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hamburger. I guess it eats anything it can get hold of.”
    Once Charlie spread that word around, you would normally have had kids lining up to feed stuff to the plant—pizza, potato chips, M&M cookies—and they would probably have had to keep the door locked and put up a big sign that said “Private, Keep Out, Teachers Only.” But none of this happened because nobody would go near the teachers’ room, not even to watch a plant eat lunch.
    When the district supervisor came back to see the new furniture, she mentioned this and said that the teachers could thank “that thoughtful girl. What was her name? Imogene” for all this peace and privacy.
    I guess she was right, in a way, but I didn’t see any teachers rushing to thank Imogene. And never mind how much I needed to find a compliment for her, I certainly couldn’t write down “Imogene Herdman is thoughtful,” no matter what the district supervisor said.

Chapter 6
    O nce a year we had to take an IQ test and a psychology test and an aptitude test, which showed what you might grow up to be if the Herdmans let you get out of the Woodrow Wilson School alive. But the only test the Herdmans ever bothered to take was the eye test.
    This surprised everybody, because it meant that at least they knew the letters of the alphabet. You had to cover up one eye with a little piece of paper and read the letters on a chart, and then cover up the other eye and read them again. If you couldn’t do it, it meant that you had to have glasses.
    Sometimes it just meant that you were scared, like Lester Yeagle.
    “If you don’t do it right,” Gladys Herdman told Lester, “it means your eyes are in backward, and they have to take them out and put them in the other way.”
    This made Lester so nervous that he couldn’t tell L from M or X from K and when the doctor said, “Well, let’s just switch eyes,” he went all to pieces and had to go lie down in the nurse’s room till his mother could come and get him.
    Besides having three other kids and a baby, Mrs. Yeagle was a schoolbus driver, so she couldn’t waste much time just letting Lester be hysterical. But Lester was too hysterical to tell her what happened—all he said was “Herdman.”
    “Which one?” Mrs. Yeagle said. “Which one did it?” and Lester said Gladys did it.
    “Did what?” the nurse wanted to know. “Gladys wasn’t even there.”
    “I don’t know what,” Mrs. Yeagle said, “and I can’t wait around to find out because I had to leave the baby with the Avon lady and it’s almost time to drive the bus. Come on, Lester, honey . . . maybe you can find out,” she told the nurse.
    Of course Gladys said she didn’t do anything, and the eye doctor said he certainly didn’t do anything. “But I got a look at that kid’s braces,” he said, “and I’ll bet that’s his problem.”
    I didn’t think so. Having braces was no problem— not having braces was a problem. Gloria Coburn’s little sister got braces and Gloria didn’t, and Gloria cried and carried on for weeks. “I’ll grow up ugly with an over-bite,” she said, and she didn’t even know for sure what one was. She just wanted braces like everyone else.
    That night the nurse called Mrs. Yeagle to say that apparently Gladys didn’t do anything to Lester. “We think the trouble may be his braces,” she suggested.
    “What braces?” Mrs. Yeagle said. “Lester doesn’t have braces.” But then she went and looked in his mouth and she nearly died.
    “What have you got in there?” she yelled. “What is all that? It looks like paper clips!”
    Sure enough, Lester had paper clips bent around his teeth and he got hysterical all over again because his mother pried them off.
    The nurse said she never heard of paper clips, “but you know they all want to have braces or bands or something. And they don’t know how much braces cost.”
    “Well, these cost thirty-five cents,” Mrs. Yeagle said. “According to Lester, Gladys Herdman put