The Unusual Suspects (The Sisters Grimm, Book 2)

"I said I was sorry!"

The old man stomped down the aisle and roughly pulled the boy out of his seat. He dragged him to the front of the room so everyone could see his humiliation.

"Do you know why you are always late, Wendell?" Mr. Grumpner asked. "It's because you are a worthless fat-body. Isn't that right?"

This woke up the class, who roared with laughter. Toby, the bug-eyed boy, nearly fell out of his chair giggling.



"Well, I'm sure I could stand to lose a little weight, but I wouldn't go so far as to say . . . !" but the chubby boy never got to finish. Grumpner shoved a piece of chalk into his hand and spun him toward the chalkboard.

"And you are going to write it until the end of this class. You may think that because you're the principal's son you don't have to play by the rules, but I'm not afraid of your father. I have tenure. Get started!"

Wendell turned to the chalkboard and wrote I AM A WORTHLESS FAT-BODY. The students roared with laughter again, but Sabrina barely noticed. She was too stunned by what Mr. Grumpner had said. Wendell was the principal's son—the child of an Everafter? Sabrina had never imagined that the Everafters might have children or that they would send them to a school where all the other kids were human. She gazed around the room, watching the rest of the class laugh at the boy as he scrawled the mean sentence over and over again. Could any of them be Everafters, too?

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As Sabrina drifted from class to class, she began to realize that Mr. Grumpner wasn't the only teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In fact, the entire sixth-grade faculty was a collection of bullying, screaming nightmares. They shouted through most of their classes, dishing out detentions like scoops of ice cream. Not that Sabrina could really blame them, though. The kids in her classes were real pains in the butt. They slept through the lectures and none of them had done their homework.

Even in gym class, the kids staggered around exhausted. Unfortunately for them, gym class turned out to be the one place you really needed to be alert. Their teacher was Ms. Spangler. Spangler the Strangler, as the kids called her, was a bulky little woman with a ponytail and an evil glint in her eye, who apparently knew how to teach just one game—dodgeball. Sabrina had played dodgeball many times at school in New York City. She considered herself to be pretty good at it; she remembered being the last kid standing many times, so in Ms. Spangler's class, when the first rubber ball smacked her in the head and made her brains rattle in her skull, she knew that something about this dodgeball game was different.

Getting knocked out of the game early gave Sabrina a chance to study the other kids. It was easy to see who the dangerous ones were—the only two really playing the game. Sabrina recognized one as the giggling idiot Toby, from her homeroom class, but the other was a knuckle-dragging hulk with ratty hair. To be honest, Sabrina wasn't sure if it was a boy or a girl; all she knew was that Toby and It were vicious. Together, they whipped balls at the other kids at alarming speeds. When a kid fell down, the duo would pummel him or her mercilessly with the hard rubber balls. Even worse, Ms. Spangler encouraged the craziness. She ran around the gymnasium blowing her whistle and pointing out the weaknesses of the players to Toby and the big It, urging them to target the pudgy, small, slow, and awkward. Whenever a kid was hit and eliminated, Ms. Spangler clapped happily, like a child on Christmas morning.

There was only one other kid in the class who had the energy to defend herself. Sabrina recognized her, too. The pretty blond from Sabrina's homeroom managed to duck out of the way of several shots, dodging and jumping until she, too, was struck and tossed out of the game. She joined the battered kids waiting on the sidelines. When she spotted Sabrina, she smiled and waved. It was the first act of kindness Sabrina had experienced the whole day.

By lunchtime, Sabrina was bruised and belittled, but her main concern was Daphne. Sabrina could handle a screaming teacher or a bully, but her sister was only seven. This school would eat her alive.

Once Sabrina had her tray of food, she searched the cafeteria for her little sister, fully expecting Daphne to be huddled in a corner bawling her eyes out. She was stunned to find her sitting at a table packed with bright-eyed, happy kids, all hanging on her every word. As Sabrina approached the table, the children exploded with laughter watching her sister pull a ruler out of her big beehive hair.

"Daphne, you are the funniest person I have ever met," one of her little friends said.

"Are you OK?" Sabrina asked her sister.