Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger

The third book in the Wayside School series picks up after the school has been closed for 243 days. Wayside School is a 30-story building with one classroom on each floor and a nonexistent 19th story. Louis, the yard teacher, has spent 242 of those days alone inside, scrubbing and repairing the building. He hides whenever former students visit because he is afraid he will cry. A mysterious mooing occasionally echoes through the halls, but Louis convinces himself there are no cows and removes the closure sign.

The children return and reunite with old friends. Todd, who endured the worst school of all during the closure, arrives and kisses the building. Upstairs on the 30th floor, their teacher Mrs. Jewls welcomes them back. Dameon, the first to arrive, senses something different about her but cannot identify what it is. Mr. Kidswatter, the bumbling principal, delivers a welcome over the P.A. system and accidentally leaves the intercom on, revealing he was vacationing in Jamaica and wants nothing to do with the students.

Daily life resumes with the school's characteristic absurdity. Mrs. Jewls assigns color poems: Allison claims purple only to discover nothing rhymes with it, while her best friend Rondi switches to blue and finds so many rhyming possibilities that her finished poem consists only of the title "Blue." The school's new counselor, Dr. Pickell, known as Dr. Pickle because of his green pickle-shaped hypnosis stone, is a disgraced psychiatrist barred from practice after secretly planting malicious jokes in patients' hypnotic suggestions. He hypnotizes Paul, a student who cannot resist pulling classmate Leslie's pigtails, making them appear to be rattlesnakes.

Before Christmas, Kathy declares there is no Santa Claus, insisting the only thing that matters is how rich one's parents are. Louis arrives dressed as Santa, but the children recognize him instantly. Mrs. Jewls reframes the discussion: Louis is one of Santa's helpers, and anyone can become a helper by being kind and giving gifts.

After the holiday, Dameon finally identifies what has changed about Mrs. Jewls: She is pregnant. She announces that today is her last day because her doctor does not want her climbing 30 flights of stairs. The children are devastated, especially Dameon, who protests that they only just returned. Mrs. Jewls tells them their substitute will be a man named Mr. Gorf, and the name terrifies the class because their former teacher, the cruel Mrs. Gorf, shared that surname.

The next morning, no teacher appears. The children are so frightened that Mr. Gorf might be hiding somewhere that they do all their work independently and maintain perfect behavior. When Myron finally opens the coat closet, a man steps out, claiming he locked himself in that morning. Mr. Gorf speaks in a warm, pleasant voice and has three nostrils nobody initially notices. As each child speaks, his nose flares and absorbs their voice. He reveals that the pleasant voice was stolen from a man in Scotland and that Mrs. Gorf was his mother.

Using the class phone list, Mr. Gorf calls parents with their children's stolen voices, saying hateful things. Miss Mush, the school cook, saves the day by smashing a pepper pie into Mr. Gorf's face. The violent sneezing dislodges all the stolen voices and blows his nose clean off. He flees noseless. Miss Mush explains she knew something was wrong because she heard Kathy's voice say "Have a nice day," something Kathy would never do. The voices gradually return to their rightful owners, and Rondi and Joe call their mothers to say they love them.

A new substitute, Mrs. Drazil, arrives. She is an elderly woman with white hair, glasses, and a large blue notebook stuffed with decades of records on former students. She wins the class over by answering personal questions openly and teaching engaging lessons, including a hands-on gravity experiment dropping objects from the 30th-story windows. However, she guards her notebook fiercely and issues a veiled threat: Anyone who crosses her will be sorry. At recess, the children realize Mrs. Drazil is the same teacher who tormented Louis as a boy, once placing a wastepaper basket on his head. When they bring Louis to meet her, she recognizes him instantly, forces him to finish old homework, orders him to shave his mustache, and puts the wastepaper basket back on his head.

Louis transforms into a rigid rule-follower. He refuses to play with the children, demands to be called Mr. Louis, and adheres obsessively to the handbook of POOPS, the Professional Organization Of Playground Supervisors, banning running and withholding equipment. Despite Mrs. Drazil's many virtues as a teacher, the children decide she must go because she ruined Louis and recess. They steal the blue notebook and find a taunting farewell letter from a former student named Jane Smith. Jason discovers that his dentist, Dr. Payne, was formerly Jane Smith and stages a conversation with Deedee in front of Mrs. Drazil, providing Jane's name and address. Mrs. Drazil tracks Jane to her lakeside mansion. Jane flees across the lake in a motorboat; Mrs. Drazil pursues in a rowboat. Neither is ever seen again.

Meanwhile, the source of the mysterious mooing is revealed: Miss Zarves, the teacher on the nonexistent 19th story, shares her classroom with a cow. Miss Zarves has spent her entire career being ignored by everyone around her. She briefly quits in frustration, but three mysterious men outside the building convince her the children need her, and she returns.

A third substitute, Miss Nogard, arrives with a secret: a third ear hidden under her hair on top of her head that hears people's thoughts rather than sounds. A man named Xavier Dalton once proposed to her, but when she revealed the ear, his thoughts screamed in disgust despite his kind words. He fled and never returned. The heartbreak turned her bitter, and she began using her ability to torment others, especially children.

In the classroom, Miss Nogard reads each child's anxieties and exploits them with precision. She calls Dana a handsome young man, knowing Dana is self-conscious about her short haircut. She repeatedly calls Jason by his accomplished older brother's name. She manipulates Maurecia into confessing over an accidentally torn dictionary page and turns the class against her. She rigs homework reviews by calling only on students with wrong answers. By the end of her tenure, the children have no friends and hate each other, while Miss Nogard remains above suspicion.

Then Mrs. Jewls returns, carrying her four-day-old daughter, Mavis. When the baby enters the room, all the hatred vanishes. The children crowd around, cooing over the baby's tiny features. Miss Nogard asks to hold Mavis and drifts toward an open window, contemplating an accident. She grows curious about what a baby's brain sounds like and listens. She hears pure love, trust, and faith, wordless and overwhelming, which dissolves the bitterness around her heart. She stumbles on a rubber-band ball and falls toward the window, but Louis leaps across the room and catches her. She returns the baby and faints in his arms.

When she wakes, Miss Nogard sincerely praises the children she spent days tormenting. Mac shouts at Louis to ask her on a date. Louis tells Miss Nogard he wants to get to know her better. She hesitates, then parts her hair to reveal her third ear. The children react with excitement rather than revulsion. Louis tells her it does not matter how many ears she has and calls all her features beautiful. She can see the truth in his eyes without reading his mind. She kisses him, and his mustache tickles.