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Edith Applegate never wanted to be a teacher. She didn’t want to get addicted to a mystery pill, either, but that issue she could put up with better.
You see, children were the bane of her existence, always being noisy and messy and all ‘can I have a tissue, miss?’ and ‘can I go to the toilet, miss?’ and ‘we can’t get Billy off the roof again, miss!’. Okay, maybe that last one was just her most recent class, but still.
Let’s list off all the little horrors she’d had to teach so far, shall we?
Firstly, there was Nugget, who was Nugget, which in itself was a problem. He was... Strange. Nobody really knew quite what to make of him, only that the boy was an oddity, could probably kill you easily, and that you shouldn’t eat any of his nuggets. He became even weirder (if that was even possible) after Billy went missing, becoming more murderous and reclusive. He did provide pills though, so there was at least that.
The little freak had literally chewed off his arm earlier on, and that had gotten blood all over her carpet, much to Applegate’s annoyance. The loud bellow he’d made upon entering her classroom earlier on really hadn’t helped with the woman’s terrible migraines, either...
On a scale of one to ten, Nugget was a two, because: one, he used to sometimes give her pills, and two, he had the stuff in his system if she managed to find a way to make more of her favourite drug sometime soon. But she did hate him, so that was where the –8 came in.
Secondly, there was Buggs, who was indisputably a bully, but he did offer a good kiddie fight every once in a while. She was pretty certain that he brought a knife to school usually, which definitely wasn’t allowed, but she didn’t really care as long as he wasn’t dumb enough to do something like use it as his show and tell item. Besides, she bet Monty brought in way worse at times.
Buggs, however, had always gotten on Applegate’s nerves, insulting her and trying to hit her with his slop until she stopped eating at the cafeteria. The fact that he was a child didn’t help, and she’d once had a dream where she stabbed her in the... Uh... Rear end so that she’d died.
Buggs was also a two, because she despised him, but he helped make other annoying children suffer.
Thirdly, there was Monty, who wasn’t too bad, she supposed. He was smart, and often belittled her teaching methods back at the first kindergarten, but she bet that he would be able to make her some pills if she got the right ingredients. If he didn’t agree, she was pretty sure that she could just force him into doing it (the kid didn’t seem like a fighter, especially after he’d been wheelchair-bound– apparently, the nerd had corrected the janitor’s spelling. Applegate wondered if the kid had a death wish). Besides, it would be good for his ‘business’.
Monty didn’t bother her all that much, really, mostly leaving her be so he could sell stuff, but it was clear that he also didn’t think much of her appearance, either. She’d heard him compare her to Buggs once, and everyone knew that that was a horrible slander to anyone.
Monty was probably a six, because he didn’t go out of his way to infuriate her and could probably help her make pills, but he was also a snobby little jerk.
Fourth... ly...? She was pretty sure it was ‘fourthly’. Anyway, fourthly, there was Cindy. One of her least favourites by far, who seemed out to make Applegate’s life a living misery.
Cindy loved making fun of Applegate, thought she was better than everyone else, wouldn’t stop whining about her missing dog, and never shut up. Cindy was clearly under the false view that she was amazing.
Applegate loathed Cindy, and the feeling was mutual. She was fairly certain that both would rejoice if the other dropped dead, and Applegate had been wishing for something like am inexplicable strike of lightning to conveniently hit the girl for as long as she’d known the brat.
Cindy was a zero. There was absolutely nothing even remotely tolerable about the child that Applegate could find.
Fifthly? Meh, she gave up. Next, there was Jerome, who used his position as her boss’s son to get away with whatever the heck he wanted. Jerome was like a weasel, if a weasel loved yoyos and was obsessed with being cool. She snorted. Jerome: the egocentric weasel with a yoyo.
Anyway, she didn’t really care for Jerome much since he abused his power over her so often, and for ages, she couldn’t wait for his father to find out about one of the stolen hall passes she had a hunch that Jerome had. Then her boss died, which she didn’t really care about, and she found a small bit of vindictive satisfaction at the sight of Jerome crying alone the day after the man died, suddenly not nearly as cool anymore.
Jerome was a four. She could put up with him, but he was an annoying little wretch.
There was also Kid, who didn’t have a name as far as she could tell. She was pretty sure that he’d gotten into a kiddie fight with Buggs at one point, but wasn’t sure if that was a dream or not because she also had very vivid memories of him helping her eliminate all of his classmates. She figured that it must be part of the withdrawal...
He seemed willing to do whatever for people, and didn’t act up in her class that much, only occasionally snooping in others' cubbies, except for that one time he’d dated Cindy. She was pretty sure he’d dated Cindy, anyway, but she could also remember Lily and Nugget dying that same day, too, so she couldn’t be certain.
He got a seven.
There was also that odd, anxious new kid named Ozzy, and she made a million different ‘Wizard of Oz’ jokes in her head whenever she saw him, because she didn’t have anything that much better to do. He seemed obsessed with order and kept complaining about how his stupid dinosaur wasn’t working.
The kid mainly just sat in a corner and sulked, sometimes grabbing his inhaler if he saw something heinous like– dare she say it?– flowers. A green flower, to be specific, but she didn’t much care for details.
He could have a five, because she hardly knew him and didn’t want to give any potentially loathsome kid anything above a halfway mark. The boy seemed pretty average, anyway.
Lastly, there was the unconfident kid with the red shirt and the blue tie, who seemed pretty posh and wealthy and answered to the name ‘Theodore' during registration, but he looked like he was actually not bad. He’d asked her if she was okay when she was making particularly pained withdrawal sounds, then scuttled off before she could reply, muttering something about someone named Felix and commoners.
Weird kid, yeah, but he seemed. Alright. She guessed. He wasn’t as bad as Cindy or Buggs or the other enraging ones, which was definitely a plus. He got a... Six. That didn’t mean that she liked him by any means, but he didn’t seem like too bad a student.
Was that all? Nugget, Monty, Buggs, Cindy, Jerome, Kid, Ozzy, Theodore... Oh. Wait. She’d forgotten Ponytail and Theodore’s brother from gym and the ily-s.
Well, Ponytail had been a part of the... Situation where Applegate’d been hit by a basketball and apparently hallucinated killing Jerome. For that alone, Ponytail got a three.
She’d give the snooty rich boy a three, too, because he was snooty.
That just left the -ily twins.
Lily was... Someone. She was constantly conspiring against something, playing mock detective and even spying on Applegate’s boss. Lily’d been irritating before her brother went missing, and afterwards she’d just... Wilted.
Lily’s passion and brightness shrivelled up like dying petals that seemed determined to stay stuck to the stem as long as they could, because at her roots, Lily was an investigator.
She was a four. She had donuts, after all, and Applegate could respect that. Lily didn’t seem actively out to kill her (at least, Applegate hoped not...), too, so that was an upside.
Billy was his sister’s assistant of sorts who did most of the spying, because somehow, he found his way onto the most bizarre of places, and she was sure that whatever experiments had been done on him certainly hadn’t reduced the power of this ability.
There had been numerous occasions where Applegate had to ‘get this hooligan out of my closet before I impale him with my mop’ (because Billy could somehow apparently get to the top shelf of the locked janitor’s closet), or ‘Applegate! Get this child off of my shelf before I get a gun’ (because Billy didn’t seem to get that curiosity didn’t make you immune to bullets), or ‘Ms Applegate! We need your help getting Billy off the ceiling’ (how did a kindergartener get onto and stay on the ceiling?!). So those occasions were frustrating, to say the least.
He’d also caused a great more deal of disruption from Nugget and spying from Lily and whining from Cindy and meant that there were nO MORE PILLS– so he got a three.
Yes, Applegate hated children, hated teaching, but you know what she didn’t hate?
The massive cash load she got at the end of the day for putting up with those monsters, the free use of the coffee machine at lunch, and seeing the occasional kiddie fight.
So maybe, just maybe, teaching wasn’t so bad.
...
Nah, Applegate was definitely still quitting at the first chance she got.