"We didn't mean it, Willie. It just kind of happened," Dodger said. "One minute, everything was going great. I drank the potion, pretended to be you for a couple of hours, took that quiz I was telling you about, watched the cake fall on James Beeks—it was all fun and games. Then all of a sudden, everybody was yelling at each other, and I had to stick up for Lizzie. The next thing I knew . . . umm . . . well . . ."
. . . Dodger fled to the inside of his magic lamp for the night, I got ready for bed. While I was lying there in the dark, I kept picturing the whole nightmare classroom scene in my head, and wondering what the heck I was going to do about it. Finally, before I drifted off into a night of nervous, tortured half-sleep, I decided what I would have to do. I'd just get up in the morning, march off to school, and tell Mrs. Starsky that I was sorry, but I couldn't run for president after all. I mean, Dodger had gotten all worked up in the spirit of the moment and put me in a bad situation. But I had spent years being careful to avoid the spotlight. If I backed down, Beeks would probably make fun of me for a while, but soon things would be back to normal. I would be happily invisible, Beeks would get elected, just like he had every year since kindergarten, and life would go on.
I figured, how hard could it be? It's not like one day of being absent could change my life forever, right?