Mrs. Wallace told Sarah to stop spreading rumors but Sarah said it was true because she heard it from Jamie because Jamie’s cousin with the weird eye who was five years older used to go to the school and Jamie’s cousin wouldn’t lie because he once tried to trick Jamie into eating a hot pepper when he was really little and Jamie’s cousin’s parents grounded him for a week and made him promise not to lie to Jamie anymore so he was probably telling the truth. 

Mrs. Wallace said that spreading that kind of rumor could make the other kids scared, but Sarah said that the other kids already knew about it and she just asked Jamie about it and wanted to know more because on the playground the other kids and Jamie kept daring each other to look underneath the slide that nobody liked because it always shocked them because of the static electricity they learned about from the science video that Mr. Adams showed them in class that they liked but not as much as when they went to see the bottle rockets launch, so Sarah was afraid of looking underneath the slide because it was dark and she was kind of afraid of the dark and also because of what the other kids kept saying lived under the slide, but Lisa said Sarah had to go or else she’d reveal Sarah’s secret crush but Sarah said she didn’t have a secret crush and she thought that was something that older kids had but Lisa said that Sarah wasn’t mature enough but Sarah didn’t think that Lisa knew what that really meant, so that’s why Sarah went to tell Mrs. Wallace about everything.

Mrs. Wallace said she’d have to talk to Lisa and then Sarah asked Mrs. Wallace if she knew about the monster that lived under the slide and Mrs. Wallace said no so Sarah said that there was a big monster that lived there and it had a head the size of her mom’s car and a mouth full of really really sharp teeth and it was red and slimy like a snake even though snakes aren't slimy she just imagined them as slimy and it lived underground and then she said that one day five years ago there was a substitute teacher who was there because the regular teacher was going to have a baby and Sarah always wondered how that happened but adults would always look at her funny when she asked but anyway the kids never saw the substitute teacher again but some of them heard that she got gobbled up in one bite by the monster when she was walking home and then the monster ran away and now the monster lives under the slide that shocks you when you slide on it.

Mrs. Wallace said that it was unrealistic for such a monster to be the kind to live underground based on the physical description Sarah gave her and that something with a mouth full of really sharp teeth meant for tearing flesh from bone was unlikely to eat something in one bite, and that no such monster lived under the slide, nor near the school for that matter. 

Mrs. Wallace said that that particular monster lived in the clock tower.

Sarah had nightmares that night.