Teaching Her a Lesson Pt. 25

"Are you all right, Tabitha?"

"I'm OK. Are you OK?"

"I'm... I'm not OK."

"It'll pass, Mr. Canon. You still have me."

I was staring at the door, the after-image of Taylor's departure burned into my eyes. When she spoke again, however, I realized something was amiss from the muffled sound of her voice. "She said, 'I am a stupid, easy, flat-chested cocksucking whore,' right? I think I heard that correctly."

I turned. Tabitha was at the board, dry erase marker in hand, writing those very words along the bottom of the board.

"What on earth are you doing?"

"Huh? She said to... you know. Write." She gestured to whereI am a stupid, easy, was already enscribed in red marker. "A hundred seems like a lot of times. Is it OK if I stay after school, or should I come back to finish in the morning?"

"You don't have to write that!" I snapped.

"I do whatever Taylor tells me to do," she replied with chilling casualness, and resumed writing. "Though that goes for you too, obviously Mr. Canon."

Still trying to wrap my head around what she was saying, I glanced down at the rolled up paper in my hands. There at the top was the standard header and a recent date. This past weekend. Taylor's long-awaited essay. Taylor, the girl who had taken it upon herself to transform a smarter classmate into an automaton. Never mind that Tabitha's rote obedience was the trait I found most alluring in her, but still. If she had secretly done this, what else had she done, and to whom? Was Tabitha the only one with those words burned into her head?

I suppose I should be glad that I evidently didn't, since somehow I'd let her walk out of here.

I walked calmly over to my desk and threw her essay in the garbage. Right where I should have thrown the one she'd plagiarized all those weeks ago.

________________

It took some convincing to have Tabitha continue her assigned writing project while following her writing hand with the eraser. Taylor hadn't saidnot to, I'd reasoned, and it had evidently been deemed sound logic. On she went, helpless to do anything but comply with Taylor's final, degrading command. I left the room while Tabitha worked and made her promise that if anyone else came into the room she'd pause until they left. Taylor hadn't told her not to, after all, and if she didn't pause, someone might react in a way that she'd be forced to stop. That argument had also resonated with her, though she plainly didn't enjoy deviating from the letter of that particular law.

Disobeying Taylor, it seemed, was not an option for her. When I returned from the teacher workroom with the copies of my final exams an hour later, however, she was gone.

I buried myself in my work. It was going on eight o'clock before I left the school, though I saw I wasn't the only one still there. Not quite. Randi actually left the building a short ways ahead of me, done with her shift that had started six hours later than mine. I didn't have enough gas left in the tank to make myself thank her for vouching for me. I would, though. Otherwise, I might have been as screwed as Taylor and Abbie.

I drove home in silence, wondering what fresh hells my rejection might visit upon me. Back home, however, there was nothing. No eggs, no TP in the trees, nothing uprooted in the garden.FUCK YOU CANON wasn't spray-painted on my garage door. Just home, quiet and empty.

I ordered takeout for dinner and kept working while I ate. Grades needed to be completed, and scores needed to be entered. Missing four days had left quite a backlog, but I wasn't about to slack. Those kids had done the work; I was going to honor the effort, even if a bunch of it was nonsensical worksheets my sub had found forCatcher that I never would have squandered their time on. My seniors had missed the whole point of the story, thanks to me.

Well, no. Thanks to me, and to Taylor Stern.

I scrolled down to her name in the gradebook. There at the left was her point total, and next to that, a percentage and letter grade. 54%. Not even an F+. There were no grades entered for her in the past five weeks, ever since we'd started our after school sessions, and our illicit relationship. The whole stack of work I'd collected from her in those weeks, hundreds of points' worth of assignments, quizzes, tests and projects, still sat in the past due tray on my desk, poised right above the discarded essay in the trash. I still hadn't ever passed any of it along to her other teachers. No point now. Taylor deserves to fail all her classes.

Across the line where the blanks were situated for her missing work, I filled in zero after zero. I went ahead and created the entry for the final exam and slapped a zero on that, too. Combined with third quarter's D+, the second highest grade she'd gotten in my classes in five combined semesters, she would finish the year with a 43% in my class. It sounded about right.

I slept alone that night, trying not to think about her. Trying not to get too angry to go back to sleep when I did. Trying not to get too horny when I woke up from another dream where I'd taken her up on her offer, fucked her right there on my desk. Tabitha tried to distract me, but I wouldn't have it. Isa darted in to plead with her master to stop before it was too late. Principal Horen gasped in horror (or awe?) at the sight of me plowing one of her precious students. Candy, Megan, Cassie, Abbie, all of them joined in to implore me to quit wasting myself on this undeserving creature of mine and come shower that same attention on them. Taylor and I only laughed at their entreaties, rutting away uninhibited. Our glee multiplied along with the audience, swelling at just how perfectly we fit together.

Then I'd wake up again, remember who I was and who she was to me, and then fume, and then dream it all over again.

I took a cold shower that Tuesday morning, and was back in school before the sun was over the horizon.