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the hardest thing I’d have to do all year and I’d better start thinking about it.
    Of course, Charlie kept waiting for “macaroni and cheese” to show up in the morning announcements. He was going to walk past the teachers’ room and say “macaroni and cheese” and see what happened. But the next time it was on the lunch menu, Charlie was stuck in the nurse’s room with a nosebleed and didn’t get to try it.
    Imogene told him it didn’t make any difference because the password that day was softball.
    “Did you try it?” Charlie asked. “Did you get in?”
    “I don’t want in.” Imogene gave him this dark, squinty-eyed look. “If a kid gets in that room, they never let him out. Remember Pauline Ellison?”
    Charlie shook his head.
    “Neither does anyone else. She got in the teachers’ room. Remember Kenneth Weaver? Did you see Kenneth Weaver lately?”
    “No, because he’s got the mumps.”
    “That’s what you think. Kenneth doesn’t have the mumps. Kenneth got caught in the teachers’ room.”
    I guess this was too much, even for Charlie. “I don’t believe you,” he said.
    Imogene grinned her girl-Godzilla grin. “Neither did Kenneth,” she said. “I told him he better not go near the teachers’ room but”—she shrugged—“he did it anyway.”
    For once nobody believed Imogene. Nobody told her so, but Alice Wendleken said that from now on Imogene couldn’t shove people around anymore because she was a proven liar, and no matter what she said everybody would laugh at her and maybe knock her down. Nobody believed that either, but it sounded great.
    “Just wait till Kenneth comes back!” everybody said. But Kenneth didn’t come back.
    Charlie hunted me up at recess with this news. “He’s never coming back,” he said. “The teacher gathered up his books and moved Bernadette Slocum into his seat and said, ‘Well, we’ll certainly miss Kenneth, won’t we?’ It’s just like Imogene said!”
    “Oh, come on, Charlie,” I said. “You know they haven’t got him shut up in the teachers’ room.”
    Still . . . you had to wonder. First Imogene said Kenneth was gone, and then he was gone. What if Imogene was right?
    I wasn’t the only one who thought about this, and I wasn’t the only one who found reasons to stay away from the teachers’ room, and even to stay away from the whole third floor. Kids suddenly couldn’t climb stairs for one reason or another or kids got dizzy if they went above the second floor. Alice had what she called a twisted toe and limped around holding on to chairs and tables, all on one floor, naturally.
    But Louella McCluskey told the real truth, for everyone. “I don’t think Imogene Herdman is right,” she said, “and I don’t think kids disappear into the teachers’ room, but maybe she is and maybe they do, and I’m not going to take any chances.”
    Then two teachers and a district supervisor and Mrs. Wendleken all got locked in the teachers’ room by accident. They were in there for an hour and a half, banging on the door and yelling and even throwing things out the window. They took down the curtain and climbed up on chairs and waved their arms around at the top of the door, but nobody saw them and nobody heard them because nobody ever went near the teachers’ room.
    They were all pretty mad, especially the district supervisor, and Mrs. Wendleken was hysterical by the time somebody let them out. By that time, too they were all worn out and hoarse from yelling and dizzy from waving their arms around in the air.
    Who finally let them out was Imogene.
    She said that she stood around trying to decide what to do, and that made Mrs. Wendleken hysterical all over again. “What to do!” she said.
    “Open the door and let us out is what to do!”
    “But it’s the teachers’ room,” Imogene said, looking shocked, as if she had this rule burned into her brain. “We’re not allowed in the teachers’ room.”
    “You’re allowed to let people