15 HE IS JUST KILN IT

CHAPTER FIFTEEN HE IS JUST KILN IT Franny walked happily into school the next morning. She was looking forward to a perfectly normal day with her friends. But she didn't see any of them anywhere. Not in the halls, not in the classrooms. "Oh NO!" she shouted. "Did they get back to those muffins?" She ran downstairs to the basement.

All of the muffins were gone and everything had been cleaned up. "Where is everybody?" she said to herself, and started wandering the halls. Soon she heard laughter coming from the art room.

The kids were crowded around the Muffin Man and clapping. "Get away from him!" Franny shouted. "He's dangerous!" She pulled the Octagonner from her backpack. She had brought it just in case something like this happened. You never know when you might have to turn somebody into an octopus. She started pushing her way through the crowd.

"He's not dangerous," Mona said. "He's a kiln now. You know, so we can bake things out of clay." "I reinvented myself," the Muffin Man said. "I heard somebody say I could be reinvented, so I thought for a long time and I realized I could make more people happy by doing this." "Now we can make all sorts of things," Vincent said. "He fires them inside his belly." "Look, I made something already!" the Muffin Man said. He blew hard on it to cool it off and handed it to Franny. It was a little ceramic plate with a picture of a muffin on it and the words: THANKS, FRANNY.

"It's a muffin plate!" he said. Franny looked at it uncomfortably. "Not for MY muffins," he laughed. "I don't do that anymore. It's for one of those nasty, ugly ones that Mona makes."

Franny laughed and threw her arm around Mona. "Now that I think about it, Mona, I really like your muffins the best of all!"