Free A Murder of Crows by Jan Dunlap Page B

grain.”
    The squawking stopped. I pressed my advantage.
    “Especially hungry chickens at the end of a very long school day,” I called through the door. “I wonder if there are some really hungry chickens in this locker room? If they would just open the door, those really hungry chickens could have some of this wonderful feed.”
    I silently counted to ten, wondering if the ploy would work, and what else I could try to dislodge the hypnotized students if it didn’t. The idea of climbing into the girls’ locker room through a back window wasn’t on my list of things I wanted to accomplish in my counseling career, and I certainly didn’t want to imagine what kind of punishment Mr. Lenzen would dream up for me for that particularly egregious transgression.
    But it popped into my head anyway: lunch room duty twice a week for the rest of the year.
    Over my dead body.
    I pounded on the locker room door.
    “I’m going to wring your scrawny necks if you don’t open this door and do it now! I feel like chicken tonight!”
    From the other side of the door I could hear a frantic rustling sound of bodies moving around the room. The squawking became a soft clucking.
    I put my hand on the door and slowly pushed it open.
    Thankfully, no crazed hens came flying at me to scratch my eyes out. I peered around the door.
    One student perched quietly on a bench, arms folded along his sides, his nose bobbing rhythmically towards his shoulder. On the floor, the remaining two students were sitting on top of basketballs.
    “Nice eggs,” I commented to the two girls on the balls.
    “Cluck,” one replied, giving me a suspicious frown.
    “Tell you what,” I told the hypnotized students. “I’ll carry the eggs very carefully and you can follow me back to the barnyard and sit on them there. And then you can eat the grain. Yum, yum.”
    The boy on the bench cocked his head at me.
    “Hey,” I told him, “cut me a little slack, will you? We never covered talking to hypnotized students, or chickens either, in my graduate counseling program. I am truly winging it, here.”
    “Are you in there, Bob?” Boo called from the hallway.
    “Yup. It’s just us chickens,” I replied.
    Boo’s big body almost filled the doorframe to the locker room.
    “We’re putting the kids in the nurse’s office until the hypnotist can release them,” he informed me. He looked at the two girls on the basketballs.
    “Nice eggs,” he said.
    “Extra large,” I added.
    “Clearly,” he commented. “That’s going to be one heck of an omelet.”
    He began to flap his own arms at the students.
    “Shoo!” he cried, expertly herding them out the door in practiced moves. Cackling all the way, the students scattered out of the locker room with Boo close on their heels.
    I wished I had my camera with me. I could see the headline now in the supermarket tabloid: “Former wrestling star pursues students in high school locker room.”
    Ha. Take that, Mr. Lenzen. I’m not your only public relations nightmare.
    I caught up with Boo and the students as he funneled them into the office of our school nurse, Katy the Trauma Queen.
    “Thanks, you two,” Katy greeted us, her perennial smile cranked up to its usual megawatt force.
    She indicated the row of seven students now happily squished next to each other on the single cot in the office.
    “Aren’t they just the cutest things you’ve ever seen?” she said. She picked up the candy jar from her desk and poured out a handful of little Tootsie Rolls, which she then passed out to the students.
    “This room usually smells like sweat and vomit when I have this many kids in here at once,” Katy continued, “but I swear these kids smell more like a barnyard. Horse manure and chicken droppings. I wonder if that hypnotist gave us all some subliminal suggestions while we were watching the show? Wouldn’t that be a kick?”
    “Speaking of the Amazing Mr. Wist, where is he?” I glanced around Katy’s small