Oh, she didn't look good. Not that she ever looks good, but at that moment, she looked especially not good. Her face was turning bright red. I had never seen color in her face before.

The next thing we knew, Ms. Adolf let out a noise that wasn't like any human sound I had ever heard. It was somewhere between a cough and a hiss and a gasp.

"Water!" she hissed. "Get me water!"

She sounded like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. She was hissing pretty loudly, and her face looked like a tomato about to explode. Then she started hopping around the room, like a kangaroo with its feet on fire.

"You go, girlfriend," Frankie whispered under his breath as he watched her hop.

Ashley burst out laughing. I didn't want to laugh, so I just concentrated on smiling very, very hard. Sometimes that keeps the laugh inside.

"What happened to that poor woman?" Mr. Morimoto asked.

"Must have been something she ate," Principal Love said. Then he turned and looked directly at me. "I hope it wasn't your enchiladas."

That wiped the smile off my face really fast.

"No sir," I said. "Like you always say, there's no such thing as a bad enchilada, sir."

Man, oh, man. If only that were true.

Ms. Adolf grabbed an ice cube from the punch bowl and rubbed it all over her tongue. Then she rubbed it on her face, too, eyebrows and all. Then it went back on her tongue again. Face. Tongue. Face. Tongue. She couldn't slide that cube around fast enough. And then her face started to drip.

Ashley had tears in the corners of her eyes. That happens to her when she's dying to laugh but has to hold it in.

As I watched Ms. Adolf mambo around the room, I started to think how interesting it was that she had been standing right next to our pan of enchiladas when her tongue attacked her. I wasn't the only one to be thinking about that little fact. Frankie shot me a suspicious look.
From the book Holy Enchilada! from Hank Zipzer: The World's Greatest Underachiever. Courtesy of Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group.

NEXT STORY

Next Story