Teaching Her a Lesson Pt. 02

"No, it's harmless, see? Here, I'll show you." I picked it up, gave it a little shake.What? What was I even doing?!

But Taylor flinched, plainly mistrustful. "You think I'm gonna let you pepper spray me? Fuck that, man!"

Somehow I forced a laugh. Ha, silly Taylor, ha ha, thinking I'd use a chemical weapon on you, ha ha.Oh fuck me. "Just on the arm, see? It's, ah, it's just sunblock."

The lie was obvious, yet I suppose to a confused eighteen-year-old girl who'd never had someone try to attack them with a dangerous chemical before -- that she knew of -- her fight or flight response was already not at its sharpest. That was even before the spray splashed down on her not-recoiling-quickly-enough forearm. I gave her a good thorough dose, a sheen of toxic mist soon gleaming on her skin.

Pressing the trigger had an immediate calming effect, so much so that I took a moment to confirm I hadn't gotten any on myself. No, all clear. My relief was genuine; I'd defused the situation. Right? My mind raced through the ramifications. Even now, her amygdala was numbing, its capacity for hormone release halting, even as other parts stimulated a little extra serotonin to keep her good and calm. She'd see that nothing bad happened, that it hadn't been a big deal, and if she left with suspicions, the canister would be long gone before there was any proof this had ever happened.

Deep breath. I was in the clear.

"Gotcha, you son of a bitch!"

I whirled toward the sound. There in the doorway stood Abbie Stern, the phone in her hand brandished like a weapon. The camera. Oh no! "I, um, I don't know what you think you saw just now..."

"Save it, you creepy fuck. You try to pepper spray my sister? What, were you gonna, like, mace her down and stick her in the back of your van and take her out to the woods and like--"

"Abbie -- it's Abbie, right?"

"Right now it's Mistress Stern, cunt queen of your loser universe, asshole. And I got that pic ready to share with the whole wide world with the touch of a button, too, so don't even think about trying to get me with that shit or I will rip your asshole six feet wide." Her free arm rose, ready to shield her eyes just in case.

"Abbie, look, this isn't... I wasn't--"

She was ignoring me, looking with concern at her sister. "You all right, Tay? That shit hurt?"

Taylor had inspected the site of the spray for a moment, but after that, she'd just been looking back and forth between us with a vaguely detached expression. "Mm? Yeah, I'm fine. Chill. Smells gross, but pretty sure it's not pepper spray."

"Yeah, what the fuck is that stuff? Does it hurt?" asked Abbie, inching closer. The phone was still held up threateningly, her thumb poised over some button I couldn't see. A dead man's switch of blackmail. I wasn't about to call her bluff, though. There had been ample opportunity for her to snap a shot or two.

"Nah, it's nothing." Taylor shrugged. "The can said Serene X, or Serenex, or something like that. Doesn't sting or anything though."

There was no sign of recognition in Abbie's eyes as they turned back to me. "Set that shit down.Now. Or I hit send. I got fifteen hundred instagram followers, so I give you maybe ten minutes before you go viral for macing a student."

Not knowing what else to do, I set the spray down on my desk and took a step away. That was it. I was done. All there was left was to see if they'd blackmail me, or simply go for the throat and end my life as I knew it right here, right now.

Abbie approached her sister, though it was clear she was apprehensive about Taylor's uncharacteristic nonchalance about all this. Still, she was curious, pulling her sister's arm up where she could see it. It was still wet, almost dripping with how much I'd overdone it. Abbie sniffed, and when she didn't experience any pain or discomfort, sniffed closer. "What even is this shi--"

With reflexes I didn't know I had, I pounced. One hand clapped on the back of Abbie's head and the other under Taylor's arm. The two were pressed together until there was contact, then held there. Abbie squealed and then flailed in shocked alarm. Worried she'd start screaming, I let go a few moments later. Abbie immediately spat and sputtered, wiping her mouth on her sleeve and then spitting some more. I was pretty sure I saw a damp smear across one cheek, too.

"What the fuck was that?!" she demanded. "Oh god, the taste, it's like... it's... Taylor, what did he... what... what did, um..."

She frowned, and soon, there wasn't even a frown. "So... what did you just do?"

What indeed.

"Both of you sit down," I said after a moment in which I attempted to gather my thoughts. I failed. I needed some time to think this through.

"Oh my god, if you make me do another hour, I think I'm going to kill myself," Taylor griped as she took her assigned seat. Abbie followed alongside her, saying nothing, and took the seat beside her big sister.

"And be quiet," I added.

Taylor mouthed a bitchy repetition of my command, but no more. She crossed her legs, folded her arms, and sat there. Abbie was looking around the room, checking to see what I'd done to redecorate since her last Saturday class.

What to do, what to do?First things first, let's not make things any worse. I dashed across the room, both girls watching in idle curiosity as I snatched Abbie's phone out of her hand.

"Enter your password," I said when it wouldn't open. Abbie casually traced a pattern, 5-4-7-8-9-6-5-2. It only took a moment's thought to recognize the implied diagram. A middle finger. As classy as her big sis. There on the screen was a picture on her instagram. Live to the world. It showed me, spraying a clearly displeased Taylor with the Serenex. It was a little blurry, and she'd been focusing on Taylor more so than me. The label wasn't legible, and I wasn't sure someone who didn't know it was me would immediately ID me. I deleted it immediately. There hadn't been any likes or comments. It had only been posted for a minute, evidently having made good on her threat when I pressed her face into the Serenex. Hopefully it had lived its brief life on the internet in solitude.

Next I snatched a spare worksheet, flipped it to the blank back side and grabbed a sharpie.TESTING IN PROGRESS UNTIL 5 PM -- DO NOT DISTURB, I wrote. Once that was taped on the outside of the door, I locked it and shut it behind me. There. That felt smart. Randi wouldn't dare cross that. Nobody would. Like any high school, testing was sacred.

There. Now my timeline for being fucked had at least transitioned from minutes to hours. And I was fucked, as fucked as a stupid fuck like me could be. They'd seen the canister. Read the label. Seen me use it. Fuck, they'drecorded me using it! Oh god, I hoped nobody had seen that picture. On reflection, I quickly opened Abbie's photo gallery and deleted the copy there, too.

I almost didn't notice that one of the photos near the bottom of the screen was a selfie of the phone's owner standing in a bathroom. Topless.

On autopilot, I tapped the image. It enlarged to fill the screen. Holy shit, she was hot. She was gorgeous, like her sister, and even the lighting was working pretty well for her. Abbie's hair was down, forming a screen covering most of her breasts. But not all. She was cupping them in both hands, pressing them together in a line of cleavage as long as her forearm. As I stared, eventually I noticed her lower half was only covered by a pair of black satin panties. Zooming in, the screen displayed the outline of her labia.

How many more images like this did she have on here? I scrolled down--

Knock it off, Canon! some marginally less stupid part of my brain shouted. I was so startled I dropped the phone, then quickly turned it back off. Good grief! I'd only meant to delete the image, not to see... that!Her. So much of her, too.

I looked over to the girls. Taylor was sitting there looking immensely bored, twirling a finger in her hair and sighing impatiently. Pretty much like Monday. Abbie, though... She barely looked up as I approached. Her eyes were a glassy stare fixed on a point of nothingness across the room. Across the school, maybe. I waved a hand in front of her face, and after a moment, she looked up at me, but there was a dazed, lazy expression on her fiercely beautiful face.

"Abbie? Can you hear me?"

She nodded. "Yeah. Obviously." A hint of sass, but it was delivered in a tone so flat that I wondered how someone with curves like Abbie's could manage it.

At least she could listen and respond, a sign that I hadn't completely fried her brain. Good. But there was no mistaking it, not this close up. Taylor was looking over with a bit of concern as I studied Abbie's face. The younger Stern sister looked positively doped. Anybody looking at her would recognize it in an instant.

"What's her problem?" asked Taylor.

"Hush."

But whatwas her problem? Was it that she'd ingested it? How much? Abbie had sucked enough down that she'd said something about the taste. Hmm. I retrieved the Serenex, and sure enough in the lengthy warning label there was a bolded prohibition against ingesting the stuff, but it was in there right alongside warnings not to get it in the eyes, not to use more than the prescribed dose, to only deploy it in accordance with state and federal law, and a hundred other cover-your-ass statements. Nothing about the why of any of it. Though it seemed pretty obvious that a chemical that did things to the brain if it made contact with your skin would only get stronger if you swallowed it.

Well, bookmark that. For now, I had a bigger problem, and it was that quite simply, I'd just very openly dosed two students with a chemical weapon. The girls even knew the name of it, and eventually, they'd snap out of the effects. So... doomed, right? They might have all the verve of a pair of steamed potatoes right now, but once it wore off, they'd be losing their minds. Rightly so. Nothing I'd read suggested there was anything in the Serenex to suppress memories. All it did was alter the brain to put people in a relaxed, receptive state for a while.

"Son of a...!"

Once, I'd been sitting on the toilet in the men's faculty restroom when I'd seen a bit of graffiti scribbled under the toilet paper dispenser. In the blink of an eye, I figured it out without even knowing there was a thing to figure out. The green ink. Complaints from custodial that someone was smoking in here. A chance sighting under the bleachers at a football game last fall. The backwards K in the graffitied "go fuck urself." The next day, I'd confronted Kenny and gotten a confession.

This was like that. Taylor had been on her relative best behavior all week. She hadn't told the specifics of Monday's punishment to her sister. In subsequent meetings she'd been actually doing her work. No more cheating or excuses. I'd had her write a hundred times a promise to behave, do her own work. I'd made her apologize for the chapstick incident, and she'd further apologized for teasing me, for enticing me with her ass. I'd insisted I hadn't been. She hadn't seemingly told a soul otherwise. When Abbie teased her, she'd said she was trying to behave in class, and that she owed me an apology.

Could... could it really...

"Abbie, Taylor, each of you needs a piece of paper," I ordered the two of them.

Taylor took off her backpack, big breasts wobbling furiously as she twisted herself out of it.Stop looking! You're in enough trouble! As for Abbie, she merely frowned; she had brought nothing with her. Taylor solved her problem for her, sliding over a sheet she'd torn out. That vexation faded right back to that eerily tranquil facade. I had Taylor supply her a pen as well.

"All right. We're going to do another little writing assignment, OK?"

Taylor groaned. "Oh god, not again. That wasso lame Monday. My hand hurt like all night." She looked to Abbie expectantly. "Really? No 'couldn't even jack off your boyfriend' joke? Man, whatever that stuff was really did a number on her."

"Language," I scolded automatically. "And I didn't think you had a boyfriend." Word had it she'd been dating Marco and dumped him at prom in front of all their friends.

She wrote her name at the top of the page by reflex. Abbie glanced over, saw the heading, and followed suit -- except I saw after a moment she had written Taylor's name instead of her own. That seemed bad. Taylor didn't seem to notice, though.

"Uh, I don't...? It was just a sick burn. Not sure how that's your business either way, though."

"Fair enough. Anyway, today, let's start off with a simple one. Write down: 'I will not let anyone find out what happened in Mr. Canon's room.' You too, Abbie."

Taylor arched a neatly tweezed eyebrow at me. "Seriously?"

I mean, what did I have to lose? If it didn't work, I wasn't any worse off. If it did, who knew? Maybe I wouldn't wind up on the short bus to a long prison stay after all. "A hundred times. Chop chop."

"Seriously. Now get to it."

Abbie was already at it. She had boyish handwriting, ugly and uneven, but the words came fast. Taylor sighed irritably and began her own page. I took a moment to watch, ignoring my student's peevish glance at my hovering. It was much faster going than it had been on the whiteboard. Smaller motions, more familiar. I didn't know if the time spent on it or the repetitions were more important. I supposed for now, I had a few minutes to reflect.

Or better yet, Abbie's photo gallery would provide an amusing diversion.

"It's really uncool snooping on a student's phone like that," Taylor pointed out, pausing to shake a cramp out of her hand. Jiggle. I wonder if Abbie's boobs would jiggle the same way. I hadn't found any videos yet.

"What number are you on?"

"Sixty-five."

"Then let's talk thirty-five reps from now."

She frowned, but got back to work. Abbie had never stopped, not even when she glanced up between us during the brief exchange.

The younger Stern wasn't lacking in confidence, that was for sure. Even aside from having the guts to pose half-naked in the first place, she'd festooned them with quotes, lyrics I was guessing, boasting of her hotness, her sex appeal, her unattainability. Her expressions dripped condescension, arrogance, or both. Pretty nauseating stuff, really. But once I got past that, my eyes almost popped out of my head.

There were dozens of lewd photos in here. None of them were fully nude, and she never did a bottomless pic, quite. But I'd gotten a lot of good peeks at her nipples, often merely partially concealed behind hands or hair or a translucent bra. Wide and pink-red and almost angry-looking. Her tan covered the whole thing -- no bikini top in the tanning bed for her. Her ass did have tan lines, right along her panty line. But it looked like she'd come across a thong bikini earlier this spring that she really couldn't get enough shots of. She was at a pool somewhere, and it looked indoors. Maybe a hotel. It didn't stop her from strutting around in that thing, though. I wondered who had taken the pics, because it clearly wasn't her. She even had a few tattoos. One down her spine with Roman numerals that I could only assume was her birthdate, and another on her inner left bicep, a crown that saidLinda underneath it. I'd spoken with their mother, but perhaps a grandmother? Hell, for all I knew it could be a reality TV star.

Could I send myself copies? Would that make things worse? Was it traceable? Did it even matter at this point?

No, I told myself. Just because you crossed one line doesn't mean you need to cross the next. This slope was already too slippery by far to drop down and let it become a slide.

Besides, here I was scoping out her most private, personal files, and meanwhile she sat across the room half-aware of me doing it, permission granted by omission of complaint. They were twice as hot with her watching.

I glanced up. Abbie had set down her pen and was staring straight ahead again. Her jaw was open slightly. Was she drooling? No, I guess not. Oh, I hoped this didn't do any long-term damage. Squatting in front of her, I took her hand and squeezed it gently. After a moment, her eyes focused on me.

"Abbie? Can you hear me?"

"Yeah."

"Do you feel OK?"

"I guess. I dunno."

Not exactly helpful. Taylor frowned, concerned, but kept writing. In the eighties now. "You need to answer me completely and honestly, OK?"

"Sure."

"Do you feel nauseous? Light-headed? Headache? Anything unusual at all."

She considered. "Maybe a little light-headed. I was smoking pot in the bathroom before I caught you spraying Taylor."

Wow. Well so much for wondering whether or not she was being honest and compliant. Maybe some of her spaciness had to do with the weed, too? A side effect from mixing drugs? A million miles from my own narrow and limited area of expertise. "Tell me, when you leave here, are you going to tell anyone about this?"

She shook her head. "Nah."

"Why not?"

Taylor snorted. "Seriously, Mr. Canon? You only had her write it a hundred freaking times."

But Abbie answered anyway. "I will not let anyone find out what happened in Mr. Canon's room."

Taylor's paper was numbered up to ninety-four. "All right, that's good enough, Taylor. You can stop. So what about you?"

"What about me what? Like, do I feel OK?"

"No, I mean are you going to tell anyone about all this."

"Ah. Well, I guess not. Oh and by the way I'm fine, even though you sprayed me with that stuff. Thanks for asking."

Her answer was a lot less convincing. Shit. I needed to know if this worked or not. Otherwise, I'd... shit, I don't even know. Leave town, never come back? I tried to think of a way to get some hard data. "Did you really think I was looking at you on Monday? When you were writing on the board?"

She laughed. "Do I think? Shit, Mr. Canon, Iknow. I caught you red handed like a dozen times. You were nowhere near as subtle as you thought you were."

"Language. So did you tell anyone?"

"Nah."

"Why not? No offense, Taylor, but you're usually first in line to cause me headaches and discomfort."

Her grin broadened. "Yeah, I know. But I said I'd behave -- and I have, right?"

"You have."

"See? Always saying I'm lying about stuff. But really, I barely even thought of it. Like, I saw you staring at my butt, but I know you said you weren't, so... meh. Wouldn't really be good behavior to tell everybody you're perving on your students."

"I was not--"

"Dude, I just saw you practically drooling on your desk over whatever you were looking at on Abbie's phone." She eyed her sister. "Skank."

"I was only making sure she wasn't positioning herself to blackmail me!"

Taylor eyed her sister. "Yeah, sure. Geez, Abbie, good ol' Mr. Canon is such an upright dude. He'd never do anything inappropriate towards us. We're lucky to have him. Aren't we, sis."

The thick sarcasm was seemingly lost on her sister, who at least still seemed to have the wherewithal to recognize her name when it was spoken. "Yeah, I guess we are."

Taylor frowned. "You turned her into a vegetable with that crap, you know. What even is that stuff?"

"It's nothing dangerous. Don't worry. Not. Dangerous. Understand?"

"Nothing dangerous, my ass! Abbie swallowed some of it and now she's, like, lobotomized or something!"

Whatever I had done was working a lot better on Abbie than it was on Taylor. I didn't know what to do. Taylor was suspicious, accusatory, but by the same token, she was still sitting there calmly, her most boisterous resistance a slight elevation in volume. But would her passivity last? Maybe I was safe, maybe, but that was an awfully big risk to take.