Page 30 of The Headmistress

“No, stay back, don’t come close to me… to the porch. Stay there. Don’t move, Lily.”

The girl stopped immediately, either due to the ingrained instinct of listening to a teacher’s authoritarian tone or due to the sheer despair in Sam’s voice.

Sam could tell she was fumbling with her crutches, and suddenly a beam of light from Lily’s phone tore through the darkness.

“Ah, Sam, how sturdy are those rubber boots?” Lily’s voice was tremulous. “I mean if I remember my physics right—and I may as well have just daydreamed about Amanda all through that class for all the good it did to me—you should be okay, wearing rubber and all that? Right?”

The question at the end was said in such a hopeful, almost childlike voice that it snapped Sam out of her stupor. She was the adult here, and her fear was not helping matters.

“Yeah, I’m not sure. I think since I’m insulated in these boots, I should be okay. I will let go of the wire carefully now.”

“How can you not be sure? You’re a teacher?” Lily’s face in the dark was showing all her derision for Sam’s level of understanding of physics.

“I’m almost sure and I’m a mathematician, not a physicist. But here we go in proving my hypothesis.” She slowly lifted her fingers from the railing and the wire uncoiled like a snake, making several unpredictable twists and turns, and came to a perilous stop, hanging limply and now sparking right next to Sam. She gulped and gave Lily a hopefully reassuring look. “See? All good. But don’t come close or touch me, I’m not entirely certain this is the only one hanging loose around here. Who knows if this century-old wiring is up to whatever the current code for these things is. And what you’re wearing isn’t good enough.”

“Excuse me? These are the latest Jordans, teach, do not insult the GOAT himself.”

“Lils, they don’t have rubber soles, is what I’m saying. Whatever plastic alloy they are, it's not good enough. It has to be industrial or construction-grade rubber to properly insulate, this much I’m sure of. And I’m a Celtics girl, so I’m not a big Jordan fan myself…”

“As charming as basketball talk is, shouldn’t you two be having this conversation indoors and out of this storm?” Magdalene’s voice interrupted their banter and two voices rang out with a different degree of desperation.

“Don’t come closer!”

“Stay back!”

After illuminating Sam holding still in the middle of the puddle with a live wire sparking mere centimeters away from her, Lily turned her phone flashlight to reveal a pale Magdalene, whose face was a picture of silent horror.

11

Of Nerdlike Knowledge, Hotness Factors & Fairytales

“You still think this is all nothing?” Magdalene’s voice was like a barbed wire, taut and jagged.

Fresh from her shower and safely ensconced in her apartment, Sam’s adrenaline levels finally began to level out.

“I never thought it was nothing. After all, three lightbulbs in a hallway do not magically stop working by themselves. I just sort of moved past it with no new incidents in the few weeks since. But I am really struggling to come up with a reason a person—any person—would come after me like this. And okay, the slippery, wet floor… I could’ve hit my head or potentially hurt myself like Lily, but being electrocuted is a huge escalation from a bump on the noggin. And we really don’t know what happened with the wires anyway.”

The look Sam received was equal parts bewildered and amused.

“Did you just say ‘noggin’? Did I hear you right?” Magdalene came closer and tangled a gentle hand in Sam’s drying hair. Her shower had been quick and unsatisfying since, with the power still out until the town electrician could fix the wires, the water heater wasn’t working. The emergency generator had kicked in after an hour of desperate attempts to start it, but only the vital areas of the school were back to normal, and Sam’s room was illuminated by a few candles.

“Your strange and antiquated use of language aside, I think you’re forgetting a major clue here, Elektra.” Magdalene’s voice was low, and in the candlelight, she looked almost ethereal. Sam lost herself in the feeling of those gentle fingers combing through her hair and that seductive husky tone overloading her already electrified system. She grinned, pleased with her own mental pun, but could not let Magdalene’s mangling of one of her favorite comic books slide.

“Let's set aside your complete butchering of Marvel Comics, since Elektra had very little to do with electricity of any kind, and celebrate that you are even aware of her existence—”

A cool finger on her lips shut her up in a second.

“I am well aware that Elektra Natchios is of Greek descent, hence her name, and wields a pair of sai as her trademark weapons of choice and has nothing to do with electricity. I am also aware that she’s Daredevil’s girlfriend, so maybe my attempted analogy was doubly inappropriate, but I felt in the moment that the name fit.”

Sam gaped, her lips moving silently against the lingering finger. With a wicked grin, Magdalene booped her on the nose and triumphantly stepped back.

“Okay,” Sam whispered and licked her lips, still feeling the lingering touch. “You just got a hundred hot points.”

That earned her a chuckle.

“I wasn’t aware there was a scoring system. And I also wasn’t aware I hadn’t earned all the points yet.”

Sam joined her in laughter, and it felt good, a bit of relief after a fraught day and an even worse evening.

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