Part Twenty-Nine: Cultivating an Atmosphere Conducive to Learning
I dressed and composed myself. The door wasn't locked. Hell, it wasn't even fully closed. Yet nobody popped in, nobody squealed in alarm that my penis was exposed to the light of day in my classroom. We'd had sex in my classroom without even the slightest precaution for secrecy, and we had gotten away with it. Taylor walked off angry and dejected, I sat there simmering in all those conflicting feelings, and we'd both had some pretty memorable sex. It was symbolic of this whole crazy final term.
The final bell of the school year rang not a minute later. Students flooded the halls. I bided my time, said farewells to the few who popped by, exchanged sighs of relief with Amy when she popped her head in from next door to congratulate me on another year under the belt. If Taylor had taken much longer to get off, she would have seen the girl impaled on my cock like a severed head atop the walls of the dark lord's castle, a grisly confirmation of what one already had cause to suspect was going on within. Instead, she bustled back to her room to get to work on her own last bit of grading and left me in my room with our commingled cum still drying on my flaccid shaft.
What a note to end on.
I dialed Isa's cell.
"About time, master," she answered.
"I had to deal with the other one first. How's Abbie? Is she awake yet? Please tell me you didn't do anything to her." Prior experience suggested that background noise didn't seem to do much, if anything, but if you said their name or snapped your fingers in their face, whatever it took to get their attention, the things they heard stuck to their brain cells like superglue.
"I couldn't risk taking her into my office with Horen down the hall, so I left her in a mop closet for the past couple hours," she replied.
You WHAT?!
I should have shouted. Instead, still good and Serenexed myself, I said calmly, "Oh. Oh my."
"Yeah. Once the coast was clear, I went to get her, but I couldn't get her to follow me. I tugged, but she wouldn't budge."
"So where is she now?"
"Now I know you said not to say anything to her, but I only said enough to get her to follow. All I said was, 'Abbie, come out of the closet.'"
Oh god. "Isa..."
"'Abbie, you don't belong in the closet. Come out of the closet.' I must have told her a hundred times, master, but she wouldn't budge, just stood there repeating after me like some idiot."
Fuck. This would be very, very alarming indeed when this crap wore off. "Is she still in there?"
"In where? In the closet? Yeah, I'm looking right at her." Her voice grew quieter, evidently holding the phone away from her face to address the girl. "Abbie, Mr. Canon wants you to come out of the closet. Or are you saying that you are out to make him as unhappy as possible? If not, then you better do as I say. I said, do as I say, Abbie. Come out of the closet. Just do what you're told, damnit! Ugh, I'm going to kill you, Abbie. If you're lucky, I'll be gentle."
Instead of freezing, my blood merely dropped five or six degrees. I almost dropped the phone in panic. "Please, please stop, Isa," I insisted blandly.
A weary sigh blew from the speaker. "Oh my god, master, you are no fun to screw with at all, I swear. I figured you'd be screaming at me, not taking it on the chin."
"So... she's not in a closet."
"She is in a closet, actually, but the rest of it was for goofs. Smuggling her into my office was a no-go. Taking her through the halls at all was risky in her state, so I stashed her in the file closet by the H hall. Well out of prank earshot, I assure you, and I've got my eye on things."
"Goodbye." I wanted to hang up wordlessly, but Serenex insisted I not be so rude. Just as well I was out of the stuff; after that stupid joke, I wasn't in a mood to make good on my offer to fix her and Candy anyway.
The closet in question wasn't fifty feet from my classroom, designated for the use of the English department. We mostly used it for storage and to file away student papers, a file the district started in kindergarten and returned to graduating seniors. (In my case, since I'd been out most of last week, my substitute had gotten to distribute them and revel in that moment. Not that I was bitter.) As locations went, it ought to be safe, or at least as safe as one could hope for in a building with over two thousand people roaming around in it. At least there were until a few minutes ago. Now the students were gone, and any papers graded and returned. Nobody should have a reason to come in here until August.
I tried to glare at Isa, identifiable by her uniform even from a couple hundred feet down the school's central corridor, but her exposure to Serenex did no more to suppress her laughter than my own did to ignore it. As she'd said, Abbie stood by in the dormant closet. She didn't even glance up as I entered, standing there in her dingy old faded pink t-shirt and gray sweatpants, staring at a blank spot on the wall. The closet was more of a room, really, probably a third the size of my classroom. In addition to the file cabinets, it contained piles of disused books, surplus classroom supplies, holiday decorations... and two people doped to the gills on Serenex.
With the Taylor situation in front of me, I hadn't put any thought into what to do with her little sister. Nothing, I supposed, was an option. Probably the best option. As it stood, Abbie saw herself as my fantasy slut, happy to be used for any sexual purpose I might have for her and quick with suggestions if my imagination wasn't up to the task. Hard to improve upon that from my end, and she'd certainly seemed to enjoy herself. Knowing now that her misbehavior had been largely dictated by Taylor, there was no cause to either correct her or punish her, either. Yes, she was the one who'd taken advantage of Cassie's compromised state to make her my 'booty call,' but even that was still Taylor. Maybe it had been on direct orders, or maybe she'd done it in the spirit of her original programming from her sister, all that sarcastically misogynist tripe about what girls like them were supposed to be like. Either way, only one Stern's fault, and it wasn't Abbie's.
The right thing to do would be to keep an eye on her while it wore off, then send her on home.
Except... at home, there would be Taylor. Her "boss." Someone who had demonstrated time and time again that she was a bad influence, and an absolutely brutal mistress. I was the one who'd put her in this position. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like it was up to me, with the last of my mutated Serenex in her bloodstream, to help her out of it.
It had been almost three hours since she'd been dosed. The others had started coming to not long after this point, and they'd gotten a direct dose, not tainted bratwurst juices. I didn't have time to conduct a thorough analysis of exactly the words to use. It was now or never.
"Abbie?" I had to repeat it before her eyes focused on me. "Abbie, Taylor is not the boss of you."
There. At long last, after weeks and weeks of constant wondering, it was time to learn what oppositional commands would do to someone who--
"Yes she is," she murmured. "I do whatever she tells me to."
I sighed. All right, so much for that. I'd always imagined Serenex like some kind of indelible ink, making things stick to the brain, impossible to get off. In light of Abbie's response, I adjusted it to be more of a weather sealing paint, impossible to penetrate with more liquid once it dried. (As an English teacher, it was comforting to feel like my metaphors did anything to make me less ignorant of the sciences.)
Also, good god, Taylor. Also also, I couldn't help but notice that once she'd focused on me, she didn't trail off as quickly as the girls had other times. The closer she grew to consciousness, the worse I expected this would work. Time was running out. If undoing was out, the next recourse was a workaround. If she felt she had to do whatever Taylor said, though, how did one get around that?
"Still with me, Abbie?"
"Nyuh huh," she said. There was a slow bob of her head that I took for a nod. Good enough.
"OK. So I want you to remember, Abbie. What Mr. Canon wants is more important than what Taylor wants. What Mr. Canon wants is more important than what Taylor wants. Understand?"
Again, the bob. I looked around the little-used room until I found some markers, then a piece of brown construction paper. I thrust a blue marker into her hand and set the paper atop a file cabinet, tapping for her attention. "Write it. Write down what I said."
