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Groaning, Cynthia sank into her chair. “Earth, kindly open and swallow me up!”
I sat down at my place next to Lesley. “Poor thing—she’s still as red as a tomato.”
“And I think she’ll be a tomato to the end of her school days. Was that ever embarrassing!”
“Maybe Mr. Whitman will give her better marks now.”
Mr. Whitman glanced at Charlotte’s place and looked thoughtful.
“Mr. Whitman? Charlotte’s not well,” I said. “I’m not sure if my aunt called the school secretary’s office—”
“She has diarrhea!” bleated Cynthia. Obviously she felt an urgent need not to be the only one with something to be embarrassed about.
“Charlotte is excused,” said Mr. Whitman. “She’ll probably be absent for a few days. Until everything has … returned to normal.” He turned around and wrote THE SONNET on the board in chalk. “Can someone tell me how many sonnets Shakespeare wrote?”
“What did he mean by returned to normal?” I whispered to Lesley.
“I didn’t get the impression he was talking about Charlotte’s diarrhea,” Lesley whispered back.
Neither did I.
“Have you ever taken a close look at his signet ring?” Lesley whispered.
“No, have you?”
“There’s a star on it. A star with twelve points.”
“So?”
“Twelve points—like on a clock.”
“A clock doesn’t have points.”
Lesley rolled her eyes. “Doesn’t that ring a bell with you? Twelve! Clock! Time! Time travel! I bet you … Gwen?”
“Oh, no!” I said. My insides were going on a roller-coaster ride again.
Lesley stared at me, horrified. “Oh, no!”
I was just as horrified. The last thing I wanted was to dissolve into thin air in front of the entire class. So I got up and staggered to the door, my hand pressed to my stomach.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” I told Mr. Whitman. I didn’t wait for his answer. I flung the door open and tottered out into the corridor.
“Maybe someone ought to go with her,” I heard Mr. Whitman say. “Lesley, please would you…?”
Lesley came racing after me, firmly closing the classroom door. “Okay, quick! Into the girls’ toilets. No one will see us there. Gwen? Gwenny?”
Lesley’s face blurred before my eyes. Her voice seemed to come from very far away. And then she’d disappeared entirely. I was standing on my own in a corridor papered with magnificent gold-patterned wallpaper. Instead of the school’s ugly linoleum floor tiles, beautiful wooden floorboards stretched ahead of me, polished to a high sheen, with elaborate patterns in the wood. It was obviously night, or at least evening, but candleholders with lighted candles were fixed to brackets on the walls, and chandeliers hung from the painted ceiling, also with candles burning in them. Everything was bathed in soft, golden light.
My first thought was Great, I didn’t fall over this time. My second thought was Where can I hide around here before anyone sees me?
Because I wasn’t alone in this house. I heard music from below. Violin music. And voices.
A lot of voices.
The familiar school corridor was almost unrecognizable now. I tried to remember the way the space here was divided up. Behind me had to be my classroom door, and in the room opposite, Mrs. Counter was now teaching geography to Year Six. Next to the Year Six classroom was a stockroom for equipment. If I hid in there, at least no one would see me materializing when I came back.
On the other hand, the stockroom was usually locked, so it might not be a great idea to hide there after all. If I traveled forward again through time and landed in a locked room, then supposing I found a way to get out, I’d also have to think up some plausible explanation of how on earth I got there in the first place.
