I can think of a few instances. One in particular:
In fifth and sixth grade one of my teachers was named Beth. (In our unit we were welcome to call our teachers by their first names, though kids almost always did so only with the female teachers.) She was bright and nurturing, a little snarky, with very curly hair, bright blue eyes, well-muscled forearms and (as it turns out) devilishly nimble fingers.
She didn't tickle kids often, but occasionally, and as I recall only the boys. Once she went down a row of us sitting at a table and danced her fingers up each pair of sides, and each of us dissolved into reluctant giggles one by one. I wasn't as ticklish then as I am now but I still remember the deft effect of her hands on my sides as being unusually devastating.
Another time I remember her darting her hands at my sides and abdomen as I swiftly maneuvered my own hands to block her. She was laughing and saying "Fast hands! Fast hands!" as all the girls who were her acolytes and devotees laughed at the spectacle.
Finally, I remember one recess where two girls were dragging a smaller boy named Seth by the wrists across the asphalt to the grass, his sneakers scraping ineffectually across the ground in protest, one of the girls saying "You hold his legs, I'll hold his arms." They got to the grass and Beth, who was accompanying them, started spidering her fingers across Seth's stomach and sides. Poor Seth sank to the ground like a stone, the two girls pinning him and laughing as he howled with that juvenile combination of horror and delight that usually accompanies childhood tickling. And I remember thinking: If they decided to turn on me like that, I'd be toast.
