"All right, all right, I'm here already. Jesus, Miss Lane, don't get your fucking panties in a twist."
Melissa Lane had never been spoken to like that by anyone in one of her classes. In fact, Melissa Lane had never been spoken to like that by anyone in her life. One look into her stern green eyes behind glasses that only magnified their intensity, one glance at the auburn hair pulled back into a bun so tight you could deflect bullets with it and the conservative dress that really only a teacher, a librarian or a nun could get away with, and even the casual observer knew that to Melissa Lane, profanity was something that happened to other people.
"Tia Fernandez!" she said, her mouth a thin line. "Might I remind you that we have come to this class...five minutes late, in your case...to study the finest and most glorious compositions of the English language, not the vulgarities you may have picked up from a sailor on leave. Shakespeare, Milton, Donne--"
The pretty Hispanic girl shrugged as she dumped her bag next to her desk. "I don't give a fuck about Shakespeare, and nobody else in this room does either." The other students feigned studied nonchalance. They were quite content to watch this sudden and spectacular bit of in-class entertainment (which they would be repeating and embellishing over the next few days to anyone who would listen), but all of them knew better than to get involved. Melissa Lane held her class in an iron grip, despite having barely a decade on some of her oldest students. One boy had accidentally let a 'damn' slip when he'd forgotten his paper at home, and had wound up copying 'Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer's Day' three hundred times. They couldn't even imagine what the teacher was going to do to Tia.
"Ah, yes," Melissa said with cutting sarcasm. "I've heard this particular argument expressed before, albeit with more wit and fewer inane profanities. I suppose you feel that you don't need to learn about literature?"
"Nope," Tia said, settling into her seat and glaring defiantly at Melissa. "I turned eighteen three months ago, and I'm already pulling down more dough in a night of doing phone sex than you make in a fucking week."
"Well, that certainly explains where you've picked up that foul mouth of yours," Melissa said. "It sounds like you've got a fulfilling career ahead of you. I don't see why you're even bothering to keep our humble company." By this point, Melissa's sarcasm had moved past 'cutting' and was well into 'hacking', 'shredding', and 'mutilating'.
"Because my fucking dad fucking countersigned me, that's why!" Melissa suddenly understood. Some genius on the school board, concerned with rising drop-out rates, had pushed through a new policy recently whereby even students of majority age could be blocked from dropping out if their parents registered their dissent. It was probably unconstitutional, and definitely pointless. Few of the parents of drop-out students cared enough to sign the forms, and those who did simply became parents of truants instead of drop-outs.
"I see," Melissa said. "So you thought that you'd just come in here, throw a temper tantrum like a two year-old in front of the most intimidating teacher you could think of, and I'd expel you, thus doing all your dirty work for you?"
"Exactly, except two year-olds don't say 'fuck' so much," Melissa said. "Dad doesn't really fucking care if I stay in school anyway. He's just in the middle of divorcing Mom, and he thinks that if she shows the judge this bullshit form and tells the court that Mom said it was okay if I did phone sex, suddenly he'll look like Mister Good Parent and he'll get a better settlement. Well, fuck that. If he wants to get all Machiavellian with Mom, I can play that fucking game too. I figure they'll send me to the school guidance counselor before they bounce me, and I can let some shit slip about Daddy that'll fuck him over good."
That was the worst part about Tia, Melissa thought. In the middle of that frankly obscene tirade, she'd casually used the word 'Machiavellian' in a sentence. She had a first-rate mind when she cared to use it, but she'd decided to forgo school and the opportunities education brought, and for what? Talking dirty to some stranger? Obviously, her mother was to blame for all this...but it wasn't Melissa's job to judge. It was Melissa's job to keep order in her classroom.
"Well," she said, letting the word hang in the air for a long moment. The students looked back and forth between the two women like spectators in a tennis match. "Thank you for explaining the situation to me, although I'd prefer it if you reined in the potty mouth. I'll take the situation under advisement. Now then, class, if you could please turn to page 492 in your books, we'll take up our study of 'Hamlet' again."
"What?" shouted Tia. "Aren't you going to kick me out of your fucking class?"
"Language, Tia! And no. It seems to be what you want, and I certainly wouldn't be punishing you if I did exactly what you wanted me to do, now would I?" Melissa smiled coldly. "No, you can sit right there with the rest of us. If you choose to try to disrupt the lesson further, that's certainly unfortunate for your fellow students, but I have no intention of forcing you out of this classroom. In fact, I'd like to see you after class. I have a free period after we're done here."
Sure enough, Melissa's plan worked perfectly. At first, Tia had attempted to disrupt the lesson--she'd grumbled "Bullshit!" loudly during Melissa's analysis of 'To be or not to be', and said that Polonius sounded like an "asshole"--but Melissa simply froze her out, and her estimations of the typical teenage girl's attention span proved to be quite accurate. After fifteen minutes or so, Tia lapsed into a sullen silence, glaring at Melissa but saying nothing.
When the bell rang, the other students filed out, looking at Melissa with a touch of quiet awe. Tia just sat in her chair as Melissa went over and closed the door (after first making sure that none of her students had lingered near the classroom to overhear.)
"Tia," she said, taking a seat at her desk, "come over here for a moment."
Tia flounced over to the chair opposite Melissa's and sat down sullenly, idly playing with her jewelry.
"Now, I know I'm not generally the sort of person that students open up to," Melissa said. "But I do understand that you're going through a very hard period in your life. It sounds like things are quite difficult for you at home." Tia didn't respond; she just kept twiddling her pendant absently between her fingers, seemingly more interested in the way the light played off the facets than in Melissa's words. But Melissa could tell she was listening. "But abandoning your education, Tia, that's no answer. And for what? A career in speaking to perverts?"
Tia shrugged. "It's just words. Mom says words don't have any power unless you give them power. So some dweeb calls me up and wants me to dominate him, make him jerk off and sniff my panties and shit. He gets off on being told what to do, and I get off on ordering him around. Way I see it, I'm the one with the power there." She looked slyly at Melissa, continuing to fiddle with the pendant. "It's the same with those other words, too, you know. The ones that piss you off. Fuck, shit, bitch, piss. They only have power because you let them."
Melissa frowned. "That may be, but using them in front of me is a sign of disrespect, and I--" She broke off. "Could you please stop doing that? It's most annoying."
"Doing what?" Tia said innocently, continuing to play with her pendant.
"Fiddling with that thing," Melissa said. "You keep--" She broke off as a flash of light reflected into her eyes. "You keep getting light in my eyes. It's very distracting."
"I'll bet," Tia said, showing absolutely no signs of stopping. "It probably makes it very hard to think."
"Well, I wouldn't--" Another flash of light stabbed into her brain. "Could you please stop that?"
"Well..." Tia pretended to consider, but she kept flicking the pendant over her fingers as she did so in a way that sent rhythmic flashes straight at Melissa. "No, doesn't sound like it's worth it to me."
Melissa winced and tried to shift so the light wouldn't hit her, but Tia kept angling the pendant so that those flashes of distracting light flickered into her eyes. "I'm warning you," she started.
"Warning me of what? I'm only really sticking around right now because I want to give you a piece of my fucking mind. You can't punish me, I'll just ignore it. Unless you want to kick my ass, which would get you fired and wouldn't do shit to me in the long run." The vulgarisms irritated Melissa further, but the flickering reflections from the pendant were far more obnoxious by now. She found herself blinking every time the light passed over her eyes. "You can't expel me, because that's what I want. You wanna go talk to the fucking school board? They'll just expel me too. You wanna call my fucking dad? He'll just say he wants to keep me in school, and then you're back at square fucking one. You wanna talk to my mom? She'll just tell you to mind your own fucking business and stop sticking your nose in her daughter's life."
"I--" The refracted light jabbed into her eyes again, breaking off Melissa's train of thought before it even started. She didn't even know what to begin complaining about--Tia's constant profanities, her obnoxious behavior, or her lack of respect for authority. Melissa had never felt so helpless dealing with a student. She didn't know how or when she'd lost control of the situation, but she had to admit that she had no idea what to do next.
"So you see, Miss Lane, you have no power here at all." The flashes came faster and faster now, and Melissa felt like her eyes were shut more often than they were open. "I can say anything I want, can do anything I want, and you can't say shit about it." Melissa wanted to deny it, to demand respect from the younger girl, but confusion kept her mouth shut. It was so hard to think... "So I have all the power here. And if I have power, and you don't, then that means I have power over you, right?"
"I..." Melissa could barely keep her eyes open now. The light was flashing into her eyes almost constantly, and she was so confused, and she didn't want to answer 'yes', but she couldn't figure out what else to say...
"Right, Miss Lane?"
"yes..." Melissa felt the word just slip out of her mouth. Tia had angled the pendant so the light shone directly into her eyes now, a steady beam of light that caught her and held her and forced her eyes to close and stay closed.
"Good girl," Tia said. "Now, bitch, let's have that fucking chat."
