Colleen had eaten almost an entire kingdom of leprechauns, and four shrunken humans too. She would put her mind to work on how to catch the ones who had fled into the underground tunnels too small for her to access. She wondered if she should have attacked the tunnels with the shovel, but eventually thought that it might have damaged her potential food. As it was, she had invalidated their invisibility with food colouring and swallowed well over half of them. She had subsequently decided that her sabbatical was over, and returned to teaching at the school.  

One day after school, Connor was about to walk home, when Edith Kelson walked up and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Hi Connor!” she said, “How would you like to hang out with me on a little adventure, this afternoon?”

“Sure,” said Connor, “Like a date?”

“Not exactly that, but it’ll be fun. You know how Miss Balfour went away on that sabbatical?”

“Yes, she was gone for months.”

“She’s a bit of an inventor as well as a science and English teacher. Don’t you ever wonder if she’s got any inventions stashed away in the science lab?”

“I guess she could have, especially if she used the school’s equipment for some of her research,” said Connor.

“Well why don’t we sneak into the lab and have a look?”

“But the doors to the lab are locked until she opens them to start classes.”

“I know, but I just had her for science in last period. I sat in the back row, behind everyone else, so that nobody could see me. While she was writing on the blackboard, I turned the window handle just enough to unlock it without it showing. She’s in a staff meeting now, so all we have to do is climb up the tree outside and sneak in through the window.”

Connor was thinking about it all the time that Edith had been talking. He could show her that spending time with him could be fun too. He knew that she had a boyfriend, but she had come to him, and maybe even left her boyfriend by now. It was possible that she’d only made the invitation because she needed someone from her own school, which her boyfriend was not. Or maybe she had been thinking about him since he first asked her out.

“Sure, it sounds like fun,” he said, remembering her initial reason given for declining him.

Either way, he wuld show her that he knew how to have fun.

They walked around to the tree, checked that nobody was looking, and were soon out of sight within its branches. Edith reached the window first and climbed in, and then stood on the classroom floor to help Connor through the window. They searched the laboratory cupboards methodically, as fast as they could, but found nothing. Connor was looking in her desk.

“Look what I found in her handbag,” said Edith, “She must have been coming back here after the meeting. That means we’ve got less than half an hour left. I wonder what it does.”

Edith pressed a button and a beam of light came from the device in her hand and reduced a chair and desk to tiny size.