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“But you’re going to, aren’t you,” Jane says, just a hint of firmness in her tone. “Because there is no reason you would withhold that information from me.”
“I have her out in the hall,” Laura says. “She’s terrified you’ll hate her for getting into trouble all the time.”
“I don’t hate people for being in trouble. It is my job to discipline. If everybody behaved themselves all the time, I would have no job.”
Laura nods, satisfied with that answer.
“Storm, you can come in!” she calls out.
Jane knew it had to be Storm, but seeing her again, now, not half an hour after having warned her about a forthcoming punishment, only to learn she’s bounced from that warning to going out and smoking of all things, ignites a certain rare level of displeasure in Jane.
Jane stands to greet the wayward student. Storm enters the room looking guilty as sin, which is appropriate. She might look humble, but Jane has known her long enough to understand that rebel tendencies lie just beneath the surface of that chastised demeanor.
“So. I warned you to behave yourself, and your immediate reaction was to go and do something I had previously punished you for?”
“My…”
“I don’t want to hear a word out of you, young lady,” Jane says sternly, knowing Storm’s tendency to talk her way both out of and into things.
“You asked a question,” Storm says, predictably immediately disobeying her.
“It was rhetorical,” Jane says. “And you know better. You have had more discipline from me than anybody in this school, and yet you continue to misbehave with the slightest provocation. I begin to wonder how I might make a lasting impression on you.”
Storm lowers her head, looks at the floor, and says nothing, which is technically what Jane asked her to do, but still somehow feels rebellious.
“You are grounded for another week. You will go to your room, you will take a dictionary, and you will start copying it from the letter M until you are due here at 3 pm. If you so much as leave your room, I will double your punishment. Do you understand?”
There’s no fight in Storm today. She merely nods mutely and mumbles a littleyes, ma’am.
* * *
It is just as Storm had suspected. Jane is beginning to get tired of her. It was inevitable, really. She is a bad girl, and nobody likes bad girls for long.
Once dismissed, she goes back to her room and begins the senseless task specifically chosen for being senseless.
As she copies out of the dictionary, Jane’s words ring in her ears, morphing and becoming harsher and more distancing every time she imagines them. After a while some of them start to come in the voices of others, layering on cruelties that never existed in Jane’s initial reaction, but which now seem to get all caught up in it.
You’re hopeless,she hears.
You’re beyond help.
You’re a waste of my time.
You’re a little bitch and nobody will ever like you.
Giving herself a brutal, cruel lecture nobody else has ever seen fit to give her in one single go, but synthesizing all the worst things anybody ever said and she ever managed to think about herself, Storm spends the rest of the day, as much of the day as there is, being outwardly good and writing lines until her hand hurts.
By the time 3 pm rolls around, she is somewhat emotionally numb, which is more than can be said for her compatriots.
As they assemble back outside Jane’s office, they make for a rather pathetic sight. Penners, initially stoic about the prospect of another session with Jane, is now visibly pale. Melissa is an utter mess, crying into a handkerchief that is already soaked with tears.
Jolted out of her own problems, it occurs to Storm that she’s going to watch these two be punished, probably. She’ll certainly hear it anyway. There’s something about their innocent misery and the way they seem so much inherently somehow better than her, that makes her feel it would be wrong for them to be caned, or paddled, or whatever it is Jane intends to do to them. She feels very bad, especially for Melissa.
“I’m going to get you guys out of this,” she says. “Just agree with whatever I say, okay?”
Penners, who has been tricked by Storm before, does not look convinced at all. Melissa, on the other hand, is ready to grasp at any straw of hope.
“Really?” Melissa gasps. “What are you going to do?”
