Queen of Spades (House of Cards Series 1) [Student/Teacher Relationship]

The Magician

The man Alice had last seen when she stripped for him on his birthday stared at her in shock. Then he seemed to make a mental decision and acted like he didn't already know her. " Language Ms. Spade. I'll see you after school today as detention for inappropriate language." he wrote a detention slip and put it down in front of her.

Suddenly Alice didn't feel all that happy to be in school anymore. She put the detention slip in her shirt pocket and stared down at her Hamlet book without seeing the words. She could hear some of the girls tittering at her already receiving a detention and could feel the heavy weight of the male population's eyes already trying to undress her. Acid churned in her stomache as she suddenly felt nauseated, but forced herself to focus on the class work. They were only at the part where Hamlet is narrating the play and Alice's classmates were confused by the play within a play aspect. She listened carefully while Malco-- Mr. Vega walked the other students through the concept. She shut off the part of her brain that was freaking out over the fact that she had given her teacher a lapdance last week and instead wrote down his consice lessons. Just listening to him explain it all told Alice that he was not only a good teacher, but passionate about encouraging his students to enjoy learning it.

A folded up piece of paper landed on her desk, startling her out of her reverie. Alice looked around but no one was looking at her so she reached for it and opened it up. Scrawled across the paper was a messy question -how much will it cost for a blow job?- Alice could hear some muffled laughter as she crumpled the paper up and left it on the corner of her desk. They weren't worth reacting to, she reminded herself, taking in slow, deep breaths. Another paper landed on her desk but this time Mr. Vega saw it.

"Note passing?" he demanded and grabbed it before Alice could. Like all teachers, he opened it to read it out, but whatever it said stopped him cold. He looked down at Alice but she was staring at her desk, not wanting to make eye contact. Without reading the note outloud he crumpled it up and took the other ball of paper off her desk, realizing what it was. "Alright class. It seems you all need to have a little talk." Alice shot her eyes upwards, trying to silently beg him to not say anything. "If I catch any of you harassing another student, I will ask the principal for an immediate suspension. I don't care what the reasons are behind it, I simply will not tolerate bullying. Is that clear?" he warned the rest of the class. They responded with a dull 'yes sir', and Alice let out a mental sigh of relief.

There were no more notes dropped on her desk in that class, but as soon as it ended, she realized that the abuse was just getting started. Her locker had the word WHORE scratched into it, and every time she walked through a hallway alone she was either groped at by guys or jostled by girls. They tried to trip her, step on her feet, shove her, pull her hair and spit at her. When her friends were around they left her alone and Alice found out that Kim's dad was the Police Chief. No one wanted to piss him off by hurting his little girl. Science block had been worse than English, as throughout biology, physics and chemistry she'd been bombarded with notes from the guys and girls, either insults or offers. All of them ended up crumpled and thrown into the garbage without a response. The teachers saw what was going on and did nothing to stop it. It was very clear to Alice that the science teachers couldn't care less and probably had been unwilling to take her on, but had been forced to. When the lunch bell rang, Alice was out of her desk and through the door before any of the other students. She stuffed her bag into the locker and turned to find her friends waiting for her.

They saw the word carved into her locker and grimanced, then spent the bulk of lunch telling her ridiculous stories from their childhoods in an attempt to help her laugh and relax. Ace counted her blessings at meeting these people. Not everyone in school was horrible to her, or inappropriate; a lot of students just looked at her, unsure if the rumours were true or not. Mainly it was just the popular kids that Lexi hung around with that were horrible to her. Alice resolved to just ignore it like it wasn't happening when suddenly something cold and sticky was poured over her. Her friends jumped away from the table, yelling and cursing as it splashed and Alice just sat there while Lexi's friends laughed.