Class Six and the Nits of Doom by Sally Prue

ears to show that he had not been
turned to stone—and then he sprang.
    They all tried to get out of the way, but there were twenty-nine of them and only a small space behind the tables. The ones at the back fell over chair legs, and the rest fell over them.
    The leopard would have landed in the middle of the whole struggling panicking mass of children if it hadn’t been for his trousers. Rodney’s waistband got caught up round a table leg
and he ended up crashing down with a great snarling and cracking of table tops and fluttering of pieces of paper.
    Nearly everyone was too busy trying to disentangle their arms and legs from everybody else’s to think about anything but GETTING AWAY FROM THE LEOPARD, but Slacker had bumped his chin on
Anil’s head and he was almost too dazed to move.
    ‘Ball the chits,’ he muttered, blearily. ‘Ball the nits…’
    He suddenly sat up straight. And then he said ‘Nits!’ in a sharp, loud voice.
    Then he said it again, even louder. ‘
Nits!
’
    ‘Oh flip, now Slacker’s gone bonkers,’ said Anil, crawling under one of the least smashed of the tables. ‘What’s he keep calling out
nits
for?’
    Winsome frowned.
    ‘Calling…’ she began, and then her eyes flashed with realisation. ‘That’s what it was. Not
ball the nits,
it was
call the nits
!’ She turned to
the rest of the class. ‘Quick!’ she shouted. ‘It’s our only chance. Call the nits!’
    Class Six didn’t waste any time arguing. There was a big leopard loose in the classroom, and it had nearly managed to kick its way out of its trousers.
    ‘Nits!’ they called.
    ‘NITS!!’ they bellowed.
    ‘ NITS!!! ’
    Jack felt it first—a sharp tickle behind his ear. Then Winsome’s elbow twitched sharply for no reason at all. Serise’s foot lifted itself up and began waggling about as if she
were trying to kick her shoe off.
    Suddenly all the class were twitching and shivering as strange wiggly feelings ran through them from their toes to their belly buttons and right up to the ends of their eyelashes.
    The Rodney-leopard gave a great angry snarl, but then there was a
crack!
as if the floor had split in two, and a brilliant flash which meant that all anyone could see for several seconds
were floaty orange blobs.
    When the blobs faded, Class Six saw that a big-bosomed figure with sandy hair had appeared at the front of the classroom.
    Miss Broom looked round the classroom at the heap of bewildered children, and all the wrecked tables and chairs.
    ‘Good gracious,’ she said. ‘Great moonbeams above.’
    And she put her hands behind her ears and flipped them three times.
    At once all the splinters and odd pieces of wood from the tables and chairs jumped about, did various somersaults, and slotted themselves neatly back together again. Anil had to duck pretty
sharply to avoid being bashed on the ear by a chair back, but in less than a minute Class Six found themselves somewhere that looked like a classroom again, and not like the scene of an earthquake
with a bit of car-crash thrown in.
    ‘And now,’ said Miss Broom, turning to Class Six, ‘what about all of
you
?’
    And Class Six, terrified, knew that any moment now a real live genuine witch was going to find out…
    ‘Great unicycling unicorns!’ said Miss Broom, as a snarl alerted her to the fact that there was a half-boy half-leopard crouching on the floor. ‘I know that vacant look and
that slack jaw. Why, it’s Rodney, isn’t it?’
    No one answered. Miss Broom cast a sharp glance round the room.
    ‘Yes, it’s Rodney turned into a leopard,’ Miss Broom went on. ‘How odd. And inconvenient. And dangerous.’
    She glanced round again, and everyone hurriedly looked away, trying to make themselves invisible again.
    It didn’t work, of course. Class Six had been getting less invisible ever since the day they were born, and now, adorned with fluorescent antennae, fur and wobbly trunks, they would have
stood out at a Science Fiction