Free Miss Lazar Is Bizarre! by Dan Gutman

1
A Bathroom Emergency
    My name is A.J. and I hate school.
    Listen, I’m about to tell you something I never told anyone else. I never even told my best friends, Michael and Ryan.
    But you can’t tell anyone . It’s a secret. Promise? Cross your heart and hope to die? Are you ready? Okay, here’s the secret.
    I can’t tell you.
    Oh, all right, I’ll tell you.
    Sometimes, when I’m at school, I ask my teacher, Miss Daisy, if I can go to the bathroom even though I don’t really have to go to the bathroom. That’s the secret.
    Okay, okay, so it isn’t such a great secret.
    But sometimes I just get that antsy feeling, and I want to get out of class for a few minutes. So I ask to go to the boys’ room.
    I was feeling that antsy feeling one day in class. Miss Daisy was talking about weather, and she was showing us picturesof volcanoes and tornadoes. It was pretty cool, but I just wanted to stretch my legs for a few minutes. So I raised my hand and asked Miss Daisy if I could go to the boys’ room. She said okay.
    Nobody else was in the boys’ room. I didn’t have much to do in there. There’s not a whole lot to do in a bathroom, except for go to the bathroom, which I didn’t have to do. I looked in the mirror for a minute and made funny faces. I washed my hands. I shot paper towels at the garbage can. Then I figured I’d better get back to class.
    I thought I should flush the toilet because then it would sound like I reallywent to the bathroom. So I flushed it.
    You know how the water is supposed to swirl around and around the toilet bowl like a little tornado and then go down the hole in the bottom? Well, this water didn’t swirl at all. It didn’t go down the hole, either. It just started rising.
    It got higher.
    And higher.
    It went all the way up to the very edge of the bowl. I started to panic. And then it went over the edge and started spilling onto the floor! Water was pouring out of the toilet bowl! It looked just like those erupting volcanoes Miss Daisy was telling us about. I thought I was gonna die.

    I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I had to think fast. So I ran out of the boys’ room and started yelling.
    â€œHelp! There’s a volcano in the boys’ room! Run for your life! It’s erupting! The toilet is going to explode!” Everybody came running out of our class, evenMiss Daisy. Our principal, Mr. Klutz, was down the hall. He came running over too.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” asked Mr. Klutz, who has no hair on his head at all. I mean none . His head is like a big lightbulb.
    â€œI flushed…and the water…it got higher…and it’s going to blow!” I panted. I was all out of breath.
    Mr. Klutz pulled out his walkie-talkie and started talking into it. “Miss Lazar!” he said. “Come quickly to the boys’ bathroom! It’s an emergency!”

2
Miss Lazar to the Rescue
    Now the water was sliding under the boys’ room door and into the hallway! The whole school was going to be flooded!
    For a second or two, I thought, This is great! If the school flooded, we would get to go home. Maybe the erupting toiletvolcano wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
    â€œDid you put something down the toilet, A.J.?” Mr. Klutz asked me.
    â€œNo!” I said. “I just flushed it, and—”
    I never got the chance to finish my sentence, because at that very moment there was an ear-piercing shriek of a whistle, and it sounded like a lawn mower was coming down the hallway.
    It was Miss Lazar, our school custodian! She was riding her motorized scooter. Miss Lazar was wearing her big blue overalls with the letters “ SC ” on the front. She carried one of those toilet plunger thingies with a suction cup on the end. My parents have one at home just like it.
    Miss Lazar and the scooter screeched to a stop right in front of us.
    â€œHave no