“It’s just so cold,” says Mrs. Teichman, Nachi’s mother. “I didn’t realize how quickly the welcome house would cool off”

Eli: The custodian sneaked out, and of course we followed him.

Nellie: But he got away before we could see where he was going! And when we came back in, more strange things started happening.

Squizzle: You two always skip over the most important parts of the story, like how I’m the one who saw him come back, and I’m the one being hunted by a polar bear. This is my story!

I

t’s Nellie’s worst nightmare. If you looked up horror in the Official Nellie Dictionary, you’d see this Sunday afternoon, with a picture of Nellie right now, huddled at the fireplace.

They’re trapped at the North Pole, and the heat isn’t working in the welcome house. It’s been five minutes, and Nellie already wants to cry. It’s so cold. The vents are blowing chilly air instead of hot, and no one is sure why it happened. Mrs. Markowitz had brought out the portable space heaters, but they feel like ice when Nellie comes close to them.

“Our generator must be broken,” Nachi says grimly. “It happened out of nowhere.” One second, the room had been warm — not warm enough for Nellie, but at least it had been a little warm. The next, all the heating had switched to air conditioning.

Nellie is miserable. She shivers in her coat and wraps the two blankets that she’d grabbed from the cupboard around herself more tightly. Today, she isn’t the only one with a coat and a blanket. Ariella has curled onto her lap for extra warmth and has a blanket of her own, and everyone else is sitting close to the fireplace, too, enjoying the bits of heat they can feel.

“It’s just so cold,” says Mrs. Teichman, Nachi’s mother. “I didn’t realize how quickly the welcome house would cool off.”