School by Nathaniel Hardman (top reads .TXT) 📕

over with renewed laughter. “What the...?” Jeff muttered, picking up the wand, careful this time to take it by the hilt, not the tip.

“You did that on purpose,” he said. “You gave me the wrong end of the wand. Zxerc!” The spell hit Ushegg in the shoulder. Then for good measure, “Zxerc!” He hit him in the other shoulder, too.

Ushegg, chuckling in spite of the stings, was taking his wand back from a still-scowling Jeff when Shen spoke up. “Hey, Ushegg, how do you –” He pointed with one hand at himself and with the other at Ushegg, then switched hands. Ushegg furrowed his brow.

“Look,” said Shen. He went to the whiteboard and drew two enormous circles. Then he started drawing tiny stick figures on one of them. “All of us were on Earth,” he pointed from the humans in the class to the stick figures on the board and the big circle, “And you guys,” he pointed to Ushegg and then started drawing stick figures on the other circle, “are here on...?” He looked at Ushegg expectantly. Ushegg still looked confused.

Shen pointed again at the big circle and said, “Earth.” He pointed to the other circle and waited. Ushegg said, “Uoshn.”

“Uoshn,” Shen repeated, nodding. “Earth, Uoshn,” he pointed to the two worlds, then made an arrow from the people on Earth to the people on Uoshn and another from Uoshn to Earth. “Switch,” he said.

Shen put down the marker and pointed with one hand at the figures on Earth and the other hand at the figures on Uoshn. Then he said, “switch,” again and crossed his arms to point with the opposite hands.

Everyone in the class stared at Ushegg. Jeff forgot about his stinging hand. Up to this point, Ushegg didn’t seem to have any hesitation about sharing magic with the humans. Shen had just done, in Jeff’s opinion, a really good job explaining what they wanted. And they had a wand none of the aliens knew about, hidden in the closet.

The class held its breath.

Ushegg looked uncomfortable. “Zbexvu.” He scratched his chin, then shrugged. “No,” he said at last, shaking his head. Everyone kept staring at him. “Zishth,” he said, and his tone made it an apology.

“Was that an ‘I can’t’ or an ‘I won’t’?” Peter asked from the back of the class.

“Zbexvu?” Shen asked. “Is that ‘switch’? Was that the word?” The class looked around at each other nervously. They would try it the moment Ushegg left.

 Ushegg didn’t seem to notice. He had brightened suddenly and looked at Jeff.

“Qush Yurwush biays grib!” he said. “Bu’y ozg Qush Yurwush xiquishib.”

Jeff looked at Suzy. “Did he just say, ‘Let’s ask Qush Yurwush’?”

Suzy shrugged. “I think so?”

The happy glimmer of the moment died. Something told Jeff Qush Yurwush would be a lot less forthcoming about giving the students the magic they needed to go home.

Jamal brought the UNO cards over to Ushegg, and teaching the boy the game entertained them for a while. But they had played a lot of UNO in the last few days, and they quickly grew bored.

“Well, I guess we can get started on the grain,” Tanesha suggested, gesturing toward the sheaf the lunch ladies had left.

Ushegg wrinkled his nose again and made a sound of disdain. “You wiays eat ziqunerc tuxush.”

“Uh,” Jeff said slowly, glancing at the vocab list. “That is every. Uh... That is all...” That was the best he could do. Ushegg’s eyes widened, and then he scowled and said something fast and angry, like a mom who just found out her child’s preschool lets the kids watch cartoons all day.

“We’re cuxerc ziqu food,” Ushegg announced. He stood up. “Come on,” he waved to the class to come with him. They looked around at each other. A lot of them looked at Suzy.

Before she could say anything, Shen said, “I’ll come. E ggicu,” and Peter said, “Me too.” And then they were all crowding through the doorway into the hallway after Ushegg, talking excitedly, whispering, giggling.

Jeff let himself get pulled along in their wake. He heard Amy calling, “You guys are going to get in trouble.” She and a couple of others didn’t follow.

Only a few paces down the hallway, they were stopped by the guards. Ushegg struck up an argument with them, and Jeff heard, “Quth sos” – my dad – repeatedly. Jeff’s stomach turned. He was starting to feel that Ushegg was not so much the independent wild child who didn’t care about the rules, but rather the spoiled child who thought he was better than the rules.

The guard wasn’t backing down. Jeff started having terrible visions of Ushegg pushing too far, getting them all sent back to their classroom, locked in like all the other classes.

But then… the guard was shaking his head and standing aside. His final words to Ushegg sounded ominously like, “You’ll see.”

On the front steps of the school, they found Ushegg’s dad, and there was another tense conversation. There was a lot of heated back-and-forth, and then Ushegg’s dad stood silent for a long time. Ushegg would say something, wait for a response, say something else, and his dad just stood there.

Finally, the older alien spoke. “Okay,” He said; then over Ushegg’s crow of triumph, “But you are xogerc caoshsz with you.”

This probably referred to the six guards that followed them out the gate into the alien town. It made it less fun, the fierce warriors with drawn wands barking out commands whenever one of them strayed even a few feet from the group. But still, they were OUT, and Jeff could see his classmates were drinking in the sights and sounds and the fresh air like people who had just stumbled out of the desert into an oasis.

Jeff pointed things out to the others as they walked. “See! There’s the Nissan! We don’t know why