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out of the teachers’ room!” Mrs. Wendleken hollered.
    Then the district supervisor got mad at Mrs. Wendleken. “This child has saved the day,” she said. “We ought to thank her. And let me tell you, there are plenty of schools in this district where the students spend every waking minute trying to break into the teachers’ room, or sneak into the teachers’ room. You wouldn’t believe the wild tales I’ve heard. Now here’s a student who seems to understand that teachers need a little privacy. I hope you have more boys and girls like . . . is it Imogene?”
    “We have five more exactly like her,” one of the teachers said.
    The district supervisor said that was wonderful and nobody argued with her—too tired, I guess, from jumping up and down yelling for help.
    This whole thing got in the newspaper. “ SCHOOL PERSONNEL LOCKED IN THIRD FLOOR ROOM ,” it said. “ RELEASED BY ALERT STUDENT .” It didn’t name the alert student but it named everybody else who was there.
    “Except Kenneth Weaver,” Charlie said. “It doesn’t say anything about Kenneth Weaver.”
    “That proves it, Charlie,” I said. “He never was in there.”
    “Why in the world would Kenneth Weaver be in the teachers’ room?” Mother said. “That whole family moved to Toledo.”
    “Did they take Kenneth?” Charlie asked.
    “Certainly they took Kenneth! Who would move away and leave their children?”
    “Mr. Herdman,” I said, but Mother said that was different.
    Alice Wendleken cut out the newspaper article and gave it to Imogene. “I thought you’d want to keep it,” she said, “since it’s about you. Of course nobody knows it’s about you because they didn’t print your name. I wonder why they didn’t print your name.”
    “They didn’t print Kenneth’s name either,” Imogene said. “So what?”
    “So Kenneth wasn’t there!” Alice said.
    Imogene stuck her nose right up against Alice’s nose, which naturally made Alice nervous and also cross-eyed. “Why do you think I opened the door to that room?” she said. “You think I opened the door to let all those teachers out? Who cares if they never get out? I let Kenneth out.”
    “My mother was in there,” Alice said, “and she didn’t see Kenneth.”
    “Did you ask her?”
    “No, because I know Kenneth Weaver is in Toledo.”
    “He is now,” Imogene said.
    This was typical Herdman—too shifty to figure out, and Alice didn’t even try.
    Aside from congratulating Imogene, the district supervisor said that the worst part of being shut up in there for an hour and a half was the furniture. “Lumpy old sofa,” she said, “broken-down chairs, terrible lighting. It doesn’t surprise me that the door was broken. Everything in that room is broken.”
    So the teachers got a new sofa and chairs, and the furniture store donated a new rug, and they painted the walls and fixed the door and bought new curtains and a big green plant.
    They left the door open too for a couple of days so everybody could see the new stuff, which just went to prove, Alice said, “that there’s nobody hidden there and never was.”
    Imogene shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
    Charlie was feeling brave too. “Where would they be?” he said. “There’s no place for them.”
    “Sure there is.” Imogene pointed. “How about that? The plant that ate Chicago.”
    “The plant?” Mother said that evening. “Well, I would have chosen some normal kind of plant like a fern, but I guess they wanted something scientific for the teachers’ room. That plant is a Venus’s flytrap. It eats flies . . . swallows them right up.”
    Charlie looked at me, his eyes wide, and I knew what he was thinking—that maybe you could say the password by accident, disappear into the teachers’ room, and never be seen again because of death by plant.
    “It eats flies, Charlie,” I said. “Nothing but flies.”
    “Well, after all, it’s just a plant,” Mother said. “It doesn’t know flies from