The man-saur dropped the stapler onto the desk, then proceeded to sniff the air before letting out another massive bleat.
    Several of the girls covered their ears and looked around the room, spotting me near the door for the first time.
    “Uh . . . Mr. Avery?” Joy Goldman hiked up her hand. “Miss Bailey is—”
    The T-Rex cut her off with a might huff.
    “But Mr. Avery! Mr. Avery!” The kids giggled and continued to point at the only teacher in the room who was not trying to reenact Jurassic Park.
    Of all the emergency trainings we’d been given as a staff, all the lockdown drills we’d done as a school district . . . I was completely unprepared for this particular scenario. What exactly was my role here? Did I throw my box of markers at its head in an attempt to save the children? Did I distract it with the granola bar in my pocket, then rush the kids to my classroom?
    “Excuse me?” I approached with caution. “Are you Mrs. Walker’s sub?”
    The still-blind, ready-to-charge dinosaur whipped his head in my direction, and I barely managed to bite back a scream. Not real, Lauren. Not real.
    Instantly, the miniature T-Rex hands poking out the sleeve holes began to grow into two full-size, all-male arms. Ten fingers grappled at once for the hem of his T-shirt tucked unnaturally behind the nape of his neck. He gave it a sharp tug.
    Fabric-ruffled hair that wasn’t quite blond and wasn’t quite brown stuck up in every direction. He pulled the shirt lower still, uncovering dark-lashed eyes, covetable cheekbones, and a square jawline. The shocking reveal resembled nothing of the prehistoric monster he’d portrayed.
    The man blinked as if to reacquaint himself with the twenty-first century and let his Ask Me About My T-Rex shirt fall to his waist before he leapt off Mrs. Walker’s desk. He raked a hand through his rumpled, caramelly hair and smiled a grin that had me questioning my own species at the moment. “Hi there, I’m Joshua Avery.”
    That was it. No explanation. No apology. No ruddy cheeks of humiliation for being caught with his shirt over his head while pretending to be a dinosaur. Just a casual greeting, as if all were perfectly normal.