Everything I Need to Know I Apparently Learned in Kindergarten

Cute, but no longer a self-requirement.

The first phone conversation I can remember having involved me asking my five year old friend to tell me spanking stories.

I'm sure I'd been on the phone before then, saying hi to Grandma on a Saturday afternoon or sleepily wishing my dad goodnight when he had to work late, but this was my first true conversation with someone outside the family. The details are fuzzy now. For example, why was I alone in my parents' bedroom, talking dirty on the phone with my best kindergarten friend? How did I segue from "Do you want to come over and play tomorrow?" to "Do you want to tell me a spanking story right now?" All I remember is that I asked and she delivered, telling a story about a girl our own age who made a mess of the kitchen while making brownies. Punishment involving a hand spanking and a spanking with a wooden spoon, possibly still covered in brownie batter, ensued.

By the time I was seven, spanking stories about five year olds grossed me out. By the time I was thirteen, I had no problem envisioning a teacher putting me over the desk at the front of the room, but prepubescent spankings, even as adminstered by the hottest of middle school teachers, were no longer part of my fantasy lexicon. Up until I was eighteen and in college, the spanking stories that I had long since had to tell myself featured girls who were my own age, at whichever age that happened to be.

What changed when I hit eighteen? I went away to school, new laptop in tow, and in my dorm room was a DHL connection. I was online! I'd never had access to the Internet before and there was research to be done. It turned out my five year old instincts were right - the world was just full of people who wanted to tell me spanking stories. I couldn't get enough of them. I read everything from childhood memories to elaborate science fiction scenarios. My only rule of thumb was that the spankee(s) had to be female. My parallel age prerequisite dissipated in a textual universe populated by naughty daughters, naughty schoolgirls, naughty teachers, naughty office workers, and naughty wives. When I took those stories to bed with me, I fantasized myself as every archetype. I had a chance to be thirteen again, or sixteen, or to age a decade in order to imagine the husband who would punish me for leaving the burner lit on the stove.

Now, thirteen years later, I have come to realize that I've left most of those fantasies behind. I still enjoy reading all types of spanking erotica, and I still enjoy the sight of a spanked woman at any age - as long as she is at least eighteen, though preferably at least a few years older - no matter what character she happens to be playing. But as for what I experience behind closed eyes, I want, once again, to envision myself in scenarios that depict me at my own age. Maybe it's just a phase while I continue to sort out my own identity and my role in the spanking universe. Or maybe a core element of my erotic persona has come to understand that adults are as spankable, perhaps even more-so, than schoolgirls, and that I do not have to be anyone other than myself in order to deserve, receive, and fetishistically enjoy discipline.

I still want to play dress-up in crisp white shirts, A-line skirts and knee socks with Mary Janes, but I don't want to pretend I am younger than I am and I don't want to play a character. I finally want to be exactly who and what I am - a dirty, kinky, sexy woman who need not pretend at innocence or repentence, whose costume indicates not that she is a good girl being punished for being bad, but that she is a bad girl being punished because being punished is what she needs to feel good.

Maybe It's Really a Red Balloon.

Keyra Augustina, apparently known to the internet as

"The World's Perfect Ass."

photo: RockyJay.Com

I really wanted to post today, but I was stuck on subjects. I looked through my folder of "Possible Pics to Use on the Blog" and came across this one. The funny thing is, it's not a spanking photo. Or, if it is one, nowhere is it labeled as such. I even did a search on the model, Keyra Augustina, and spanking. They do not seem to go hand in hand. So this got me thinking again, as it did when I first found the image - why is her bottom so red?

On another subject entirely, my local and amazing bookstore, Powell's Books, is currently running a Six Word Memoir Contest. Six word memoirs are less like memoirs, more like very short haiku. For weeks, this has had me attempting to sum up life's experience's in exactly six words. This morning, I even decided to try Twittering one six word "memoir" per hour, but I only managed one. (I'm terrible at this Twitter thing. Watch me attempt it here.) Now, I am trying to come up with six word memoirs for this woman's bright red bottom.

Next time, check the water temperature.

Timer buzzes. This bird is cooked!

Roxanne turned the red light on.

(My apologies for The Police reference.)

Instructions: apply rouge to cheeks. Ohhhh.

Maybe it's really a red balloon.

The real definition of "bubble butt."

Submit your own six word memoirs in the comments! No contest here - everybody wins when we're writing about bottoms!

When I Think About You I...

For all my teacher/student and warped fairy tale fantasies, the scenario I come back to the most often when I am alone, hands not on the keyboard but on my own body, is set nowhere but in our own bedroom, the characters no one but you and me, my only crime that which I am already doing. That's right. My favorite fantasy, of all the infinite spanking scenes available to my imagination, is to be punished for touching myself.

The fantasy begins in reality. I wait for you to be on your way home from work. When I know that I am at risk of you walking in on me, I slide out of my jeans and kneel on the bed, still wearing panties, still wearing my shirt. I try to hurry, I know that when you come home, you'll want to check your email and your news blogs, and by the time you're doing with that, you'll be ready for dinner. There won't be time for you to join in, and there might not be time later for you to come back to that which I have started. So I rush, fingers madly circling over the soft jersey cotton of my panties, listening for your car in the drive, your footsteps coming towards the front door.

When the door does open, I'm so close to coming that I'm already biting my lower lip, my thighs taut as they can be, eyes squinted shut. I don't notice the door opening, but you take one look at me and slam it shut. My eyes open at the unexpected sound. "Oops," I say. "I was just... finishing up." "I know what you were doing," you say, calmly, a bit sarcastically. "You couldn't wait for me to come home so I could join you?" I'm surprised. I didn't realize it had been on your mind. I didn't realize you would have wanted to join in. We've been distracted lately, our jobs and our own hobbies taking precedence over trying to fit in a roll between the sheets, or on top of them, before dinner.

No longer on the verge of orgasm, I'm a bit irritated now at being interrupted. "No, I couldn't wait for you to come home. I needed to take care of myself." You cock your head, raise an eyebrow, and begin to unbuckle your belt. "Well, that just seems selfish, doesn't it? What if I wanted to be the one to take care of you?"

You fold the belt over in your hands so that it makes a loop, which you then begin to slap against your palm. "Well?" I can't take my eyes off the belt. Is it looped so you can put it away on its hook? I know that's only naive wishful thinking. "I didn't think you wanted to take care of me. In that way, I mean. Not as soon as you got home, at least."

"Well, now I have no choice, do I? It's a shame. I was going to do such nice things to you, and now," he points towards the foot of the bed, "I'm going to have to punish you for being too much of a slut to wait an extra five minutes for her husband to get home. Get over here." I crawl over the mattress to the end of the bed. I look up at you and whisper, "Welcome home, sweetheart." You grin and lean over to kiss me, then straighten up to become the disciplinarion. "No, stand up. Spread your legs." You swish the looped belt between my inner thighs. "Wider. Elbow and forearms on the bed. Head down."

I take the position and wait. You're rustling around in something on my side of the bed, but I'm not supposed to look up to see what you are doing. Then you return to stand beside me, crack the belt in the air a few times, then bring it down swiftly, three times in quick succession, on my cold bottom. I'm still wearing panties, but it hurts. I lean forward and cry out. "What?" you say mockingly. "I thought you were already heated up." You whip the belt across my flesh again, one long stroke that stings the full width of my backside. "Please," I moan. "I just wanted to relax before the evening."

You begin a lighter but steady rhythm that I know is quickly turning my long-unspanked bottom a bright scarlet. I grab a piece of comforter in each fist and try to accept the punishment. After a few more strokes, you yank my panties down, and then, and this is what gets me, this is the core of what will make me come, you begin to berate me as you belt me, and even as my tears begin to stream, I know a rush of wetness is building between my thighs.

"Look how wet you already are," you say. "Bend over deeper, point that pussy at me." The belt swings dangerously close to the part you've just requested to see. "Perhaps I should punish it, too." You let the belt fall so that it hits my inner thigh and slips past the slick folds of flesh, making me shudder. "Oh, look at you. You're such a whore for punishment."

You've begun the steady belting of my bright backside again. "Maybe the belt is too good for you. Maybe we ought to try the cane? Will you still keep pushing your pussy out for a good hard caning, my little punishment slut?"

You stop and go over to the side of the bed. I know now what you were doing earlier. Opening the toybox. Moments later, you're swishing the senior cane behind me and you're pressing an object into my hand. "You're going to have to learn that when you try to have sex with yourself, right there in front of me and without my permission, you are going to be punished. And you're going to be punished with sex." You guide my hand, now outfitted with my ridged blue vibrator, under my belly and between my legs.

You stand behind me, cane bruising the air. "Go ahead," you say, "make yourself come." I am tentavively turning the vibrator on just as the first crack of the cane lands on the lower part of my backside. I haven't felt the cane in nearly a year, and I scream as loudly as perhaps I have ever screamed in response to punishment, but you keep on as if I have merely said, "One, sir." The second strike of the cane, and I have already lost my understanding of the scene. The head of the curved vibrator rests just between my labia, barely inside me, the clit ridge of the cleverly designed toy rests just as it should between the bed and my body. Each time I arch forward away from the strike of the cane, I drive the vibrator deeper into my body and the ridge harder against my clit.

You don't make me count. You don't let me know how many strikes are coming, but you do reprimand me as you cane me, an agonizing pattern of admonition, stripe, admonition, stripe. "Is this what you wanted when you lowered your pants today?" A lighter tap of the cane, stinging but without venom. "Did you want to be forced to come, whether you like it or not?" A hard strike, surely leaving a welt. I sob, tears wetting the blanket below me, but you pay no attention. "You will come, young lady, won't you?" Two hard strikes of the cane. With my eyes closed, I can picture the welts as they rise on my punished skin. "Do I need to put your toy elsewhere?"

You tap the most tender spot of my backside, the one I have always begged you not to punish with your straps and tawses and crops, even when you've made me spread myself open for you. The spot you have punished anyway. "No, sir, no," I plead. Three more hard strikes of the cane. "Then come," you say. You raise the cane and fell it upon me in a very hard stroke. I know more than feel that a vicious welt has appeared across my bottom, skin perhaps broken in a staggered patten, and as I lurch across the bed away from the pain, I leave my body, white the only light I can see. The caning and the pain continues in a vicious single stroke, and I know that I am shuddering in orgasm, leaving a wet stain on the comforter we have so recently learned is dry clean only, but I am beyond it, above it, flying.

"One more," you say, "to make a single dozen, much as you deserve far more. Are you coming?" I hear you from the blank space in which I hover and shudder, an empty space of agony and pulsating warmth, and I nod my head. Somehow, I manage to tell you, "Yes, Sir."

"Don't stop," you whisper, your voice rough, beyond yourself as well, and when the cane strike comes, the kind that leaves a mark for weeks, a slight bruise for months, I know I am screaming even as I come harder and harder, and I know you can barely breathe, and I know that I was right to touch myself as I waited for you, that you would punish me as I needed you to, that you would find, in those dozen strokes, everything you have ever needed, and remember that we need this, that we are this, once again.

A Heavenly Creature, Indeed

Looks like I'm not going to have time to finish the post I was working on for this evening. However, I promised myself I would post tonight, so hopefully the curve of Kate Winslet's bottom will suffice. I can't remember where I found this picture, but I did note upon uploading it that I actually renamed the picture "kate winslet omg." As in, Oh. My. God.

I made a list today of subjects for posts that are currently swirling through my mind, and the list is absurdly long. The list contains everything from my current spanking fantasies to my early spanking video viewing to what could ultimately become a thesis-long post on modern culture's fascination with the archetype of "the bad girl."

For now, I hope it helps just to know that when I was but a young girl, I fell madly in love with Ms. Kate solely for rolling around in her panties in Heavenly Creatures. Murder-shmurder. There was a lovely, lovely bottom.

The Inaugural Peek of the Week: Mrs. Aristotle

A photo of my lovely wife's shapely, well-stocked,

tightly-trousered bottom as she stands at the kitchen sink!

I spank her naughty, 50+ yr-old bare backside

regularly and frequently!! ~Aristotle

Welcome to The Little Red Schoolhouse's inaugural Peek of the Week! I am absolutely thrilled to present you with Aristotle's homage to his wife's beautifully denim-clad bottom. Thank you, Mrs. Aristotle, for being our first Peek! And thank you, Aristotle, for perfectly capturing the spirit of this endeavor! Love and beautiful backsides - that's what makes the world go 'round.

Submit your Peek of the Week photos to abby.schoolhouse@gmail.com with "Peek of the Week Submission" in the subject line. Review guidelines here.

Zoinks!

Comic by the incredible Dave of The Cherry Red Report

Just a little Happy Monday note to say how ecstatic I am over being back to the blogosphere. I have so many ideas and am going a bit crazy trying to work my normal 9-5 job. I have the Peek of the Week plan (see below and send those pictures!), I'm getting my facts together on moving off of Blogger onto my own domain, I'm debating asking Mr. Williams to go back to filming his beautiful work on my backside, and I'm trying to figure out how to have more time for fiction writing in this genre and making that my 9-5 instead. Thank you to everyone who has stopped by, lurked, commented, emailed, and otherwise reminded me that this world makes me so happy and that I need to be a more active part of it once again.

xoxo,
Abby

Peek of the Week - A Proposal to You, Dear Reader

This is an older photo of mine and one that you've probably already seen. I use it as my profile pic on FetLife as well as in any reference to "Time From the Belt," as this is from that shoot. Still, it's one of my favorite pictures, and it relates directly to the post below.

This would be an example of a faceless but spanked over the panties

version of Peek of the Week. The possibilities are endless!

As my dorky way of wishing someone well on Wednesday, I wished someone a Happy "Peak of the Weak" yesterday and had an idea for a weekly post. Every Wednesday, or as close to every Wednesday as I can get, I could post a naughty photo and call it the Peek of the Week!

Then I got to thinking. Since I'm not so much in front of the camera anymore, what if I opened up the place of honor to my readers? Sure, I get a thrill from sharing my backside with the world, but I'd love to share that thrill with others. So the idea is this:

Submit your own photo for Peek of the Week to me at abby.schoolhouse@gmail.com with "Peek of the Week" in the subject line.
The Peek of the Week will be a candid photo and not taken from someone else's page. It can be of yourself, your partner, your friend, what-have-you, as long as it's not, say, a photo you downloaded from a candid shoot of Amelia Jane Rutherford, unless you actually are Amelia Jane Rutheford, in which case, hello and feel free to submit that photo!

The Peek of the Week will be 18 or older and female, solely in keeping with the theme of my blog. I don't want to alienate the male bottoms of our world, I just don't think this is the right venue, at least not while this idea is in its infancy.

The Peek of the Week need not be nude. This could be a great opportunity to show off one's new panties! Or keep your jeans on, a peek of panties or backside showing or not. Anything that celebrates the bottom is welcome.

The Peek of the Week need not be a spanking photo. You can show your marks or you can show your blank canvas, it's up to you!

The Peek of the Week doesn't have to have a face. There should be a bottom, but after that it's up to you. Just make sure the photo is taken or cropped as you would want it to appear. If someone else is in the picture with you, make sure you have their permission to have it posted here! I won't be Photoshopping or changing it in any way.

The Peek of the Week can be anonymous, or not. Just be sure to say whether you want to remain anonymous or if you want a name attached, and if so, which name you want to use. It can link to your blog or website, or include text submitted with the photo. I'm happy to give you free advertising, as long as your submission is genuine.

The Peek of the Week can be young or old, voluptuous or skinny, pale or pink or purple or any other color that flesh can be. Any and all body types and shapes are loved and accepted. A bottom is a bottom! The idea is to celebrate all the amazing people who make up this world.

The copyright of the photo will remain your own. There may be more than one Peek of the Week if this turns out to be a popular idea. Submission is not a guarantee of being posted, but if I do get submissions, I'd like to share as many of them as possible.

What do you think? Also, when I originally conceived of the idea, I also considered "Peep of the Week." Which do you prefer? I'll put up a poll and see if anyone actually responds.

Worse comes to worse, you're stuck with pictures of me every Wednesday until it catches on, if ever. But wouldn't it be great to be the inaugural Peek of the Week? You know you want to....

Rosario Gets a Licking

Rosario looking very ready for her punishment.

Rosario Dawson's Wet Punishment. Believe me, it's not what you think it is or want it to be. Nonetheless, this was the headline attached to an ABC (American Broadcasting Network) News Video I viewed recently. The strangest part of this, however, is that the actual subject of the video is more bizarre than what any of us would have pictured. The subtitle once the video pulls up is: "Ick! The actress says her mom used to lick her as punishment."

Her mom used to lick her? That's peculiar in any sense, nevermind as punishment. Apparently, her mother would lick either Rosario's face or her armpit and would do this in public. Rosario notes, "It was humiliating." There are so many elements of a fetish story here - licking, punishment, humiliation - but the fact that it fails to be a fetish story seems to confuse even the news anchor, who notes in regard to Mama Dawson, "She wouldn't spank her, but she'd lick that armpit."

That's right, Mr. News Anchor. I think we can all agree that we hoped the wet punishment would be something wetter, more humiliating, and, if nothing else, at least more painful. This certainly brings new meaning to the heretofore titillating phrase, "She received a licking like she'd never received before." Because it was in her armpit.

This topic alone would have been enough to merit a blog post. Not only is it obvious that we were meant to envisage a particular scenario more akin to our concept of punishment, but also the news anchor himself so lamented the dearth of spanking in the report that he had to bring it up himself! He may as well have just said, "Well, folks, if you weren't already picturing Rosario's bare caramel bottom upturned and blushing, her bare skin slick and shining, wet and well-punished, here, let me just toss these two little words at you to get you going. Spank her. Spank her. Spank her."

The thing that gets me, the thing that makes me wonder just what is going on over at Disney-owned ABC, is that, as Natty of Natty's Spanking Blog writes in her post "Not as perverted as it used to be," ABC reported on February 11th that kinky sex is on the rise. And ABC seems to be just fine with that.

Who would have thought that the juggernaut leading us into a spanko-friendly twenty-first century would be a broadcasting company owned by Disney? I can only imagine what might come next. Miley Cyrus punished for the misdeeds of her rock star alter ego, Hannah Montana? Or, coming soon, "Private Catholic High School: The Musical?" (Get the unrated DVD for extended punishment and dance scenes!) Ah, the slippery slope of public kink acceptance. Still, I can't imagine that slope is as slippery as Rosario after a licking.

Good Rosario / Bad Rosario

The Neverending Spanking.... Blog

www.typewritermuseum.org

I've encountered a good bit of Internet buzz/fuss over the past two days concerning the news of the possibility of a remake of the 1984 film The Neverending Story. The film, despite straying a good deal from Michael Ende's beautiful novel, has always been one of my favorites, and I owe much of my own spirituality and belief system to its portrayal of a world called Fantasia being consumed by an emptiness called the Nothing because of lost faith.

Since reading the news, I have been haunted by scenes from the film: the Swamp of Sadness, the Rockbiter's empty hands, the Ivory Tower standing alone in an empty world. I even dreamed of the Gmork, the wolf-beast servant of the Nothing who terrorized me when I first saw the film when I was five years old. Apparenty, he terrorizes me to this day.

The thing that frightens me the most, however, is not the Gmork or the Nothing or even the possibility of a remake by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company. The thing that frightens me the most is that I realized I am my own Nothing. I have been absent from this blog, from the world of Internet spanking, from the lifestyle itself. Not all of those things are of my own choosing, but my absence from myself can be blamed on no one but me.

I miss this. I miss picking the perfect picture. I miss making arcane references and wondering what they become in the Google translator for my international readers. I miss describing the curve of my own backside, the sound of its flesh when soundly smacked. I miss knowing that I'm turning the world on with my words and, yes, occasionally my own soundly smacked image.

This world, I realize now, is my Fantasia. I am Bastian, the quiet and bookish outcast on one side of the mirror. I am Atreyu, fierce warrior, on the other. In other words, I am both the woman I am in my daily life and Abby, fierce spanking recipient and writer. The two, like Bastian and Atreyu, are inseperable. Atreyu's story, the Childlike Empress told Bastian, is Bastian's own.

Abby's story is my own -

- and it looks like our story hasn't ended yet.

Subtype (New Fiction)

Image: The Virtual Typewriter Museum

Sorry, all, this is just set up, it never gets to the spanking and I never finished working on this story. The set up is decent, though, I should really get back to writing this one.

Anita had been sent to the headmaster's office - again. She fidgeted as she waited on the knotted oak bench outside his office, reserved for situations much like this one, for girls much like herself. This was her third time on the bench in as many weeks, and the seat was successively less comfortable each time she visited it. She silently chastised herself. The likelihood of Anita ever becoming a good girl and avoiding the bench entirely was highly improbable, but she knew both her permanent record and her backside could do with longer respites in between the disciplinary punishments she was apparently fated to endure while attending Saint Geoffrey's Academy of Creative Arts.

She wondered which implement of Headmaster Arnold's cabinet would be waiting for her on his desk when she was finally summoned by Claire, the Headmaster's new assistant. Claire was an alum of Saint Geoffrey's, and rumor had it that she'd spent a good share of her own four years at the academy bent over one piece of furniture or another in the same office outside which Anita now sat. Some girls even claimed that Claire advised the Headmaster on how to punishment his wayward students. If she liked you, she was said to convince him to lean towards lighter discipline. If she didn't, it was the cane, never less than six of the best, and rarely only six at that.

After the semester she'd had, Anita was certain that Claire did not like her one bit.

The fidgeting turned to silent fuming as Anita considered the reason she'd once again been sent for punishment. Didn't Mr. Bloom realize that she was never going to finish her novella assignment if she couldn't sit down at her desk? But when she'd complained to the professor after the first time he'd sent her to the headmaster's office for failing to complete a writing assignment, he'd told her she would just have to learn to type standing up.

Now the semester was nearing Winter Break and she was supposed to have forty pages of her senior novella project finished. "Fifteeen pages, Miss Birchthwaite," Mr. Bloom had intoned upon flipping through Anita's homework submission, "are hardly worth turning in. Are these the same fifteen pages you turned in last Friday, and the Friday before?"

"No, sir," Anita had stammered, knowing full well what was coming no matter what sincere excuse she gave.

"Unless you can provide me with an excellent explanation, you will find yourself in Headmaster Arnold's office after class, Miss Birchthwaite."

"They're not the same pages, sir. I've been editing, and rewriting, and I know it keeps coming out to the same number of pages, but I've been working very hard. There's a new character on page four, you'll see, and I've tightened up the structure, and I've changed the setting a bit, and I've added more allusions to Japanese mythology, because I thought that might..."

Bloom shook his head. "Thought it might what, Miss Birchthwaite?"

"Get me another free trip over Headmaster Arnold's desk, sir."

"Anita!" Bloom did not consider himself to be an especially strict or difficult professor. He taught creative writing, a subject in which he prided his own endeavors and lauded that of his students. He had never had to send a student for discipline so many times, and never one as gifted as Anita. She was correct in that her incessant rewrites were always improvements on the previous versions, but the assignment, at this point, was not to have the best fifteen unfinished pages. The assignment was to get through the story. She would have the entire spring semester for revision. If she had written ten more pages, even five, he would have considered an alternative to more forceful punishment. Anita's flippancy, unfortunately, confirmed his suspicions. Anita didn't want to write another five or ten more pages. He had begun to think that she didn't want to write at all.

As Anita sat in her hallway purgatory, she recalled Bloom's face when he'd handed the unfinished story back to her. His cheeks were red and his eyes were watery. She'd thought he was about to yell at her, but instead he spoke very quietly. "Take this back. Over the weekend, write at least five more pages. They don't have to be perfect. They don't even have to be spell-checked. Just write. On Monday, you will turn in twenty pages, or you will turn in your resignation as a member of the Senior English Honors Society. You can finish out your year as a regular student, and your diploma will reflect none of the work you've accomplished over the past four years. Do you understand?"

Anita had not been able to look her professor in the eye. "Yes, sir," she said to his desk. "Twenty pages, or I'm out."

"That's correct."

Anita had looked up from the desk then. "And Headmaster Arnold's?"

"Go there now. You will wait until he is ready to see you. After that, I suggest you go back to your room and begin writing. Even," and at this Anita realized Bloom was blushing, "if you have to do it standing up."

Dirty old man, Anita thought, squirming on the uncomfortable oak bench. I bet he sends me down here just so he can think about me bent over and getting my ass spanked later on.

But even as she thought it, Anita felt a twinge of guilt. It wasn't Bloom's fault that she couldn't get past her writer's block. Moreso, it wasn't his fault that she didn't really care about the story she was writing. Maybe he was right to threaten expulsion from the honors program. If she couldn't write five more pages, what right did she have to call herself a writer anyway?

A pit had begun to grow in the depth of Anita's belly, and it had nothing to do with the punishment she was about to receive. She had to come up with something to write about. She had to make that story work. Just five pages. Come on, brain. Don't you have something to say?

"Anita!" Claire stood at the open door to Headmaster Arnold's office. "I said, what do you have to say for yourself this time?"

It was Anita's turn to blush. "I guess I'm not a very good writer."

Claire's stern expression softened. She put her hand out until Anita rose and placed her palm against the older girl's. Claire squeezed. "I don't think that's why you're here, though, is it? I think you're here because you're a very good writer, but you're not fulfilling your potential." Anita was confused. Claire had never spoken to her more than was necessary to escort her in and out of a disciplinary session. Now she was offering advice?

Claire stepped forward into the hallway and let the office door close behind her. "Why do you think you're at the headmaster's office again, Anita?"

Anita shook her head. "I didn't do my assignment."

"And why didn't you do your assigment?"

"I tried. I started by doing some editing, and then I just couldn't go any farther. The story stops at page fifteen. Nothing I do to the pages before that makes me want to write the sixteenth page. Nothing."

Claire tilted her head. "So you don't believe in your first fifteen pages?"

Anita's eyes flared. "I do! They're great, I just," she lowered her voice, "don't think I can write anymore."

"So you can write fifteen good pages, and that's it? Did the story decide it didn't want you to write it? Or did you decide you didn't want to write the story?"

Anita let go of Claire's hand and stared determinedly at the floor. "Neither. Both. It doesn't matter."

Claire took Anita's chin gently in her hand and guided her gaze up to meet her own. "But it does. And so does what happens in the headmaster's office. If you think you're being punished for failing to write x number of pages, you might write more to keep from being punished, but those pages are going to come from your sore backside, not your heart."

Both young women started to giggle at Claire's words, but Claire had meant to be serious. She pressed her lips together for a moment, then continued. "What if this time, you don't think of it as punishment?"

Anita started to laugh again, but Claire pressed her finger to Anita's lips. "I mean it. What if you think of it as the means to a new beginning? As a way to clear your inhibitions, your writer's block, whatever's going on in that head of yours?"

Claire let go of Anita and opened the office door. "Remember, you decide why you're here, and what happens when you leave." Through the doorway, Anita could see the senior cane resting on Headmaster Arnold's desk. She met Claire's eyes once again, this time with disgust. "I hardly think that's the case."

Claire winced. Her voice was back to it's usual icy tone as she left the office, pulling the heavy door closed behind her. "It's not for the reason you think." The door latched quietly, an insufficient punctuation to Claire's enigmatic statement. Anita was left trembling out of anger, confusion, and, despite being all too familiar with the headmaster's office, fear. Everything was happening differently this time. She no longer felt like she was about to be punished for being a bad girl. This time, her nerves told her, she was in for something much, much worse.