The air in Room 12B smelled of lemon cleaner and hot pencil shavings, while the fluorescent lights overhead hummed like a swarm of angry bees.
Renee slid into her seat just as the substitute teacher entered. He didn’t walk; he glided, his movement as smooth as a cursor scrolling across a screen. His tie was perfectly straight, stiff enough to be made of sheet metal, and he wrote his name on the board in rigid block letters: **MR. GLORP**.
“Good morning, young earth learners,” he said, blinking with unsettling slowness. “Prepare for… *knowledge intake*.”
Then, he did the first truly weird thing.
Mr. Glorp picked up a banana from the teacher’s desk—likely a bribe from a front-row student. He didn’t peel it. He didn’t check for bruises. He simply turned it sideways and bit right through the middle, yellow skin and sticker included.
*Crunch.*
Renee’s best friend was out sick, so she had no one to share the horror with. She whispered to the empty air, “That’s… that’s fiber, I guess?”
Mr. Glorp chewed thoughtfully and announced, “Texture: sufficient. Now: lunchtime will be known as **fuel intake**.”
That became the recurring joke of the day. Every time someone mentioned “lunch,” he corrected them with robotic precision.
At 10:15, when a student asked about the cafeteria menu, Mr. Glorp replied, “The Fuel Bay opens at 12:03.
