The witch in the walls

My sister Jennie got a packet in the mail from someone in the (high)school system. She opens it and finds a request for her to come to a meeting and discuss something about her classes for the next semester. The packet also contains a congratulations letter printed on green paper, thanking her for accepting whatever they are going to propose. Maybe that was an accident.

We arrive at the office. It's a mess. There's a front room and a back room. The front room has 2 desks, and things piled up around the room everywhere. Two men with very curly hair are in the room at their desks. The boss of the two seems rather eccentric. His secretary has platters of food out on his desk and is eating.

We walk past these two into the next room, where an eccentric old lady is waiting for us. To me, she looks like a witch. She sits us down around a table, me facing the wall near the table, and Jennie facing the center of the room. She disappears into the walls, which are made of loose, pliable plastic panels. I say, "hey, she went into the walls!" but before my sister could turn her head all the way around, she popped back out of the wall, with a sinister giggle. I've seen her do this before. She disappears back into the walls as Jennie turns her head back toward me, but I point back again. The witch comes in and out, in and out. In a lame attempt to show me that what she's doing is actually normal, she pulls open a panel to the right of the ones she goes in and out of and shows us part of a closet, saying that she's just been getting stuff from the closet. Yeah, sure... like I believe that.

She finally sits down and explains the situation to Jennie. They have a teacher who has been on personal leave because of "family issues" for nearly 15 years now. They were forcing him to come back and teach now, or get fired. However, there weren't enough people taking his class for him to be able to teach. She shows us some charts that show how apparently if this class isn't held, it'll screw up a bunch of people's semesters, and they won't be able to get the credits they need. Basically, they need Jennie to take the class, or this man gets fired, and lots of people's classes get messed up. She agrees to do it, and the woman cackles again. She hands Jennie a green slip of paper with a congratulatory note on it, just like the one that was mailed to her. She laughs, saying "thanks, even though I already have one."

We head back out of the office, and the secretary is still eating. I pick up a plate and grab some of the food from the platters on his desk, spilling a handful of egg-potato salad on my black shirt. I just leave it there, ignoring that it happened, until it starts to roll off. I catch it in my hand and eat it.