243 Days
As the book open, Wayside School has been closed for business for two-hundred and forty-three days. That is an exact number which is repeated several times within the first few paragraphs. It is a constant reminder of the state of the school as it connects back to the cliffhanger ending of the previous entry in the series:
“For two hundred and forty-three days, a lonely sign hung on the front of the old school building. Wayside School Closed for Repairs.”
“For two hundred and forty-two days, he pushed and pulled, shoveled and mopped. He never left the building. At night he slept on the couch in the teachers’ lounge on the twelfth floor.”
“And at last, two hundred and forty-three days later, the school was ready to open.”
Elevators
The strange and inexplicable architectural design of Wayside School is such that it is a thirty-story building in which each floor is comprised of just one room and the only means of locomotion from one story to the next has been stairs. All that is about to change this year, however, as the principal makes clear in an announcement to the student body:
“Elevators have been installed in Wayside School!...There are two elevators. One is blue. One is red. When you want to go up, you take the blue elevator. When you want to go down, you take the red elevator. It’s that simple. It can’t go wrong! The blue one only goes up. And the red one only goes down.”
The New Lou
Mrs. Drazil has at least six points of reference which indicate she is popular and well-liked by the students. Nevertheless, she cross a line which discounts all those positive points and deems that she must go. There is simply no other choice. The line she has crossed was to force Louis, the yard teacher, to do something no one had ever considered possible before. This changes everything.
“A very handsome stranger was walking toward them…Maurecia was beginning to feel scared. She looked around for Louis, the yard teacher, but didn’t see him…Maurecia looked at the stranger. He did sort of look like Louis. Except his hair was combed. His shirt was tucked in. He was wearing a tie. And there was skin between his nose and mouth. He had shaved off his mustache.”
Questioning Reality
A recurring bit of imagery—and subplots to go along with it—show up across the series. Amongst all the strange things at Wayside, this recurrence may be the strangest. This is because its very ability to recur and the recognition of its impossibility infuses the series as a whole with a metaphysical aspect that questions nothing less than reality itself:
“Miss Zarves taught the class on the nineteenth story. There is no nineteenth story. And there is no Miss Zarves.
You already know all that.
But how do you explain the cow in her classroom?”
