Their teacher was a normally boring and dull lady, a Mrs. Cthulhu. She was in that time of her years when you couldn't call her ancient but she was a fair ways away from young, too. She was soft-spoken and wrote very lightly on the board, and even if you were stupid enough to copy "answers may vary" out of the back of the book on your homework, she always gave you a B. Nobody in the class thought much about her outside of class, except for those times at drunken orgies when people would play that ancient game, "Who's feet would you lick for a million dollars?" When somebody said, "Mrs. Cthulhu?" everybody just sort of shrugged, and then went on to the nerdy kid from biology. That was as much as she ever got mentioned.

One day it was raining horribly outside and the building they were in which predated the Great Wall of China was having a time keeping it's lights on. They flickered and flashed and went out for minutes at a time. The algebra class was waiting for Mrs. C to arrive. Every time the lights went out there was a shriek and or a giggle, from either the bitchy one or the princess or the slutty one or the tomboy. Some girls just can't keep their hands to themselves.

Finally the lights just quite altogether, and the students had to sit in the bare gloom that filtered through the windows. Time passed and Mrs. C was very late. Some students wanted to invoke the fifteen minute rule. If the teacher doesn't show up after fifteen minutes, everyone gets to leave.

"No way, man, it's ten minutes," one person said.

"Naw, it's like, nineteen, or some weird number like that," somebody else offered.

"Should we just leave our homework here?"

"Nope, she has to give us an A for it."

"Is that true?"

"It's, like, a law. Like that law that says if your roommate commits suicide, you get a 4.0"

"No way!"

"Yah."

"What if you teacher commits suicide?"

"3.5"

"Kick ass!"

They talked excitedly in the dark about the possibility of managing a masters in psychology if, by a string of coincidences, one's roommates committed suicide, one's teacher's committed suicide, one's advisor was slaughtered in a failed bank robbery attempt, and one's bus driver overdosed on heroin while driving a busload of Sunday school kids to the pumpkin patch.

Suddenly, there was crash of thunder and a bright stroke of lightning which filled the room, and there, standing on front of the class, was Mrs. C, drenched to the skin, her oddly frumpy body now damp and frumpy and lumpy in weird places.

"Well, I'm here, class," she said as the lights in the room slowly flickered back on, one by one. "Sorry I'm late. We'll skip questions about the homework and go right to the lesson plan."

With a groan, the students pulled their books out of their bags and opened them to the section on quadratic equations.

"EEEEEeeeeeeeeeeee!" A scream filled the classroom. All eyes turned to the nerdy boy in the corner, who's face had gone white, his hair standing on end.

"Cool!" Somebody whispered.

"What's the matter?" Mrs. C snapped.

The nerdy boy pointed at his book. "Sp! Sp! Spide! Sp! Spider!"

There were a few shrieks and the braver ones stood up to look. Sure enough, right in the middle of his book was a great big hairy spider. Yuch!

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Mrs. C said. She walked over to the boy, grabbed the spider in one fist, and walked with it across the room. The nerdy boy was faint. The others stared, fascinated, at Mrs. C. Just as she was about to throw the great big old hairy nasty big creepy hairy spider in the wastebasket, she said, "Well, it'll probably just get out of there," and in one quick movement, she tossed it in her mouth and swallowed.

Five boys at the back of the the room, wearing their ballcaps on backwards and really cool plaid flannel shirts because they were bitchin' FRAT boys, promptly fainted.

"Now where were we? Oh yes, Quadratic equations." Mrs. C. began to scribble furiously on the board. Something inside the students told them that they'd better not start asking too many question.

Mrs. C talked for a a few minutes about the graphs of quadratic equations. "They curve, you know," she said, slowly drawing on the board. "They cuuuuuuurrrrve. They're. cuuuuuuurvy"

The students watched very carefully at the back of Mrs. C's damp dress. Her back seemed to be moving in a weird way.

"Sometimes they curve this awaaaaaaay," She said, lifting herself on one toe to reach the top of the board. The material on her back seemed to be slithering. "Sometimes the curve that awaaaaaaaaay," She reached down low and drew the curve off the chalkboard onto the wall.

Thump. A large tentacle like thing fell out of her dress onto the floor. "Sometimes, they. INTERSECT!" the lights in the room flickered. There were a few moans from the students. The tentacle shot back up into her dress. ".the x axis. Sometimes not."

She began to draw new curves. The students peered at her, too frightened to move. the light in the classroom seemed to be darkening. "But they always intersect the Y." Those at the front of the class saw that something red and sticky was running out of the chalk as Mrs. C drew the Y axis. Those same students felt their gorge rise.

Two tentacles, this time, dropped out of Mrs. C's dress, and slithered around on the floor. Mrs. C's shoulders started to move around on her back. Slobbery munching sounds could be heard coming from her front, which was still, thankGod, facing the board.

And then, of course, wouldn't you know it, the nerdy kid had to ask a question. "Mrs. C.? How can we tell if an equation will cross the x axis or not?"

Lucky for them, the five frat boys at the back woke up, because right then Mrs. C's skin fell off as she turned around. "CHECK THE DISCRIMINANT!" she screamed in a horribly blood-curdling bone crunching nails-on-the blackboard- voice as she leapt over to the nerdy kid and ate him in two messy bites, flinging his entrails around the room as she slurped him down.

"Bitchin!" one of the other students said as they all screamed and ran out of the room. Thunder crashed and lightning flashed, the windows were blown in by gale force winds as Mrs. C howled and howled in the algebra room.

A few weeks later, at a drunken orgy, somebody said, "How about Mrs. Cthulhu? Would ya lick her feet for a million dollars?"

"Wait? Mrs. Cthulhu? Isn't she the one that turned into a slime covered, all tentacled-out monster from the pit of hell, right before she ate that nerdy kid?"

"Yeah."

"I heard that if that happens, like, you get a 3.8 for the semester and they graduate you Phi Beta Kappa."

"Cool!"