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Show 43. Then Fred Tomlin walked in and made his earth shattering announcement. JD, still at the blackboard at the back of the room, stopped writing in mid-sentence. "See any UFO's lately?" Fred paused for effect. "I heard our honorable editor spent his weekend at the Gorge with an Un-ident-i-fied Fly-ing Ob-ject," he drew it out. "You calling Stephanie names?" Chic danced into the room like a featherweight pugilist, his fists punching the air. "Where'd you hear that?" JD turned around. Everyone was listening now. Even Chic stopped at the tone of his voice. "C'mon, who told you that?" JD asked again. "At lunch. The guys at our table said you made a police report last night." Mike Butzow, JD thought, or Lenny. Man, you couldn't keep a secret in this crummy town. Chic sidled up to JD. "What's he talking about?" The others left their seats and pulled up on desk tops at the back of the room, surrounding JD. "Did you really see a UFO?" a girl asked. "Hey, what happened?" "What'd you hear, Fred?" "Let him tell it," Fred looked rebuffed. "I wasn't there." JD didn't know what to do. He hated being put on the spot. "Look, you guys, we've got a paper to make up. Let's get the assignments passed out and we can talk later," his voice was all business, but his suggestion met with a stiff silence. A couple of the kids exchanged looks. Chic folded his arms, put that "make me" expression on his face, and plunked himself solid as a sphinx right under JD's nose. No one said a word. JD got the message in a hurry. "Okay," he shrugged. He carefully set the chalk and eraser back on the chalk tray and slid up on a corner of the work table. "Shut the door, Claudia," he nodded at one of the girls. "Are we all here?" He took a quick head check and decided no one else would be coming in. As it turned out, they didn't make up the paper that day. They did decide JD should do a feature on his UFO sighting and that Elaine |