The Day The Teacher Overslept....
By Aditya

It was a sultry Monday morning so typical of Kinsasha. When I reached the classroom it was a different: scene altogether for Ms. Vidito was not present, and there was pandemonium all around. Coll and Allykhan were standing on their desk singing a song along with the girls: Lara, Sara, Malak and Shazadi. I was so excited at seeing all this that I rushed in the classroom and jumped in the center of the party like a cowboy. Unfortunately the song was just: ending. It: ended and everybody sat down exhausted. I looked around and was surprised when I saw the clock. It was 8:30 AM., and MS. Vidito was still not there. I shouted this knowledge out at the top of my lungs. Everybody was as surprised as me because she usually came at 7:30 A.M. and had us at work by 7:55A.M.

Then Jackson bellowed, -"Hey everybody, remember that: Mr. Collins' class is going on a field trip today. That means...." Jackson didn't even finish his sentence because he could see everybody had gotten the meaning. It meant we had the class to ourselves. Daniel who is loquacious kid in our class hollered, "Yahoo party time." We all hushed him up because we were sensible enough to know maybe other teachers could hear him. After that was only one thought in my mind. Where was Ms. Vidito ? Other children must have been thinking the same thought because we all shouted the question at the same time, 'Maybe the teacher overslept."

Now everybody was so excited that all started yelling out what we could do with this free time. Somebody said to go to the pool, somebody else proposed to get out of TASOK. It got so loud that even if two (2) people shouted in each other's ears they couldn't hear themselves. This had to stop, so Coll, and I stood on Ms. Vidito's desk and somehow bellowed over the noise so that everybody got quiet. "You guys wanna have a free day or not?" At that everybody got quiet, and I said, "Let 's write our suggestions on the boar." Everybody except Virginia, Coll and I sat on their desk. Virginia went to the board to write down the suggestions. Coll and I began to call on each student turn by turn. Jason said, "Let's try and get to the Intercontinental." That was a great suggestion and there were many good suggestions.

I suggested we go to the LAB, and this had a surprising effect on the class. Everybody wanted to go there. So the LAB it was! Everybody decided the best thing to do was go in a straight- line, and pretend Ms. Vidito was just coming. We reached the LAB without any incident. I called out, "Everybody be quiet because I can hear a class next door." We got quite and proceeded on to the LAB. We opened the door and our luck was with us for there was nobody inside.

That's when things took a strange turn.

Instead of having fun... we sat down scared. It went like this....Daniel had stepped on Hussien's feet, Hussien pushed Daniel angrily causing Daniel to fly straight into a tray full of tubes filled with strange chemicals. The jolt caused the tubes in the tray to fall! Some drops fell on the floor which made Daniel slip. This made all the children laugh excluding me, because I knew that if some unknown chemicals mixed there could be a chemical change resulting in an explosion. I shouted out a warning and told everybody to lie face down. Good time to listen because I think there were about 5 blasts.

The first explosion was so hard that the wall near it cracked (luckily no bricks came near us, the second wasn't so bad, but it turned all the walls black. The third, fourth and the fifth made the roof come down. Fortunately we were all out of the LAB before that. Even though our parents were glad to have us alive I think Mr. Cummins wasn't as pleased. We were given 15 days of suspension. After the reprisal, as we were filing out of Mr. Cummins office we all whispering as to what we will do with the unexpected holiday.... all 15 of them!