I licked my lips and faced Mrs. Beouf. .“The household cleaning sponge is based off the oceanic variety whose filter feeding system could be argued to be a basis for a vacuum cleaner’s own filtration.”

“Very good, Clark! Two candies!” Two more chalky bits; one white and one pink came to me and I reared back. Beouf paused. “Okay okay. One for me. One for you.” She popped the pink one into her mouth and bit down. Wincing a bit like she’d just taken a bad pill.

As if to prove something to me (which she did) she stuck out her tongue and showed me the dusty residue left on the middle of her tongue. I held out my hand. The white one. “Pink one, please?” Beouf rolled her eyes and picked a pink one out of the dish of treats. “They all taste the same.”

It wasn’t the taste I was worried about. I was going to pee my diaper before lunch if I wanted to get my shorts back. Didn’t mean I wanted some kind of spiked candy to make me completely incontinent by daysend.

I bit down on the pink and just like Beouf, I winced. It was somehow both sugary and bland at the same time. The chalky aftertaste wasn’t great either. Beouf didn’t wince just because this was sugary and her Amazon tastebuds hated it. She winced because it was just generally bad candy. I grabbed my bottle and took several pulls from it. The cool water washing the aftertaste away was a bit akin to drinking milk after eating a pepper. It lessened the aftertaste, without completely getting rid of it.

A way to ‘reward’ Littles with sweetness while encouraging them to hydrate.

“You got two?” I put down the water and looked back to Ivy. There was a fire in her eyes that I couldn’t remember seeing before. Not angry. Just intense. She looked back to her teacher. “My turn?”

“Yes, dear.”

Ivy flipped over the tiles. “The color green aaaand a tuna sandwich.”

I crossed my arms, sat back in my chair and waited to be regaled about lettuce or something or how tuna turned green if left in the fridge too long. I was wrong. “Algae is green and plankton feed on algae and tiny fish eat the plankton and the tuna fish get gobbled by us as a sandwich.” Ivy exhaled. “The circle of life.”

“Three points!” Beouf praised. Ivy opened her mouth and let the three little tablets be dropped right in her mouth. She crunched down and chugged at her bottle. Her eyes looked past it and to me.

She hadn’t said it. But the message was obvious.Game on.

“Okay Clark, your turn.”

I chose two more… “A blackbird and a desk?” I chewed my bottom lip. “A blackbird and a desk…”

“Anything?” Beouf asked.

I threw a look at Ivy. She was giggling behind her hand. “I’m thinking…I’m thinking…is there a time limit?”

“Not really but-”

“Mrs. B?” Ivy interrupted. Her hands were by her stomach. Her face was contorted into a harlequin frown. She hadn’t been giggling, after all. She made a fist by her belly button and pointed up to her face; sliding her hand up until her pointer finger touched her chin.

Beouf stood up and reached across the table. “Drank too fast, huh?” She picked up Ivy off the ground. “I gotcha.” She started to pat Ivy’s back and sway a bit. “Come on. Let’s get it out.”

Burping. A woman almost my own age just asked to be burped. I looked away and forgot the glimpse of an adult I’d seen with her food chain answer. A discomfort that had nothing to do with my intestines grew with every little ‘urp’ I heard.

Over at Zoge’s table, some kind of arts and crafts project was being done with clay and what looked like food coloring. The puzzle that Billy and Jesse were working on seemed magnet based and three dimensional. For the longest time, I’d suspected that the Littles in Mrs. Beouf’s room did the exact same thing as my own students. And to a degree they did…but to a degree they didn’t…

At least Hell wouldn’t be boring…

“Clark?” Beouf called me back to reality. She’d finished burping Ivy, and added a pacifier clip to Ivy’s dress. “Did you make a connection yet?”

Shit! Black bird? Desk! Black bird…desk. Bird? Wood? “The bird sits in a tree that gets turned into a table…that…?” It didn’t sound good coming out of my mouth. I hated it. It was like a riddle that I couldn’t quite solve, and like any good riddle, you knew.

A shadow fell over me. “How is everything going Mrs. Beouf?” My heart stopped beating for an entire three seconds. I’d heard that voice too many times before.

I looked up. Towering over me was a grim gargoyle, a skeleton of a woman. Even her smile, prim, proper, and polite as it was, didn’t hide a barely simmering malice just behind the eyes.

Even now, on what might be the worst day of my life, I hated being so close to Principal Brollish. Her legs were touching my chair, practically pinning me up against the kidney table. And I couldn’t even vocalize that disgust because of the faint bit of carrot dangling over my head.

Melony Beouf seemed unphased. “Doing well,” she said “just getting into the routine, ma’am.” It was the second week of school. Teacher observations, scheduled or otherwise didn’t happen nearly this early. “Anything I can help you with?” Beouf’s smile didn’t quite reach her glasses, either. And while polite, her tone had an implied ‘quit interrupting me and let me be’ to it.

Like as not, I was just imagining that particular bit of subtext. Amazons were Amazons, through and through. Yet better the monster I used to like than the one I’d always loathe.

“How did the new cafeteria equipment work out?” Brollish asked.

“Very well, thank you.” Beouf said. “Thank you for managing to get it for us.”

“Of course.” More phoney smiles from Brollish. “Your students deserve all of the support that their same maturity peers get. We’ve got new playground equipment too. I think I can have maintenance deliver and set it up for you during their naptime.”

“Thank you very much.” Again, I could swear there was an implied ‘go away’ in there somewhere. Maybe I was just projecting….

“It’s been something I’ve been meaning to do but just got wrapped up in other things. You know how it is. Testing. Organizing. Meetings. Union issues. All the little distractions.” Translation: “I’m bribing you now that Clark is a baby and not your coworker. Let’s keep it that way.”

Beouf nodded, noncommittally. “Of course. You’ve got a lot on your plate” She tilted her head and called over. “Mrs. Zoge? How much time do we have left before center rotation?” Hint hint hint!

“Timer’s about halfway through, ma’am.” Hintety-hint-fucking-hint!

“How’s Clark adjusting?” If I’d had any hair on the back.of my neck it would have stood on end. I hated having my name on that witch’s lips. “I heard that he might have had a tantrum in the cafeteria this morning.”

I wanted to have a tantrum right then. Or at least open my mouth and advocate for myself. Ivy tapped me on the hand. She was sucking on her pacifier, her eyes alight with panic, and her finger pressing where her lips would be. Grown-ups were talking to each other…or the boogie woman was in the room. Best to shut up when someone wouldn’t listen.

Beouf made a show of looking thoughtful. “Not really,” she said. “No more of a tantrum than any of my kids on their first couple of days. Better than a lot.” I wanted to erupt at that. Ivy kept sucking on her pacifier and pantomiming with her thumb on where I should stick mine.

Self-soothe. Keep quiet.

“No throwing food?”

“None. Ate up all of his breakfast and he’s drinking from his bottles.”

“Has he been changed yet? Any resistance there? Any escape attempts?”

My ex-mentor put her hand to her mouth. “Mrs. Zoge? Any problems changing Clark this morning?”

“No ma’am. He was a perfect Little Angel once I laid him down.”

More pacifiers being popped into mouths all around me. Thumbs substituted where manmade soothers weren’t available. Snickers were muffled and blushes of sympathy were distracted from. Self Soothe. Keep quiet. Don’t let the giant grown-ups know what you were thinking. A purposefully taught behavior or a nervous tic quietly encouraged and reinforced? I didn’t want to find out.

“Good,” Brollish said. “I’m glad everything is going smoothly. I’ll leave you to it.” She didn’t leave through the classroom’s front, however. Quietly, she opened the back door, the one that used to lead to my classroom. It still did; it just wasn’t mine anymore.

A shrill scream from a child pierced the air before she managed to close the door. One of my kids was crying, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell which. I wasn’t used to hearing children cry; least of all mine.

I reached over and drained the baby bottle of water, wishing it were vodka…

“How is a raven like a writing desk, Clark?” Beouf asked, refocusing on the game.

My head wasn’t in it. “Pass.” And I’d be damned if I wouldn’t have welcomed a hug from either Ivy or Beouf just then. But I’d be double damned if I’d have asked for one. “Ivy’s turn.”