by LSF Publications
by Louis Woodley
Terry Osborne went ahead and ate her supper early because she would be confined to her bedroom for the rest of the evening. She had made an early exit from school today after her mother had been called to pick her up. She'd be returning to school in the morning with a couple of days worth of detention to look forward to. But shortly she would be having an encounter that she definitely was not looking forward to.
Her mother was hovering over her as she finished. She'd read Terry the riot act hours earlier, after which she'd come up with a punishment that fit the crime. Since she had been a party to defacing school property she got to spend several hours scrubbing bathrooms and the kitchen. It was good practice for her detention periods, which would be spent assisting the janitor cleaning up graffiti similar to what she'd been caught helping to create.
"Terry, thank you for the work you did this afternoon. But your father will be home soon and you need to go get ready. So go grab the Spanker and then wait in your room for us."
Terry pleaded that she not get beaten with the Spanker, but her mother was adamant. She'd just gotten into major trouble at school, which meant a more severe punishment was in order. Besides, Terry was not in a position to be making any demands, so if she was wise then she would stop arguing and just do what her mother told her to do. She would be very disappointed if Terry tried to evade responsibility for her actions.
Terry realized she was fighting a losing battle and folded her cards. Inside she'd known this was what it was going to come to; otherwise her mother would have just handled the task herself after they'd gotten home. "Yes ma'am" she conceded.
"Sweetie, we love you but what you did today was totally unacceptable and you know it. I cannot believe that my daughter would go along with trying to bully another girl. And I know you weren't the ringleader, but you went along with it and played your part. You need to seriously think about your friends because they're not who you should be hanging around with if this is the way you're going to act."
Terry was a natural follower rather than a leader. She and Mackenzie had been friends for several years, until Terry got assimilated into new girl Gabriella's sphere of influence. Gabby was exotic, boisterous, and full of ideas (not all of them well thought out). Terry got sucked into being one of her minions, abandoning her old friend in lieu of the opportunity to be part of the in-crowd. Her parents had noted Mackenzie's absence and weren't enamored with Gabby, but tried to stay out of their daughter's life.
Unfortunately, as time went on, Gabby began to push the envelope and Terry felt in over her head but was afraid to go back to being the nobody she viewed herself as. The previous weekend the gang had made a shoplifting attack on the jewelry counter at the mall. Terry had been persuaded to snag a pair of earrings; she kept them hidden in her jewelry box and felt vaguely nauseous every time she looked at them. She didn't have the nerve to wear them in case her mother started asking questions.
But she was also afraid to tell Gabby she wanted out because, to be frank, Gabby could be a vindictive bitch if she thought you were turning on her. And she was world-class at carrying a grudge, which had directly led to the incident that had Terry contemplating her impending spanking.
Nicole had been the number two of their group until she and Gabby had a vocal falling-out (for some reason Nicole objected to finding her boyfriend and Gabby lip-locked with pants at half-mast). Nicole basically said "Fuck you, buddy," and left the gang; the animosity between them had continued to grow since then.
So Gabby decided on a preemptive strike against her former friend, to teach her a lesson. Terry should have known it was a bad idea but went along with it without question. Gabby knew Nicole's locker combination and planned a little early morning interior decorating session for it. The plan was to let the school know what a slut Nicole was by putting that information on her locker door with a paint pen and then fill her locker with niceties to let her know not to mess with Gabby. Terry's contribution to the plan had been providing the paint pen that became an exhibit for the prosecution.
It had been a dumb idea, because who else was going to be the prime suspect? But Gabby was convinced that, with no eyewitnesses, she could rely on plausible deniability and claim that any number of other girls felt the same way about Nicole and equally could have done it.
But the key to the plan were the magic words "no eyewitnesses." It needed to be a quick strike; get inside the school as soon as the doors opened, post lookouts, do the damage and then disperse. Later they could pretend to be horrified that someone would do that to their friend.
Sadly for them, their plan exploded with the kiloton fallout of a nuclear weapon. They had posted sentries in the hallway that would give them enough time to scatter should students or teachers be sighted in the distance. What they had failed to consider was that a teacher might have been equally dedicated to arriving early and was already in place before them.
Mrs. Kenney had come in early because her computer was acting up at home and she needed to take care of a few things on-line before the school day started. She'd already gotten started when the need for caffeine sank it.
So she opened her classroom door to go crank up the coffeemaker in the faculty lounge. Instead she wound up walking out into a group of girls around a locker; the fact that they took one look at her and scattered like gazelles told her they'd been up to no good. They didn't even close the locker, so Mrs. Kenney got a first-hand view of the 'decorations'. And she also got a first-hand view of several of the collaborators.
By the time Nicole arrived to see 'SL' painted on her locker door, the Principal had already begun the manhunt for the responsible parties. Nicole was advised to go to the office. Once Mrs. Kenney identified the girls she'd recognized, Nicole had quickly rattled off the names of the most likely co-conspirators.
In Home Room, Terry was kicking herself for ever going along with such a stupid stunt. She knew she was screwed because she'd had Mrs. Kenney as a teacher the year before and she would definitely know who she was. Her only hope was that the teacher hadn't gotten a good look at her.
That hope was dashed when one of the Vice-Principals waltzed in and requested her presence. By now a good number of students had heard about or seen the locker, so they knew why Mrs. Bartlett was there for Terry. Some were surprised, but others figured that she'd done it to herself by glomming onto Gabby.
So there was a group reunion in the Administration offices. The girls' backpacks were searched while their lockers were opened and inspected. Mrs. Kenney was present to confirm who she'd seen. Gabby had tried to protest her innocence, but it was obvious that no one else would have taken the initiative to pull off a stunt like this.
Nicole's explanation of the reason for their fall-out didn't exactly paint a stellar picture of Gabby either. The search of Terry's backpack produced the paint pen that had generated the 'SL' on the locker door; between that and Mrs. Kenney's eyewitness identification, she was nailed.
She was unable to adequately explain her actions to her fuming mother when she was later picked up from school. Well, at first she wasn't given that opportunity because her mother told her not to say a word. It wasn't until they got home that an explanation was demanded; Terry realized how stupid it sounded once it was offered. She lamely admitted that it had been a really stupid choice; her mother only snorted, as if to say "Duh!"
That was when Mom decided that, since she wasn't in class for the rest of the day, she could exert some energy getting cleaning practice. They would discuss her behavior when her father got home. Her other assigned tasks were to write apologies to both Nicole and the Principal, which her mother vetted before approving.
Terry trudged to her father's study and pulled open the bottom left drawer of his desk where the Spanker was kept curled up and waiting. She and it had a long history together.
It had come into her life about a decade ago. Her family had hit a rough patch when her father's company went out of business and he was unemployed for a while. The then eight year old Terry had acted like a little brat when they went school clothes shopping at Goodwill because that was all they could afford at the time. None of her friends wore second-hand clothing and, by God, she wouldn't either.
Her constant whining and refusing to cooperate prompted her father to splurge $0.50 on a boy's belt; it turned out to be a highly worthwhile investment. He dragged his now repentant daughter out to the parking lot, yanked down her shorts and undies in the back seat and proceeded to light her butt on fire. Several minutes later, a suddenly cooperative Terry was trying on clothes without complaint (although she was moving a bit stiffly).
The belt had been christened the Spanker and had remained in use ever since then. Her father had considered replacing it with an adult version as Terry had gotten older. But he could snap the smaller belt dozens of times leaving a nice sting and stripes without worrying about going overboard with a heavier, longer belt. God knows he got plenty of practice with it when Terry was younger and a good hand spanking wasn't quite enough, although appearances were much rarer now.
Terry had been a bit of a whirling dervish, often leaving an unintentional path of destruction in her wake. Her parents joked that was why they'd only had the one child; a second Terry could have decimated their household. Her pleas that it was an accident didn't save her from the consequences.
She'd been a far from cooperative child once her pleadings were ignored and a spanking was imminent. Her father had a wiggling target to tan when Terry was across his lap, but he persevered and gave a healthy pink glow to those little butt cheeks before she was released.
And when she'd misbehaved enough to merit an encounter with Spanker, it was a two-parent operation. Once her bottom was bared, her mother would hold her bent over from above, keeping her in place so that Dad had free reign to let the leather create its magical behavior change. About once every three weeks, Terry was deposited on her bed to think about what she'd done while she waited for the sizzling of her rear end to die down. She was always apologetic but it was never that long before she found herself in trouble again.
But all that changed when puberty rolled around and it wasn't kind to Terry. It arrived later than many of her peers and her growth was mostly upwards. She wound up tall and gangly, practically tripping over her own feet on occasion. Her complexion was a constant struggle and now needing glasses didn't help matters any.
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