1 A Ghost in the Bathroom

Miss Mary Is Scary!

Chapter 1 A Ghost in the Bathroom My name is A.J. and I hate school. It was a couple of weeks before Halloween, which is the coolest holiday of the year. We get to wear our costumes to school on Halloween and have a big candy party. At the end of the day we parade around the block with all the parents watching. Marching in a parade is way better than watching a parade, because you don't have to stand in one place for a million hundred hours. "Hang up your coats in the cloakroom," said my teacher, Mr. Granite, who is from another planet. What a weird name for a room: "cloakroom." Who wears a cloak? I don't even know what a cloak is.

After we finished circle time and Word of the Day, Mr. Granite told us to take out our math books and turn to page twenty-three. "Can I go to the bathroom?" I asked. "Do you really need to, A.J.?" said Mr. Granite. "Yes!" I didn't really need to go to the bathroom. Sometimes I go to the bathroom even though I don't have to. Like when Mr. Granite is teaching math. I hate math. Math is the perfect time to go to the bathroom. "Arlo doesn't need to go to the bathroom," said Andrea Young, this annoying girl with curly brown hair. She calls me by my real name because she knows I don't like it. "I do too." "Do not."

We went back and forth like that for a while. But the teachers have to let you go to the bathroom. It's a law. If they don't let you go to the bathroom, they have to go to jail. "Go ahead, A.J.," Mr. Granite grumbled. "The boys' bathroom is haunted, y'know," whispered my friend Ryan. "I heard there's a ghost in there." "Yeah, watch out for that ghost," said my friend Michael. "He eats kids for lunch." That's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a ghost. And even if there were ghosts, they wouldn't go to the bathroom. They don't have to. Even if ghosts did have to go to the bathroom, they wouldn't haunt one. Ghosts haunt graveyards, basements, and old houses of people who died. Not bathrooms. Everybody knows that. I'm not afraid of

ghosts. Still, I was going to be careful, just to be on the safe side. I walked down the hall and pushed open the door to the bathroom. "Anybody in here?" I asked. Nobody answered. I sat down in one of the stalls. There was nothing to do, but it was better than learning math. That's when something really weird happened. The toilet in the stall next to me flushed. "Who's in there?" I asked, alarmed.*

Nobody answered. I peeked under the stall to see who was in there. Nobody. "Are you a… ghost?" I asked. The ghost didn't answer. Maybe it was invisible. I picked up the extra roll of toilet paper in case I had to hit the invisible ghost over the head with it. That's when something even weirder happened. The toilet on the other side of me