by Zanib Mian
CHAPTER 5
We were bursting to talk more at lunchtime, but we had to keep it in until we got to the playground after eating. That’s because Sarah and Ellie were sitting right next to us in the cafeteria, and they were clearly in
Instead of talking to each other, they were just staring into space and smiling at each other now and then. I wondered why they were so interested in us today. Usually they’re chatting away about their own stuff . . .
I hoped they hadn’t sneakily read the note I passed to Charlie! I figured if something was going on with Mrs. Hutchinson and the other teachers were in on it, then we had to keep it to ourselves until we knew more. It could be dangerous.
“Finally! We can talk!” I said as soon as we left the cafeteria.
“Talk already! What do you mean Mrs. Hutchinson is in trouble?” said Charlie, wiggling his eyebrows between excited and worried.
“What? When did this happen?” asked Daniel.
We told him I found out in medieval times, which made us all laugh, even in this serious situation.
“I hate being at that faraway desk,
complained Daniel. “I’m going to be the last to find everything out!”
“OR you’ll be the first, but you won’t be able to tell us,” said Omar.
“Even worse! You know I can’t keep anything in.”
“Yeah, we know,” said Charlie, fanning the air around his nose.
“What? It’s not my fault.
We walked away from the smell, relocating to a more hidden spot behind a tree. I explained to my friends what the second-grade teacher said to me. “You know what that means, don’t you? They are hiding something. All the teachers. First, Mr. Henry said that she was in the bathroom, and now this teacher is acting all suspicious and secretive.”
corrected Charlie.
“I’m pretty sure it’s ‘secretive,’ but we can go with ‘secrety.’”
“So what are we going to do?” said Daniel.
“I think we should launch a
But not inside the school,” I said. “Because the teachers are clearly in on it—or they would have told us what’s happened to her.”
“What, like put missing posters up on lampposts?” asked Daniel.
“That’s one idea, but we’ll need to do more,” I said.
“Maybe we could ask
He’s her uncle, remember?” suggested Charlie.
I did remember. Lancelot Macintosh is Mrs. H’s super-cool uncle, who drives a Ferrari without showing off, and who supported us in our save-the-mosque money-raising campaign.
“Yes! He should be the first one we talk to,” I said.
We made a plan to make missing posters using a photo of Mrs. Hutchinson from the wall near the office, where there was a photo of every member of staff in the school. Most of them weren’t smiling in their pictures; they except Mrs. Hutchinson. She was smiling in hers, as if she had just seen a Every time I looked at the wall, it made me want to grab a marker and put smiles on everyone’s faces, the way Maryam and I draw funny hats and mustaches on people in magazines.
“Daniel, would you mind bringing your phone in one day and taking a photo of her photo?”
I’m not allowed a phone of my own yet, even though lots of kids in my class have one, including Daniel. Mom and Dad say I can only get one when I am thirteen, which still feels like a million years away.
“Oh . . . yeah . . . hmmm.”
He giggled.
Charlie and I giggled, too, but I was hoping this mission wouldn’t land any of us in trouble.
CHAPTER 6
After school, I went over to see our next-door neighbor Mrs. Rogers, because she always has the best cookies and listens to all my worries without saying they are nothing to worry about.
she said after I finished telling her everything. And I loved her for it. “You could use The Facebook to try to find her. Apparently, you can write on The Facebook and the whole world can see it. My son John signed me up on it from his computer, which was nice, but I have to wait to use his computer again to look at it, because he didn’t sign me up on mine.”
I pushed a giggle back into my mouth because I didn’t want Mrs. Rogers to think I was laughing at her.
“That’s not how the internet works, Mrs. Rogers. You can sign in to your Facebook account from any computer, anywhere in the world.”
“Oh really? That is fascinating, isn’t it?”
“Sort of.” I grinned.
“Well, the first step is to go and poke around the area she lives in. Bet you’ll find
around there.”
“I know exactly which road she lives on, because I saw her carrying in her groceries once when Dad and I were driving past!”
“Fantastic. That makes things a lot easier. Get your dad to take you back, and then let me know how it goes,” said Mrs. Rogers with a wink. “And say hi to your mom. Tell her I haven’t had a biryani in a while.”
“Umm, we sent you some last weekend, Mrs. Rogers.”
“Like I said, it’s been too long!”
I giggled and promised I would ask Mom to make some more of her favorite Pakistani food.
When we first moved in next door to Mrs. Rogers, she hated the smell of our food cooking.
But now that she’s more part of our family, she gets excited by the smell, knowing what’s going to hit her taste buds.
My dad told us that once, when he took a chickpea curry for lunch to his lab, all his colleagues thought that the smell was one of their experiments gone wrong. He was super embarrassed until he let everyone taste it and they all went mad for the yummy flavor.
I walked the few steps back to my house, but I took my time because I heard a whizzing noise from above. I looked up at the sky, where I could see nothing but clouds. But what was the sound? I imagined it was an alien spaceship, hiding behind the clouds. Which made me wonder . . . what if Mrs. H was in an alien spaceship? It wasn’t impossible . . . After all, she was the one who said there were aliens up there!
When I opened the front door, Esa was unfolding all of the fresh laundry Mom had just done and flinging it across the room.
He grinned happily.
I jumped around trying to grab socks and T-shirts from places high and low. “Stop it, Esa. Mom will be super angry with you.”
Just then, Mom walked into the room with her cup of coffee in hand. she blurted out.
She walked straight back out, mumbling something about at least getting to finish a cup of coffee before it got cold.
I folded the laundry again as well as I could. It’s not as easy as it looks!
Then I used my very best puppy-dog eyes and asked Maryam if I could use her phone to call Charlie and Daniel.
I told them.
CHAPTER 7
The next day, we could barely focus on our already-boring work in class. We were dying for school to be over so we could keep searching for Mrs. Hutchinson.
Mrs. Crankshaw had to deal with her first class incident when Sarah tripped over Daniel’s big boots and fell, hitting her head on the side of a desk. There was blood, right near her eyebrow. It wasn’t pretty and especially because she was wailing very loudly.
But Mrs. Crankshaw went over and looked at Sarah as if nothing had happened. As if she had no blood trickling down her cheek. “OK. You can go to the nurse,” she said. And then she put her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t be able to hear the crying.
It made me miss Mrs. Hutchinson even more. She couldn’t hide how worried she got when a kid hurt themselves, because
Mrs. Hutchinson would always send another child to the nurse with the person who had hurt themselves, just to make sure they were OK on the way.
said Charlie in a whisper, looking at all of us near his desk, the way he does when he makes a joke, like he’s checking how fun
ny it was.
We all laughed, which was a super-bad idea because, as if by some witchy magic, our new teacher appeared out of nowhere, piercing us with her eyes.
“And what exactly is so funny over here?” she demanded, looking at me. Probably because I was the one who
“Nothing,” I said.
And before she spoke, I knew what she was going to say. The same thing all adults on the planet say when you say “nothing.”
“It’s obviously not nothing. It’s something.”
We all stared down at our hands in our laps, not daring to look up.
“Well, ‘nothing’ can cost you your recess. So be careful.” She dropped this bomb as she spun around on her sharp heel and stormed off.
The class worked in silence for the rest of the day, but rumors were already starting to spread on the playground about Mrs. Crankshaw being a
who had and disguised herself as a schoolteacher.
CHAPTER 8
After what seemed like forever, we were finally together on our bikes. Charlie, Daniel and me. Dad had actually managed to sort out my chain problem. which we had figured out was an equal distance from all three of our homes. If you want to know how we did that, I’ll tell you. It was easy. We all left our own houses on foot and counted our steps on the way. Charlie had taken 215 steps, Daniel 189 and me 192. We noticed that Charlie’s steps are smaller, so it was actually about the same distance. Dad said that the whole thing and he raised one eyebrow. It was the eyebrow that told me I should know better because I am the son of two scientists.
sometimes even I can’t be bothered to do
“All right, guys,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “First stop, Mrs. Hutchinson’s house. Follow me and be careful—it might be
that the police haven’t discovered yet, so no touching anything. Except the doorbell. We’ll have to touch the doorbell.”
“But what if we leave and then later the police think we did it?!” said Charlie.
“Does everyone have gloves?” Daniel asked.
Luckily we’d all remembered to bring them. So we put them on and sped off.
As we rode, Charlie said, “She might be at home. Maybe she just decided not to be our teacher anymore.”
I thought about this in my head and said, “No. Mrs. Hutchinson would never, ever do that.”
But my heart was beating at the thought of her opening her front door. And when we got there and I went to press the doorbell, my hand was shaking.
We waited. Charlie held on to the hood of my jacket for comfort, and Daniel held on to Charlie’s arm. Which made me imagine myself at the circus, being the person on the bottom that all the other people stand and balance on. That person has to be the
to hold everyone up. If I ran away now, we would all run away. So I tried to remember to I conjured up my imaginary dragon, H2O, who breathes cool steam. I don’t imagine him very often anymore, but I needed him now, to help me stay calm.
Nobody came to the door, Sad because that meant Mrs. Hutchinson was missing. But happy because it meant that she didn’t just decide to stop being our teacher.
We rang it another couple of times and waited, to be triple super sure. Then we peeked in through the mail slot.
There was a whole pile of mail on the floor.
“You know what that means, don’t you, guys?” I said quietly.
“She hasn’t been home,” Charlie gasped.
“For days!” Daniel added.
Then we peered in through the front window, hoping to find more clues.
“Can anyone see anything?” Charlie asked, with his nose pressed up against the window.
“Errmm . . . nooo . . . not really . . .” I said.
“What are we looking for, anyway?” said Daniel.
Just then, the freakiest creature ever pounced onto the windowsill from the inside and
All three of us screamed and leaped backward onto the grass. Charlie practically jumped into Daniel’s lap.
he shrieked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it!” I said.
“I think it was just a cat . . . I think,” said Daniel.
Charlie was still shrieking.
“Yeah, it was, like, just skin, yucky skin.” I grimaced.
“Like an Charlie said.
“Guys, what if it’s an alien? Trying to disguise itself as a cat, but it doesn’t quite know what cats look like? Or maybe its fur-disguise feature is out of order?!” I said, thinking back to the spaceship I had imagined in the clouds.
Charlie and Daniel stared at me blankly. None of us spoke for a long, awkward moment.
Just when I thought my friends thought my idea was way too crazy this time, Charlie said, “I mean, it was really weird-looking. I guess we shouldn’t rule anything out—right, Daniel?”
“Oh, come on,” he replied.
I sort of knew what Daniel meant, but I couldn’t let go of my idea that easily. I looked up at the sky again and then down at my feet. I noticed something very strange. We were standing in a circle of grass that was a completely different color from the grass around it.
I spun around to look at the rest of the grass and saw that there were four circles just like that, making a pattern on Mrs. H’s front lawn.
I pointed down.
“That’s weird,” said Charlie.
“Hmmm. What are those?” said Daniel.
They were really odd. Especially because the rest of Mrs. H’s yard looked like somebody’s very green fingers had been working on it, making it all pretty and neat.
“What can make weird circle patches like that?” asked Charlie.
In my head, I thought:
And I wanted to shout out: A SPACESHIP, GUYS! But this time, I kept it to myself, because Daniel thought my aliens idea was too wacky.
“I think we should get out of here,” I said, grabbing my bike.
CHAPTER 9
We rode slowly back toward our houses, talking about the evidence we had seen.
We decided that the first clue had to mean that she had been kidnapped and had not been home for a long time.
The other two clues were just weird. In my head, they were definitely alien clues. Charlie thought they could be, too, but maybe he was just trying to be nice, because then he said the most likely explanation was that she had been kidnapped by humans. Because humans were definitely more common on Earth, mathematically there was more chance of it being humans.
Daniel said there was no way it could be aliens, and why were we distracting ourselves from the real kidnappers with the idea? (This is why it’s good to have more than one best friend: in case one of them thinks your imagination has gotten out of control . . .)
“Should we tell our parents?” Charlie asked.
said Daniel.
I thought about it. “Hmmm. They might be able to help . . . but on the other hand, they would absolutely hit the roof if they found out that I had gone outside on my bike. YIKES.”
“The perimeter” is a very strict zone that I am allowed to ride my bike in when I’m not with Mom or Dad or Maryam. I had broken the perimeter by a lot to try to save Mrs. H.
“I would never, ever, ever admit to my parents how far we went from home,” said Daniel. “They’re coming up with more and more genius punishments for me, like they’ve been reading a book about it.”
“Haha, what? Like there’s a book called No Screen Time for a Week and Other Genius Punishments for Kids.” I laughed.
“No, no.” Charlie giggled. “209 Million Ways to Make Your Child Behave.”
“How to Train Your Kids and Other Animals,” Daniel said, slapping his knee with delight.
“Seriously, though, it might be worth it, if they can help Mrs. H.” I decided she was even worth losing Xbox time for a little while.
&nb
sp; So that night, I casually walked into Mom and Dad’s room, where they were reading in bed, even though it wasn’t really bedtime yet. They had chosen
obviously. But a closer look at Dad’s cover convinced me to tell them about our suspicions, because it was about the universe.
“What’s up, darling?” asked Mom.
“Need batteries again?” said Dad.
Wow, how did he know that? I actually did need batteries again, but I decided to use this time wisely and stick to the more important issue.
“No, I want to talk to you about Mrs. Hutchinson . . .”
“What about her? Is she back?” said Mom.
“No, that’s what I want to talk about,” I said, jumping onto the bed and myself a space right between them.
This was great—now I could say things without having to look them in the face.
“So . . . don’t be mad, but . . .”
“You know when you start a sentence with we probably will be mad,” said Mom.
“It’s OK to tell us,” said Dad. “Maybe we will just be a teeny bit mad.”
I took a deep breath. “OK. Well, we had to find out what happened to her, so we rode our bikes to her house and saw some stuff.”
OUTSIDE it? OUTside, as in the side you promised never to go on?” said Mom, holding her head in her hands as if it would blow away if she didn’t.