This choice: Hannah heads to Wellington to do some investigating • Go Back... Wellington was a nice, metropolitan sort of town far below the mountain range that Buttercombe Academy was built on. For the most part, it was separated from the isolated, yawning experience offered just an hour or so away. It was like Buttercombe Academy was it's own little world; a tiny independent nation, completely segregated from the hustle and bustle of "normal" life.
Hannah had been driving for an hour now, tracing the long stretch of road that was the mountain trail with her barely used luxury car. She could have counted the times she had driven it on one hand since her seventeenth birthday; students (even her, for the most part) had to jump through an awful lot of hoops to get permission to leave campus, even for a few hours. The fact that she was going this far out, on her own, with nothing more than a hastily scribbled permission slip from Ms. Polluck, should have been nothing short of a miracle.
AT THE LIGHT, TAKE A LEFT.
The navigational system was programmed for the Tenderfoot Institute for Talented Youngsters, Coach Knight's purported place of former employment. Hannah had dabbled online, curiously googling the school in hopes of maybe gathering some important information there. It was a magnet school, privately funded by through the generous donations of the locally wealthy not unlike Buttercombe Academy itself. They specialized in younger children, taking in applicants as early as three years old and retaining them until the third grade. Their website was full of statistics showing the higher success rates of students who attended the Institute as compared to standard public schooling, as well as interviews with former tots who had graduated and gone on to live successful lives. If Ms. Farron was right, and Coach Knight did hold a soft spot for children, this could have easily qualified as her dream job.
Hannah took her left.
DRIVE FOR FOUR HUNDRED FEET, THEN TAKE A RIGHT.
And turned off the GPS.
She could see the building from here. It was a sleek, modern looking place. Obnoxiously square and white, with large windows that wrapped around the entire building. Behind it's gates, a perfectly trimmed lawn was decorated with statuettes and a polite little walkway system that was noticeably cleaner and brighter than the sidewalk outside. The sign, TENDERFOOT INSTITUTE FOR TALENTED YOUNGSTERS was also something of a dead giveaway.
Hannah parked in the lot, and started inside...
***
The Institute was expectedly and obnoxiously modern, with a focus on grays, whites, and reds. It wasn't unappealing, but it looked far more professional than Hannah had expected of a place calling itself the Tenderfoot Institute. Hannah's mind went right to more traditional, home-spun kindergartens rather than the ostentatious. The office was brightly lit, with minimalist modern art hanging behind the desk.
Hannah had the foresight to, through some further greasing on Ms. Polluck's part, re quest an audience with the principal of the Institute in advance. Mrs. Pataki was a maturing woman, somewhat older than what Hannah had expected, with a motherly figure and countenance. Her brown hair was fluffy, bouncing against the collar of her blouse and curling around her face as she smiled pleasantly from behind the desk.
"It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Pataki." Hannah smiled cordially in the somewhat uncomfortably rigid chair.
"Please, call me Helen." the principal sat with her hands folded on the desk, leaning slightly on the elbows of her wine-colored blazer, "Though it's nice to see that your headmistress has been teaching her girls etiquite, I'd rather not be reminded of my age. How is Shannon? I haven't seen her in ages."
"She's doing..." mental snapshots of the past year flashed before Hannah's eyes, memories etched into her brain as Ms. Polluck glutted herself on endless breakfasts, scarfing down free treats from the on-campus bakery, and exploding out of multiple expensive business suits, "...well. She's doing well."
"That's wonderful to hear." the dark-eyed woman said pleasantly, "So what brings you into my office today. Not looking at childcare this early, I hope."
"Oh, no ma'am." Hannah laughed at the awkwardity of the assumption rather than any humor to be found in it
"Well then surely you must have some reason to come out and see me. And during school hours too!" Mrs. Pataki chuckled brightly, glancing at her clock, "With how tightly she holds you girls by the reins, I'm surprised I'm even speaking with you!"
Hannah mused that it had been much longer than she'd thought that Mrs. Pataki and the headmistress of her school had actually met face to face, or the older woman would have surely believed that Ms. Polluck had let herself slip quite a bit. Hannah simply smiled and laughed complementary to Mrs. Pataki's amusement, but the inadvertant comparison between then and now made Hannah feel a bit charged.
"Actually, I do have a reason for being here." Hannah calmed her practiced laughter, "I was, um... hoping you could tell me a little about a teacher who used to work here--Ashley Knight?"
There was a slight pause in the principal's demeanor, as if she were caught off guard by the question. It was an odd one, sure enough. It had at least been five years since Ashley had been employed there, given the four she'd been at Buttercombe.
"Oh, Ashley! Mrs. Pataki brightened once more, "I remember her! Oh, she was such a dear!"
"Right!" Hannah perked up, happy to see that this line of questioning wouldn't seem invasive, "I was hoping maybe you could tell me about her career here and, um... what she was like?"
***
"Let me begin by saying that we all liked Ashley a lot." Mrs. Pataki began, taking her elbows off of the desk, "She was just as sweet as could be; She used to bake cookies and bring them in for us and our students every Friday, and she always went the extra mile in making sure that everyone was happy with her. Nobody ever had any real problems with her."
"So... why did you let her go?" Hannah asked, taking very detailed notes on her clipboard, "If she was such a good teacher?"
"Well... it's a bit more complicated than that, Miss Hammond." the principal said with a more somber smile, "Ashley was a very kind, caring woman. But I felt--and still feel--that she didn't fulfill the responsibilities that a teacher has to their students."
"My institution promotes free-thinking and independence within the young mind. We make sure that our teachers go out of their way to avoid mollycoddling them or underestimating our student's great potentials. We allow our students, no matter how young, to lead themselves in learning and come to their own conclusions. While we are there to help guide them along the way, Ashley--ah, excuse me, Ms. Knight--had a nasty habit of doing everything for them. Mollycoddling them, if you will. She cleaned up after them, held their hands through the creative exercises, she was spoiling them. It came from a good place, of course--everyone knew how much she loved each and every one of her students--but it became entirely too much. Children in her class performed at noticeably lower levels than students under different teachers, and showed a very distinct dependency on her to do things for them. They had low social skills, lower motivation, they spoke mostly in "baby-talk", and were overall just very... infantile."
"Needless to say, everyone was so sad to see her go." Mrs. Pataki continued, taking a drink of water, "She was just this shy, timid thing around us adults and everyone loved her so much. But unfortunately, a lot of people pay good money per semester to have their child separated from that kind of environment, and she just couldn't tell them no. We had to let her go."
"So... Ashle--er, Ms. Knight, used to be... timid?" Hannah circled the word on her notepad, "And... sweet?"
That... didn't sound anything like Coach Knight. At all.
The Ashley Knight Hannah knew--that everyone knew--was a fire-spitting, fork-tongued bitch with a temper as short as her ass was large. If Mrs. Pataki, Ms. Farron, and Ms. Polluck were to be believed, then the same hollering hippopotamus had at one time been a sweet, kind, person who actually cared too much about her students. And baked cookies. Coach Knight baking cookies should have been an impossibility.
Was that who said that ridiculous phrase? The person who Mrs. Pataki had been describing; the cookie-baking, baby-talking, child-loving enabler from the story?
Was Coach K hiding something beneath all that bitchy booty blubber?
Did she really... care?  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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