Boys Life

wouldn’t budge. Somebody chortled. “Is it funny?” she demanded, the fury leaping into her eyes. “Who thinks that it’s fun-” And then she squawked, because her elbows wouldn’t leave the desk’s edge. Sensing calamity, she tried to stand up. Her ample behind would not part with the seat, and when she stood, the chair came with her. “What’s going on here!” she shouted as the entire class began to yell with laughter, myself included. Leatherlungs tried to shuffle to the door, but her face contorted as she realized those clunky brown shoes were as good as nailed to the linoleum. There she was, crouched over with her butt stuck to the chair’s seat, her shoes mired in invisible iron, and her elbows stuck fast to the desk. She looked as if she were bowing to us, though the expression of rage on her face hardly approved of the courtesy.
    “Help me!” Leatherlungs bawled, close to maddened tears. “Somebody help me!” Her cries for assistance were directed at the door, but the way everybody was hollering and laughing I doubted if even her foghorn voice could be heard beyond the frosted glass. She ripped the cloth of one arm of her blouse away as she got an elbow free, and then she made the mistake of placing that free hand against the desktop for added leverage. The hand was free no longer. “Help me!” she shouted. “Somebody get me out of this!”
    The upshot of all this was that Mr. Dennis, the black custodian, had to be summoned by Mr. Cardinale to free Leatherlungs. Mr. Dennis was forced to use a hacksaw on the tough fibers of the substance that bound Leatherlungs so firmly to desk, chair, and floor. Mr. Dennis’s hand unfortunately slipped during the hacksawing, and a patch of Leatherlungs’ rear end was thereafter in need of reconstruction.
    I heard Mr. Dennis tell Mr. Cardinale, as the ambulance attendants wheeled Leatherlungs away wheezing and gibbering along the holly-decked hall, that it was the most godawesome glue he’d ever seen. The stuff, he said, changed color depending on what it was smeared on. It was odorless but for the faint smell of yeast. He said Leatherlungs-Mrs. Harper, he called her-was mighty lucky she still had her hand connected to her wrist, the stuff was so powerful. Mr. Cardinale was enraged, in his flighty way. But no jar or tube of glue was found in the room, and Mr. Cardinale was stumped as to how any child could’ve been cunning and devious enough to perform such trickery.
    He did not know the Demon. I never found out for sure, but I assumed she must’ve had the glue bottle hanging from a string outside the window and had reeled it in while the rest of us were eating lunch. Then, when she was through smearing all the necessary surfaces, the glue bottle had gone out the window again to be collected after school. I’d never heard of such a strong glue before. I learned later that the Demon had concocted it herself, using ingredients that included Tecumseh riverbottom mud, Poulter Hill dirt, and her mother’s recipe for angel food cake. If that were so, I would’ve hated to taste Mrs. Sutley’s devil’s food. She called it Super Stuff, which made perfect sense.
    I knew there had to be a reason the Demon had skipped a grade. I’d had no idea her real talent lay in the realm of chemistry.
    Dad and I ventured out into the woods on a chilly afternoon. We found a small pine that would do. We took it home with us, and that night Mom popped corn and we strung the tree with popcorn, gold and silver tinsel, and the scuffed decorations that nestled in a box in the closet except for one week of the year.
    Ben was learning his Christmas songs. I asked him whether Miss Green Glass had a parrot, but he didn’t know. He’d never seen one, he said. But they might have a green parrot in the back somewhere. Dad and I went in together and bought Mom a new cake cookbook and a baking pan, and Mom and I went in together and bought Dad some socks and underwear. Dad made a solitary purchase of a small bottle of perfume from Woolworth’s for Mom while she bought him a plaid muffler. I liked knowing what was inside those brightly wrapped packages under the tree. Two packages were also there, though, that had my name on them and I had no idea what they contained. One was small and one was larger: two mysteries, waiting to be revealed.
    I was snakebit about picking up the phone and calling the Glass sisters. The last time I’d intended to, tragedy had struck. The green feather