"Are you hopelessly gullible?" said Schwartz. "Or are you just plain stupid? Every hotel has some kind of ridiculous ghost story. Can't you tell the difference between fact and fiction?"

"But, Miss Schwartz, I swear these are facts."

"You get an 'F,' Candy."

"That's not fair," Candy protested.

Miss Schwartz's upper lip began to twitch, a sure sign that she was going to start yelling soon.

"Don't talk back to me !" she said, her volume rising. "If you don't stop indulging in these dim-witted fantasies of yours, and start doing some real work, you're going to fail this class completely. And I'll personally see you held back a year for your laziness and your insolence."

There was a lot of tittering from the back of the class, where the coven of Candy's enemies, led by Deborah Hackbarth, all sat. Miss Schwartz threw them a silencing look, which worked; but Candy knew they were smiling behind their hands, passing notes back and forth about Candy's humiliation.

"Why can't you be normal ?" Miss Schwartz said. "Give me work like this from Ruth Ferris." She leafed through the pages.

Miss Schwartz held up the paper, so that everybody could see what an exemplary piece of work Ruth had done. "You see these graphs?" Miss Schwartz was flicking through the pages of colored graphs Ruth had thoughtfully provided as appendices to her paper. "You know what they're about? Well, do you, Candy?"

"Let me guess," said Candy. "Chickens?"

"Yes. Chickens. Ruth wrote about the number one industry in our community: chickens."

"Maybe that's because her father is the factory manager," Candy said, throwing the perfect Miss R. Ferris a sour look. She knew– everybody knew, including Miss Schwartz—that Ruth's pretty little charts and flow diagrams ("From Egg to Chicken Nugget") had been copied out of her father's glossy brochures for Applebaum's Farms.