VICKY GETS A LESSON
The bell rang at three-thirty on Thursday afternoon and, strangely, Emma found herself thinking about the small hammer that beat itself repeatedly against the bell’s metal drum. For a moment she was completely bewildered, wondering why this random image should come to her now. Then she realised: she was thinking about the hammer – and, more particularly, about the rate at which it struck – because that was how fast her heart was beating at this moment.
The time had come at last. After a month of meticulous planning, she was finally going to get her revenge. The A-levels were three weeks away. The girl in her class – the one called Vicky – already had an A to go towards her final grade, and so did many other girls she taught.
But this girl was different, because she may well be rueing that A by the end of the day.
Emma packed her things away and dismissed her class, knowing that in five minutes she had to be on the other side of the school. That was where Vicky would be, where the trap Emma had laid for her would come to fruition. It would happen in Lynn’s office. Dear Lynn, who had long been one of Emma’s closest friends, treating her with love despite the fact that during school-time she was Emma’s superior.
Don’t let me down, Lynn, Emma mouthed as the last of her day’s pupils left the room. She knew Lynn wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Emma needed this so bad.
* * *
There was a knock on the door and Lynn, the Head of Sixth Form at this school, did not need to wonder who it was.
‘Come in,’ she called, picking up her pen and feigning paperwork.
The door clicked open and a girl came in. Lynn pretended to write something else and then dropped her pen to her desk, spinning her chair around to face the girl. ‘Hello,’ she said, as if this meeting was entirely unexpected.
‘You wanted to see me,’ Vicky said, closing the door behind her. She didn’t sound worried that she could be in trouble. ‘There was a message in assembly this morning.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Lynn acted as if she had just remembered this fact. ‘Take a seat, Vicky.’
Vicky did so, already unsure as to what was happening. Was this serious? She certainly didn’t have much to fear from this woman. Lynn was young and enthusiastic, and considered herself a friend to students, if a such a thing as a student-teacher friendship really existed. Most of all, she was a soft touch – at least in Vicky’s experience.
Lynn pulled her chair forward slightly. ‘Now, then,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard something a bit disturbing about you.’
Vicky cocked her head in confusion. She tried to remember what she could have done wrong in the past few weeks, and failed to come up with anything.
‘One of the teachers came to me a couple of weeks ago and told me that you had spoken to her outside school,’ Lynn went on.
Vicky nearly fell off the chair. Emma! She had told – the bitch!
But despite her shock, she somehow managed to appear calm.
‘She says you entered her house. You were angry that she only gave you a C on your English coursework.’
Vicky swallowed and nodded tamely.
‘She says you threatened her. Then she says you took her upstairs and tortured her into changing your grade.’
Vicky was flustered, but she thought that she could yet get out of this. ‘Why would I do that?’ she asked. ‘It’s only a grade!’
‘So you deny it, then?’
‘Yes.’
Lynn toyed absently with her pen. ‘Shame. You could save yourself a lot of trouble if you just confessed.’
‘But I didn’t do it!’ Vicky protested, raising her voice slightly. But it didn’t sound angry. It sounded worried.
‘Well, let’s ask your teacher, shall we?’ Lynn said.
At that moment the door opened, and the woman who entered was none other than Emma herself. She looked easy and assured.
‘Miss Cooper,’ Lynn said, looking up as her colleague (and friend) entered. ‘This young lady here says you’re lying.’
Emma dropped her handbag in one corner of the office. Outside, the block had already cleared of people, both students and teachers having clawed their way out of the school as if it were infested with giant rats. ‘I thought she’d say that.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Vicky asked, dreading an answer. ‘Take back my A? Or worse?’
‘No, you’ll keep your A,’ said Lynn. ‘It’s too much fuss to change it. But you will be punished.’
Detentions till the end of the year, Vicky thought, then remembered that the end of the year was only three weeks away. What could they do to her in that short time?
‘Me and Miss Cooper talked it over,’ Lynn went on, ‘and we decided to give you a taste of your own medicine.’
For a second Vicky didn’t know what that meant, and then she saw Emma pulling a pair of handcuffs from her bag, and she knew.
‘What? No!’ she stammered.
Emma moved forward quickly and grabbed the girl by the wrist, yanking her from her seat. She was smiling.
‘No, wait, don’t!’ Vicky pleaded, but at the same moment her red-haired teacher tripped her up, keeping hold of her wrist so that the girl wouldn’t hurt herself in the fall. Vicky tried to crawl away, but Emma was on her in a flash, rolling her onto her back and pulling her arms over her head. She struggled and managed to free a hand, but a moment later it was in the teacher’s grasp again, and Emma quickly closed the handcuffs over the girl’s wrists, locking them to the leg of Lynn’s desk.
While this had been happening, Lynn took another pair of handcuffs out of her drawer (she couldn’t even remember why they were there; she guessed she must have confiscated them), and got to her knees. Vicky was kicking and screaming, and it took a few moments to remove her shoes, but when this was done Lynn managed to secure the girl’s ankles in the handcuffs (or footcuffs).
‘No, don’t!’ Vicky wailed, struggling desperately against her bonds. ‘I’m sorry!’
Emma and Lynn looked at her silently. It had been an agreement between them three weeks ago. Emma had wondered whether she would ever tell anyone about the torment she had endured at the hands of Vicky, but eventually she had come out to Lynn, whom she knew she could trust. Lynn had been most averse to the idea when Emma had first suggested tickling the girl as punishment, but over the next few days she had reconsidered. Emma had been shaky and nervous, completely unlike her usual self, after Vicky had finished with her, and despite the risks involved, Lynn simply wanted to help a friend. It might land them both in more trouble than it was worth, but she did not think so. Vicky would learn her lesson and keep quiet.
‘Shall we start then?’ Lynn asked her friend.
‘Yeah,’ Emma answered. ‘The feet?’
‘Okay.’
They made quick work of removing their victim’s socks before listening briefly to Vicky’s pleas for mercy.
It was too late for that now. They simultaneously raised one finger each and used their nails to stroke Vicky’s wiggling soles. The girl yelped and cried, ‘No!’, but they did not listen to her. They continued to stroke, slowly at first and getting faster, one dealing with each foot. Both teachers had smiles on their faces. Vicky was smiling, too, but it was forced.
Lynn saw Emma bringing all of her fingers into play on the left foot, still using them lightly, but now covering every centimetre of Vicky’s sole at the same time. Lynn did likewise and the girl shrieked. Her ankles may have been cuffed together, but she could still bend her knees, and she did so, pulling her feet away. Her tormentors were quick to pull them back to their original position, though, now holding her ankles in place with one hand while using the other for tickling.
Vicky squealed and (how she hated herself for it) laughed as the speed of the tickling intensified. She could not really see what the two women were doing to her: she spent all her time looking at the ceiling and trying vainly to get free of the handcuffs. Her soles felt unpleasantly as if they were aflame, and being unable to extinguish it was horrible.
It hadn’t yet crossed her mind that this was a fair punishment for what she had done to Emma. It later would.
The speed of their fingers increased again, and it now felt as if there were more than twenty scrabbling over her soles. The two women laughed among themselves, enjoying the game, while Vicky screeched and begged for them to stop.
After about five minutes they did stop, but the pause was only momentary as Emma began to squeeze Vicky’s knees and Lynn followed suit. The girl screamed with laughter again and bounced her knees up and down, but the teachers kept a good hold on her legs.
This went on for about two more minutes before the torture ceased again. Vicky’s face was flushed and she felt dizzy.
‘That’s enough now,’ she pleaded, knowing that if her tormentors didn’t stop they would soon reach her upper body. And that would make things even worse.
Lynn and Emma simply smiled at each other. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Lynn, and both women moved to Vicky’s side.
She saw them moving their hands towards her ribs, and she squirmed like a pierced worm. ‘No!’ she squeaked, and then she was laughing in guffaws as they attacked.
They didn’t hold back. What they were doing here was ruthless tickle torture, both of them digging into Vicky’s torso with their nails. She tried to roll to the side but could only go so far. The teachers were given free reign to tickle her ribs and stomach, and she saw in their faces that they enjoyed it – even Lynn, who had no particular personal score to settle.
A minute later they moved up to her armpits, and she wondered whether this could get any worse. Emma’s tickling style was rough and violent, but Lynn’s light and quick spidering over the underarms was just as bad. All the time they made funny faces at her, sometimes talking to her in babyish taunts.
‘Awww, is your tummy ticklish?’
‘Here it comes! Tickle, tickle!’
By this point Vicky feared she was losing her mind – as her incoherent screeches would have testified – but it was going to get worse. After countless minutes of relentless tickling, Emma straddled the girl’s waist, much as Vicky had done to her a month ago, and tickled even harder. Perhaps if Emma could have seen the look of sheer delight on her face at that moment, how much she revelled in the girl’s clear suffering, she would have been horrified. But she couldn’t see that sadism. She was too busy living it.
At the same time, Lynn kept up an endless stream of baby talk while tickling the girl’s armpits with apparently infinite stamina.
‘No, please, stop!’ Vicky tried to yell, but she could not breathe through the laughter that was being forced out of her.
Emma kept up the rib tickling for a while longer (occasionally giving the girl’s large breasts a few squeezes for good measure), and then changed her strategy. She spun around and moved to sit on Vicky’s bucking shins, and started tickling her feet again.
It was more than Vicky could take (as if she hadn’t reached that point about ten minutes ago). Maddening tickles in her armpits, maddening tickles on her feet – how could she avoid actually going mad? All attempts to beg for mercy were abandoned; she just screamed and laughed and thrashed mindlessly.
It was at this point that she accepted what was happening to her. She had been a complete bitch, tickling her teacher like that, just for a grade. She deserved what she was getting.
But still, it tickled so bad!
After another five minutes (or was it five hours?), Lynn left her victim’s armpits and moved down to tickle the feet again with Emma, ignoring Vicky’s babbling.
After about a minute of this – at a time when Emma was just considering stopping altogether – Lynn’s eyes widened. ‘Wait, I’ve got an idea!’ She stood up and took her ball-point pen from the desk. Vicky saw it and gasped.
‘Oh, no, please…’
Lynn continued grinning and crouched down again, drawing slow circles and figures-of-eight over Vicky’s soles. She, too, was now completely taken in by the excitement of the moment, and she truly enjoyed the noises Vicky was making.
‘That’s a brilliant idea!’ Emma exclaimed, seeing what Lynn was doing, and she took her own pen – a red one – from her bag. Soon she was drawing on Vicky’s feet, too, and all she knew about it was that it was fun. She drew little shapes and figures, and even drew a smiley face. She saw that Lynn had drawn what looked like a feather.
There were more disjointed prattlings over the next couple of minutes, during which Vicky tried desperately to get them to stop.
Anything! I’ll take an F! I’ll do jobs for you! I’ll give you a bath! Just please stop tickling me!
Then, when Emma was halfway through drawing a star on the ball of Vicky’s toes, the girl screamed out in a tortured voice: ‘NOOOO! STOP NOOOOOOW!’
The scream was so loud it made Lynn’s ears pop. She stopped smiling and put the pen down, looking at Emma, who had also stopped with the shock.
‘Perhaps we should stop now.’
‘Yeah, I think we should,’ Emma agreed. She moved over and leaned above Vicky’s panicky, worn face. ‘Have you learned your lesson?’
Vicky nodded furiously. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she panted, almost crying. For a moment Emma felt quite bad. Then she looked back at Lynn.
‘Take the cuffs off, Lynn. We’re done.’
Lynn did as she was told, and soon both women were comforting a shaking and blotchy-faced Vicky, telling her that they were sorry they had gone so far, and asking for reassurance that the girl wouldn’t tell anyone what they had done. Vicky nodded and spoke weakly, and they both believed her when she said she would keep all this to herself. Soon after, they dismissed her and cleared up the mess.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, the two teachers were making their way to their cars, ready to go home and rest after the day’s excitement.
‘I hope we weren’t too hard on the girl,’ Lynn was saying, conveniently leaving out the part about how she had enjoyed it all.
‘It was hard, but it had to be done,’ Emma said. ‘Not only to teach her a lesson, but it’s also made me feel a lot more confident about myself.’
‘It’s a wonder nobody heard us.’
‘Too true.’ She came to her car and took out her keys. ‘Well, see you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, see you tomorrow, Ems.’ Lynn walked off towards her own car. ‘Hopefully things’ll be a bit calmer then.’
Emma laughed and got into her car. As she watched her friend moving across the car park, she found herself thinking how vulnerable Lynn looked. She looked like the kind of woman who would react very badly to tickle torture.
And that led to darker thoughts. Emma knew her self-esteem was definitely back, but now there was something else. Tickling Vicky like that – all cuffed up and helpless – had been one of the best experiences of her life. That sounded crazy at first, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt so exhilarated. She had always loved having power – that was part of the reason why she became a teacher – but this had taken it to a different level.
She knew right then that she needed to do it again. Too often people with power thirst for more, and she was not an exception. It was like an addictive drug: she’d had a taste, and now she had a craving that needed to be satiated.
Lynn would make a good subject. Power, even over your best friends! She had no doubt that making Lynn squeal and giggle while restrained would be blissful. She wanted to do it now, but knew she must wait. Didn’t they say good things came to those who wait?
She switched on the ignition and drove out of the car park, the sound of Lynn’s laughter filling her head.
