Free Elliot and the Goblin War by Jennifer A. Nielsen Page A

official business to attend to.”
    Elliot shook his head.
    “I know that you’re in class, but this is very important. We’ve had a stray wander into Burrowsville. She won’t leave, and she’s upsetting the Brownies.”
    “I’m taking a test,” he whispered.
    “Yes, Mr. Penster, we know,” Ms. Blundell snapped. “Now be quiet. The second word on the test is ‘annoying,’ as in, ‘Someone in this class is being annoying.’”
    “She said she’ll only talk to our king,” Mr. Willimaker said.
    Elliot huffed. Whoever she was, her problem had better be important. He raised his hand and asked, “Can I please go to the bathroom, Ms. Blundell?”
    “Can’t this wait until the end of the test?”
    Elliot glared at Mr. Willimaker. “I guess not.”
    “You can’t make this test up later. If you use the bathroom now, you’ll get a zero on the test.”
    “I’ve really got to go,” Elliot said. The class laughed again, even though he wasn’t trying to be funny.
    Ms. Blundell pursed her lips. “Then you’ll get a zero,” she said. “You need to be back in two minutes.”
    Twelve seconds later, Elliot was in the hall with Mr. Willimaker, running along beside him to keep up. Mr. Willimaker ran so fast that he kept tripping over his own feet, but Elliot didn’t slow down. He wanted to get this over with. He had only two minutes, after all.
    “I thought we could all talk in the boys’ bathroom,” Mr. Willimaker huffed, already out of breath from running.
    “You brought a girl into the boys’ bathroom?”
    “Better than making you go into the girls’ bathroom.”
    That was true. Few things could ruin a boy’s entire life faster than being caught in a girls’ bathroom. He pushed open the door to the boys’ bathroom. Luckily, it was empty.
    Or was it?
    It sounded as if someone was crying in one of the stalls. Specifically, the disabled stall. He glanced at Mr. Willimaker, who nodded that, yes, this was the person whom Elliot had come to see. Great. Not only a girl in the boys’ bathroom, but a crying one.
    “Hello?” Elliot walked toward the stall. “Are you okay—wah!”
    The crying had been so gentle, he had expected to see someone more, well…gentle. He froze, knowing it was rude to look but too horrified to turn away.
    The woman in the stall looked a little like Dorcas, the really mean school lunch lady—but only if Dorcas had been turned into a zombie, and only if Dorcas wanted to serve children for lunch instead of the mystery meat they usually served. Except this woman was way less cool than zombies and, if possible, even uglier.
    She was a woman whose face looked like one of those shriveled apple heads. If you could count the age of a tree by its rings, then maybe you could count her age by her wrinkles. If so, then she was at least seven hundred years old. She had wrinkles on top of her wrinkles. Her tattered clothes were wrinkled. Even her white hair was wrinkled.
    “Her name is Agatha, Your Highness,” Mr. Willimaker said. “Agatha, this is King Elliot.”
    “Stare if you must,” Agatha said, wiping her tears with a fistful of toilet paper. “Few people can turn away from my beauty.”
    Elliot giggled and then stopped himself by clasping a hand over his mouth. He didn’t mean to be rude, but that wasn’t what he expected her to say. Beauty was definitely not the word running through his mind.
    Her withered skin looked as if it were made of dry oatmeal. Her face had no less than a dozen warts. Her right eye bulged out from her head so far, he wondered why it didn’t fall out. Her hands reminded him of the display skeleton in Ms. Blundell’s classroom. Her fingers looked twelve inches long.
    “What?” she asked. “You don’t think I’m beautiful?”
    Elliot remembered the rhyme his first-grade class had said every day at the end of school: “I am beautiful because I’m me. I’ll be the best that I can be.”
    He said, “I believe you are the best you can be.”
    It was