psychology.”
Witchling Two shrugged.
“So what are you doing here? At my house? My mom doesn’t particularly like… people like you. You better leave before she gets home from work.”
“I’ve already met Joanne. We just had a nice pot of tea.”
At that moment, Rupert’s mother opened the front door. She was struggling to get her shoes on, and she was wiggling around trying to clip the straps. “Rupert, honey, you didn’t tell me you made such a lovely friend at school. We were just having tea.”
Rupert looked at Witchling Two in fright, but she was just smiling. Did she tell his mother the truth? Rupert couldn’t imagine that Witchling Two would tell his mother that she was a witch and Rupert was her new apprentice — and his mother seemed far too calm to have heard that she was just drinking tea with a witch.
“Rupert?” his mother said. “You seem distracted.”
“Sorry. You’ve met my friend…” he tried to introduce her, but then he realized that he very well couldn’t introduce her as Witchling Two. “Uh, my friend. So now we’re going to work on homework. In my room.” Rupert grabbed the sleeve of Witchling Two’s powder blue shirt, and he pulled her into the house.
“I’m headed to work!” his mother shouted behind him. “I’ll see you later, Rupert!”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Campbell!” Witchling Two cried.
Rupert pulled her past the kitchen and through the living room. He tried to drag her up the stairs, but she paused at the adjacent basement door.
“Ooooh!” she squealed. “A dark and dangerous door! What’s in there?”
“Just the basement,” he said. “Let’s not go down there.”
Witchling Two opened the basement door, grabbed Rupert’s arm, and pulled him down the stairs with her. The basement wasn’t the most comfortable part of the house — it was a carpet-less, cement-floored, dimly lit, dust-ridden, musty-smelling, dingy old space. But despite his reluctance to go down there, Rupert supposed it was perfect for what he needed at the moment: a quiet area to think. He buried his face in his hands and thought, thought, thought about what to do next. Now that his mother met Witchling Two, it changed everything. His mom would expect to see his “new friend” around. But how could Rupert possibly have her over? She was a witch, and if his mother found out, she wouldn’t like that one bit.
Rupert looked up to find Witchling Two pacing the perimeter of the room.
“What are you doing?” Rupert said.
“The dimensions are perfect. And it’s just the right temperature. And it has the ideal amount of light.”
“For… for what?”
“For my new lair, of course!”
Rupert’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“Well, I can’t go back to Pexale Close with you. The Witches Council booby-trapped it for humans.”
“You can’t have a lair here!” Rupert said. “My mom hates witches! And she’ll know if a witch’s lair is in her own basement!”
“Calm down, Rupert. She likes me.”
“Not when she finds out you’re a witch! And what did you tell her by the way? How did you end up having tea with my mom?”
Witchling Two smiled. “Ah, well, I was waiting for you outside the house, and your mom just invited me in. Who am I to say no to perfectly good tea and crumpets?”