Josh was getting uncomfortable. Mr. Symarian had been reading from his little black incantation book for a good fifteen minutes and it didn’t seem like anything was happening. Except maybe that the candles had burned lower, but Josh was sure that didn’t really count.
None of this would have been a problem — Josh was as up for a good supernatural adventure as the next kid — except that he really, really had to go to the bathroom. He wondered idly whether it was ok to interrupt a ritual invocation of dark spirits to announce something like that. He was sure the spirits wouldn’t care — they probably didn’t even have bathrooms in the afterlife, or wherever dark spirits hung out. But it just didn’t seem quite, well, appropriate.
To get his mind off things, he tried to think about other occult situations, in books he’d read, to see if anybody had ever had to go to the bathroom. There was that one series of books, the one with the annoying wizard kid, where there was some ghost of a girl who actually haunted a bathroom. But Josh was pretty sure nobody in the book every actually used that bathroom. Which made sense, given that a haunted bathroom pretty much guaranteed you wouldn’t get any privacy.
He had just about managed to screw up his courage to speak out and openly express his need, when Jenny spoke up first. “I don’t think this is working,” she said.
Mr Symarian looked at her with an injured expression. “It’s always worked before. I’ve been doing this spell for centuries…”
“Euphemism,” Sid interrupted. “‘Centuries’ was a euphemism, kids. Right teach?”
“Yes, well,” Mr. Symarian said, blushing. “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”
Jenny was sure she’d heard that somewhere before, but she couldn’t quite place it. She looked to Josh for support, and noticed for the first time that he seemed rather uncomfortable. In that moment she had a flash of understanding. “Mr. Symarian, would it be ok with you if we took a bathroom break?”
“Why yes,” their teacher said, “I think that would be fine.”
Josh wanted to kiss Jenny, but that would have to wait. Right now he needed to head for the door. By the time Mr. Symarian had finished his sentence, Josh was already gone.
“Sheesh!” said Sid. “And they say we demons dematerialize fast.”