Sideways Stories From Wayside School Chapter 14 Summary

Sammy

  • One rainy day, the classroom on the thirtieth floor smells awful because all the kids have brought wet and smelly raincoats. There's also a new boy in class, but no one can see him underneath his raincoat.
  • Mrs. Jewls introduces the new boy, Sammy, to the class. Leslie tells him, "You smell terrible" (14.6). Leslie may be lacking tact, but she insists Sammy smells awful—so Mrs. Jewls writes her name on the board.
  • Sammy calls Leslie ugly, insults Allison, and calls Mrs. Jewls an "old windbag" (14.14). He also refuses to take off his coat.
  • Mrs. Jewls takes Sammy's coat off for him, but underneath is another coat, "even dirtier and smellier than the first one" (14.16), so the class still can't see who's under the coat.
  • Mrs. Jewls keeps taking off raincoats. The smell is overwhelming, so she opens a window. Sammy gets angrier and angrier—and creepier—by the minute. "You're all just a bunch of pigs," he screeches. "Dirty, rotten pigs!" (14.21).
  • Sammy gets smaller as his raincoats are removed. Mrs. Jewls writes his name on the blackboard. He begins to laugh, and "His horrible laugh was even worse than his horrible voice" (14. 29).
  • This kid's kind of creepy, right?
  • Mrs. Jewls keeps removing coats, throwing them out the window, and adding marks to the blackboard around Sammy's name as the smell gets worse. Sammy threatens to bite her head off.
  • When Mrs. Jewls removes the final coat, all that's left is a dead rat. Seriously.
  • Thankfully Mrs. Jewls has a no-dead-rats policy in her classroom though, so she picks up the rat and throws it away. The kids are grateful that Sammy doesn't get to stay in class.
  • Now everyone, scream at once: "Dead rats were always trying to sneak into Mrs. Jewls' class. This was the third one she'd caught since September" (14.42). Best punch line ever? Or just the freakiest?