Chapter 1 Snorts, Snuffles and Grunts The laughter started in the corner at the last desk by the window. It always started there; a snuffle, a grunt, then another snuffle, like a pig in a sty pushing its nose into the slop pile. Nobody but JoJo laughed like that, well no human—nobody thought JoJo was human anyway. They did think he was funny, so titters and squeaks followed the grunts and snuffles, until the whole class was laughing. Ms. Gerard rapped on the board but nobody heard. Then she slammed the desktop with the metal stapler. Nobody listened. She tried shouting but there was so much noise with kids laughing so hard they practically fell off their chairs, she never stood a chance. Besides Ms. Gerard, three kids in the room didn’t laugh, one standing in the front of the room because he was the cause of the class hysteria. The other at her desk, fuming. And the third, well nobody could see him sitting on the window sill, his mouth turned down, squinting. If you looked closely enough, you might see a faint shadow on the wall. The butt of this laughter, Danny West, stared down at a tiny hole in the floor, his hands hanging down at his sides, the book poised and ready to drop from his fingers. If he concentrated hard enough on the hole, maybe he could disappear into it, like that girl, Alice who slid down a hole following a talking rabbit. Then he could take a drink of something magic and grow so tiny no one would notice him. He would never have to read aloud again, nobody would laugh and he wouldn’t feel so awful and, and…. But he didn’t fall down the tiny hole and Ms. Gerard finally got the class to calm down by slamming the button on the bell that sat on her desk. She glared at the now silent students, her blood-red lips pressed together, as if a knife had slashed a tight line across her face. Veins stood out on her long, giraffy neck, holding back terrible words she wanted to scream but couldn’t let them out. Finally, words filled the room, squeezed between her gritted teeth. “Pop Quiz. Open a clean page in your notebooks and write two hundred words about why it is wrong to laugh at someone who makes a mistake. This will count toward your mid-term grade in language arts.”
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