Mrs. Gorf wiggled her ears — first her right one, then her left — stuck out her tongue, and turned Todd into an apple. “Does anybody else have an opinion?” she asked.
Nobody said a word.
Mrs. Gorf laughed and placed the three apples on her desk.
Stephen started to cry. He couldn’t help it. He was scared.
***
Todd really tried to be good. He knew that if he talked one more time, Mrs. Jewls would circle his name. Then he’d have to go home early, at twelve o’clock, on the kindergarten bus, just as he had the day before and the day before that. In fact, there hadn’t been a day that Todd didn’t get sent home early.
Todd wasn’t really bad. He just always got caught.
***
Dr. Pickle was a psychiatrist. He had thick eyebrows and wore tiny glasses. He had a small beard on the tip of his pointed chin.
A psychiatrist is a doctor who doesn’t cure people with sick bodies. He cures people with sick minds.
Although Dr. Pickle had a pretty sick mind himself…
Eventually Dr. Pickle was caught, and he was no longer allowed to practice psychiatry. So he had to find another job.
He became a counselor at an elementary school.
***
“If I was married to Mrs. Gorf,” said Jason, “I’d be glad she never came home. He should thank us.”
***
“Hello, Mommy,” Mr. Gorf said into the phone, using Rondi’s voice. “No, nothing’s wrong. I just called to say I hate you! You’re the worst mother in the whole world. You’re ugly and you smell bad! It’s not fair: out of all the mommies in the world, I got stuck with you!”
He hung up the phone.
Rondi sat crying in her chair.
Mr. Gorf touched his nose. “Isn’t this a good game?” he asked. “Rondi is crying. And at home, her mother is crying too.” He laughed. “Too bad you won’t ever be able to tell her you’re sorry.”
***
She hated children the most. Every time she passed a playground, she heard them laughing and having fun.
So she became a substitute teacher.
***
Mrs. Jewls held her nose, walked up to Sammy, and removed his raincoat. She threw it out the window. But he had on still another one.
Sammy hissed. “Hey, old windbag, watch where you throw my good clothes!”
Mrs. Jewls put a check next to Sammy’s name on the blackboard. Then she took off another raincoat and threw it out the window. The smell got worse, for he had on still another one.
Sammy began to laugh. His horrible laugh was even worse than his horrible voice.
When Sammy first came into the room, he was four feet tall. But after Mrs. Jewls removed six of his raincoats, he was only three feet tall. And there were still more raincoats to go.
Mrs. Jewls circled his name and removed another coat. She threw it out the window. Then she put a triangle around the circle and threw another one of his coats outside. She kept doing this until Sammy was only one-and-a-half feet high. With every coat she took off, Sammy’s laugh got louder and the smell got worse.
Some of the children held their ears. Others could hold only one ear because they were holding their nose with the other hand. It was hard to say which was worse, the laugh or the smell.
Sammy stopped laughing and said, “Hey, old windbag, if you take off one more of my coats and throw it out the window, I’ll bite your head off.”
“They smell too bad for me to allow them in my classroom,” said Mrs. Jewls. “You can pick them up when you leave.”
“They smell better than you do, Pighead!” Sammy shouted.
Mrs. Jewls didn’t stop. She took off another one of his coats, then another, and another. Sammy was only four inches tall, three inches tall, two inches tall. At last she removed the final coat.
All that was there was a dead rat.
“Well, I don’t allow dead rats in my classroom,” said Mrs. Jewls. She picked it up by the tail, put it in a plastic bag, and threw it away.
Mrs. Jewls didn’t allow dead rats in her class. Todd once brought in a dead rat for show-and-tell, and Mrs. Jewls made him throw that one away, too.
“I’m glad Sammy isn’t allowed in our classroom,” said Rondi. “I didn’t like him very much.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Jewls, “we caught another one.”
Tags: A DEAD RAT DISGUISED AS A HUMAN CHILD, books, louis sachar is a monster, sideways stories from wayside school, traumatic memories
Does anyone remember the story about every kid having an ice cream flavor that tasted like them? And you couldn’t taste your own flavor, but everyone had preferences for how other people tasted? It will never leave my head.
AHHH OH MY GOD YES.
MARCIA
TODD FLAVORED ICE CREAM YUCK
I think about that more often than I would care to admit.
I was really interested in Maurecia’s flavor, I remember.
Yep. I raced to the comments section to point out that people-flavoured ice cream needs to be on this list.
the only thing worse than remembering this is that no one you ever try to talk to in person will remember. proven a natural law by no fewer than a dozen failed encounters. and turns out you don’t seem less crazy by saying, “no, I’M not the crazy one, LOUIS SACHAR IS CRAZY.”
God, I loved these books. But they really are pretty unsettling, huh?
Way more settling than that damn runaway bunny…
He and Roald Dahl were formative parts of my childhood, which might not explain anything, really; but also might explain so much.
I remember one where it was always said there was no thirteenth floor (or some number) and then a kid got sent to detention or something and it turns out detention was on the thirteenth floor and no one ever left.
It was the nineteenth floor! Because…I don’t know. Some reason.
In my mind this was always closely linked to the resolution of the Buffy season one episode with Clea DuVall.
That one still haunts me. That and the weird men in the basement.
This is only from the first book, right? Because otherwise I’d have to question the omission of the part in Wayside School is Falling Down where the one kid gets stuck in Miss Zarves’ class on the nonexistent floor.
omg miss zarvesssssss
I don’t think the school counselor was in the first book; it’s the only one I read and I don’t remember him at all.
OH MY GOD MALLORY THANK YOU
I was sincerely beginning to believe that I was the ONLY ONE who found those stories incredibly, deeply unsettling in a way I can’t name. Oh my God, I hated hated hated hated hated those books for being scary as shit.
THIS SERIES WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR 7 OUT OF 10 OF MY GRADESCHOOL NIGHTMARES
OH MAN I USED TO LOVE THESE BOOKS.
“Too bad you won’t ever be able to tell her you’re sorry.”
… aaaaand, nightmares.
Especially creepy because I literally just ordered all the Wayside books from Amazon yesterday after having this gchat:
Friend: if it’s not SSfWS it’s bullshit in my world
The school! They built it VERTICALLY instead of HORIZONTALLY!
they let a student attend who wasn’t even a child! He was a stack of stinky raincoats and a rat!
Me: i love louis sachar
We caught another one
DAMN, JEWLS. That shit is straight horrifying.
Also, I’d really like to read Wayside School stories as written by Shirley Jackson.
I feel like the stories already are as written by Jackson? I can’t think of how she could make them more horrifying.
Oh my god, I STILL use Sammy The Dead Rat as an analogy for my dating life.
That is brilliant and terrifying and highly relevant.
In other words, you are wise and full of winning.
Couldn’t you have just made a list of the non-horrifying moments? That would have been shorter, I think.
The one kid got a potato tattoo.
The other kid finally counted all the hairs on his head.
That’s it.
Mac and Nancy’s friendship.
Oh yeah, totally. Love them.
I wonder if my mom still has these and/or would send them to me…
Cow: horrifying or not horrifying?
See, this is the problem. I cannot remember most of the things that would probably have been good or ambiguous.
I cannot remember the cow.
Wikipedia has refreshed my memory, it is actually cows, plural, and they get stuck in the school at the end of one of the books because they can go up stairs and not down.
The scary part was that after Louis the yard teacher got all the cows out, occasionally you could still hear a moo from somewhere in the building.
I dunno, that potato tattoo always seemed very unsettling to me.
“Maurecia’s voice sounded like a pineapple milkshake.” That is a delightful image (taste? sound?) that has stuck with me for 20 years.
The potato tattoo! I think of that kid all the time- he did it just for himself. He just liked potatoes. I love his potato tattoo.
Yes okay but WHAT ABOUT Sherry, or whatever the girl’s name was who weighed 45 pounds including her giant heavy coat and her ten pounds of eyelashes? That was so upsetting to me. It does not sound clever to have multiple pounds of eyelashes! It is terrifying! The dead rat is the worst, though.
Didn’t sherry turn out to BE a dead rat after all that? No. I’ve got her confused with Sammy. I feel like dead rats were a major, core theme at Wayside School. Excellent prep for garbage strikes in later life.
This is fantastic. I may be on Amazon right now, buying these terrifying books so I can re-read them.
Did anyone else buy the Sideways Arithmetic books and try and solve all the puzzles? I guess what I’m saying is, I loved this series.
Yes! Those math books were awesome. I loved those but hated actual math (so having Sideways Math not be actual school math = my most horrifying moment)
Oh yes, those were super fun puzzles
This is fantastic. I may be on Amazon right now, buying these terrifying books so I can re-read them.
Oh my god, I am looking at this book on my shelf RIGHT NOW and IT IS A SNOW DAY.
And this isn’t even taking into account that teacher with the ear on her forehead. (Or was she the one who hated children and became a sub? It’s been too long.)
Omg, I was just thinking about her while I was reading this. She could hear people’s thoughts with her third ear and she used it to always pick the kid who didn’t have the right answer, and then at the end she was going to throw a baby out a window.
D:
Miss Nogard! She would read their thoughts, then insult them based on their insecurities. Mrs Jewls’ kid melted her hard heart and changed her forever, and she went out with Louis.
Remember when they closed Wayside and Louis got depressed?
“Oh, that’s quite all right,” said Miss Nogard, picking up Mrs. Jewls’s baby. “She’s just adorable.”
The window by Sherri’s desk was wide open. That’s kind of dangerous, Miss Nogard realized. Somebody might accidentally drop something out the window.
YES this is my second strongest memory from these books, the third ear and the baby-throwing.
(Mallory picked my first-strongest memory, which is the teacher who steals their voices to say mean things to their parents.)
I loved the crap out of these books which probably explains a lot of why I’m so odd now.
I also just bought both the math books for myself as a Valentines Day present. So worth the $10
Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School! You are in for a treat. I think the math books probably warped my mind as a child even more than the main series did. Here’s one of Mrs. Jewls’s True/False tests, as a taste of the insanity that you have just purchased:
(1) The answers to statements 3 and 4 are the same. T/F
(2) At least four of the answers contained in this problem are false. T/F
(3) Statement number 5 is true. T/F
(4) The answers to statements 3 and 5 are different. T/F
(5) Statement number 3 is true. T/F
(6) The answer to this statement is the same as the answer to statement number 1. T/F
It’s like the guards from Labyrinth, except so much worse.
This was definitely my favorite series as a kid. Although the only things I really vividly remember are the horrors of the 19th floor and…didn’t some kid go to an evil dentist?
You guys, my grandmother bought books on tape for her grandchildren to listen to in bed when we spent the night at her house, and the only ones she had were Wayside School, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Where The Red Fern Goes.
The room I always stayed in was in a far corner of a large house, with a window that looked out over fields, and a giant sleigh bed, and really thick pink carpet. I would lay in that bed with the blanket to my ears and listen to these tapes, which were either completely horrifying or emotionally devastating.
For some reason it never occurred to me that I could just not listen to them.
Scary Stories toTell in the Dark! Just like that, I’m transported back to the library of my elementary school.
Awesome.
Your grandmother is the best. Now I want grandkids.
(Note to my teenagers: I do not really want grandkids.)
I used to swear up and down that these books made me feel sick. I was allergic! I read them anyway.
My conscious mind had forgotten about Sammy, but he’s been there hiding all along.
Agreed; I didn’t realize the extent to which these eldritch books had permeated my consciousness.
I am glad you included the dead rat scene. I still think of that strangely often. But you skipped the most horrifying line: “Dead rats were always trying to sneak into Mrs. Jewls’ class. This was the third one she’d caught since September.”
WHY were dead rats always trying to sneak in???
I guess it is very telling that when I was really little, I found these books 100% hilariously and delightfully disturbing, and never even slightly actually-scary. And then I solved all the Sideways Arithmetic problems and read all his other books.
Same! This is why we are friends.
I loved Sideways Arithmetic. I still think about it every once in awhile.
I don’t remember being scared when I read them as a kid, either. Maybe it’s even more telling that of the ones quoted here, the ones I find the most disturbing (the first two) are unsettling on a sociopolitical commentary level. I mean, yeah, dead rat disguised as a child is creepy, but that “Does anybody else have an opinion?” gave me chills.
MALLORY. Louis Sachar, creator of the horrific Wayside School, also wrote Holes, which revolved around children who had to keep getting up and doing the same shit again tomorrow, in a harsh and terrifying natural environment. The movie of which starred Shia LaBeouf.
What is this secret theme to all of your posts today, and why? And what petrifying Wayside-ian punishment shall befall me now that I know?
UGH I’M SO BUMMED I DIDN’T SEE THIS YESTERDAY. I adore Louis Sachar, and I’ve read and re-read the Wayside School series roughly six billion times.
Ugh me too!!!
ALSO, did you ever read the Sideways Arithmetic book? Because that was the only way I enjoyed math when I was a kid.
Oh, yes, yes I did. I seem to remember a lot of puns surfacing.
This is the best. Thank you so much!
Same! This is why we are friends.
I’ve used these books really successfully with multiple kids that I’ve tutored, they’re the best, creepy bits and all.
RONALDO, KING OF THE GYPSIES!
reading this reminded me that i had a book-crush on louis the janitor. that mustache!
I tell people about the potato tattoo story whenever I get asked what tattoo I would choose. So glad I'm not the only one who remembers it!