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After a lengthy morning constitutional walk to Zermatt and back to clear her mind, Jane is feeling refreshed and ready to face the day for a second time. The false start with Kiera dies not count, she has decided. This morning she has two students on her list to deal with, Penelope, for a second time in two weeks, and Melissa, a young lady she is yet to properly meet. Neither one of them should pose her any undue problems.
She enters her office once more, finding it mercifully empty. There. The day is not lost. Indeed, it has barely begun. She goes to her desk to get some note paper and send for the girls, but before she can, she is confronted by three yellow disciplinary infraction slips. These are short reports filled out by the staff for her benefit. Usually she gets one or two a week. Three is an unusual number for so early in the day.
There is one from Laura, one from Madame Pritchard, the deportment teacher, and a third from Frau Lotte herself. They all bear the same name.
Jane sighs as she reads: “Storm, Storm, Storm.”
* * *
Jane finds the girl in question sitting in her room looking at a pair of very ripped hosiery with a miserable expression. She has showered and changed into fresh clothes, indicating that she has recently gotten herself into some kind of absolute mess.
“Three notes with your name on them,” Jane says as she walks in the door. “That has to be a record, even for you. How have you managed to convince half the faculty you deserve to be punished this early in the day?
Storm’s room is in chaos, but Jane decides to ignore that for the moment. She wants to deal with this matter efficiently and swiftly.
Storm slumps on the bed, her posture very bad indeed.
“I’m awful,” she says. “But they’re more awful. You should see what we’re supposed to do in that deportment class! You have to put a book on your head like some kind of…”
Jane listens to Storm’s litany of woes. It takes quite a bit of skill to have started in a classroom and ended up being physically dragged out of a bush by an annoyed guard, but she’s no longer surprised by anything Storm gets up to.
She also has no intention of punishing her charge. Not yet, anyway. It is time to consider another approach when it comes to this willful young lady who has shown ever increasing capacity to take discipline without learning her lesson.
“Before this day completely derails… what if you were good at these things?”
“What?” Storm stares at her.
“What if you were good at walking around with books on your head?”
“Uhm…”
“What if you were one ofthe bestat walking around with books on your head? What if it were a sport of sorts?”
A little light has gone on in Storm’s eyes. She’d swear she isn’t competitive, but deep down, she absolutely is.
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t know where to start being good at that.”
“Well, first of all, you’re going to throw those hose away, they’re ruined, and then you’re going finish getting dressed…”
Storm waves a thin bow at her. “I can’t even tie this stupid tie. Why can’t we wear real ties? They’re simple, because men have to wear them.”
“Come here,” Jane says, crooking a finger.
Storm does as she is told, approaching Jane with her tie and a downtrodden expression. Jane does her the favor of sliding it around her neck, under the collar, and tying it as it should be tied, with enough tension at the knot to keep it in place.
“There,” she says. “You look practically civilized.”
Storm smiles a little. “I do?”
“Yes,” Jane says, continuing to ignore the unmade bed, the random objects absolutely everywhere, picked up and put down seemingly at random. She imagines this must be the aftermath of the great cigarette hunt.
“Now, find some hose that don’t have a run in them…” She trails off as Storm shakes her head sorrowfully.
“Alright, never mind the hose. Come with me. We are going to go back to your class, you are going to apologize to Madame Pritchard and then you are going to see if you can’t impress me with how good you get at all this silly deportment stuff.”
She can see the hesitancy in Storm’s eyes, but she can see something else too, a little glimmer of hope.
“Okay,” Storm says. “I’ll try. Not for them, though. I don’t care what they think.”
