screeched. They all knew the game that was being played.
'I did not do it, Sir,' said Jenks, appalled.
'Did he do it, class?' asked Mr. Clark.
'Yes!' the class shouted.
It was very gratifying. Jenks began to cry. 'But I didn't, Sir. I didn't do it!'
'Why should you be treated any different than anyone else, Jenks?' Mr. Clark asked. 'Jenks, I think we better go to the Principal's office.'
There was a theatrical gasp from the children. Jenks was going to get the Strap. The children terrified themselves deliciously with tales of the Strap. They said it had spikes on the end. It was a dark and terrible thing. Jenks began to blubber with fear. 'Mr. Clark,' he begged, his voice a whine.
'Angela. Take charge of the class, please.' Angela was Class Monitor, a two-edged sword, who led the mayhem when he was out of the room, and then organized the tidying up before he came in, so that he did not have to deal with it. He knew that. The class knew he knew that. The class knew he secretly approved of a bit of mayhem as long as it was kept absolutely hidden.
Angela sat on the teacher's desk. 'Jenks, getting the Strap. I never. I never would.'
'They won't give him the Strap,' someone said, knowingly. Jenks's grades were too good.
'They have to now, Mr. Clark said he would, and it would look too bad if he didn't. Who else do we want to have the Strap?'
Dorothy barked out a laugh and stood up. She looked at them all with undisguised scorn. 'All of you. All of you little smarty-pants. You all think it's so great. I'd like to take you all and whip your asses.'
Silence.
Jenks came back into the room with a face the color of sandstone from weeping. He couldn't sit down. But the class didn't laugh at him or tease him. They didn't lean forward whispering out of the corner of their mouths, asking him about the exploit. Something was wrong. The class looked cowed and silent. 'Thank you, Angela,' Mr. Clark said. He thought perhaps that Angela had simply kept them firmly in line.
Or maybe, maybe they hadn't thought it was right. Well then, if Jenks didn't do it, they should have told me the truth.
That Dorothy Gael, the children thought. We got to do something about that Dorothy Gael.
But the terror of the Strap meant there was one unbreakable rule: You never told, you never snitched. They couldn't snitch, and if they did, what would Dorothy do, what revenge would she extract? What, what could they do about Dorothy?
One day in spring term, her ally, Emma, said something. That was what broke it. Nobody knew for certain what it was that Emma said. She whispered it, but it sure was something Dorothy Gael didn't like. Em had trusted Dorothy a bit too much and grown too familiar. She teased her about something, her size, maybe, or her shoes, her dress. Maybe it was something about her family. Evangeline Thomas claimed she heard Emma whisper the word 'Henry.'
There was the word 'Henry' and Dorothy Gael's face twisted up like a painting of the Devil, and her lips pulled back in concentrated hatred, and she slapped Emma across the face. The noise was so loud that Mr. Clark dropped his chalk. Emma wailed in shock.
'Dorothy Gael. Did you hit her?' Mr. Clark knew that this was his chance.
Dorothy said nothing. Her face was puffed out like an adder, arrested in an expression of utter rage and turmoil that unmanned Mr. Clark for a moment. He had never seen an expression like it on a child's face.
'Did anyone see what happened?' Mr. Clark asked.
That's when it broke. 'No,' said Angela, the two-edged sword. Her arms were folded. She had decided. The time had come. 'But Dorothy is always doing things like that.'
'She picks on people.'
'She makes Amy Hugson give her money, and if she doesn't she hurts her real bad.'
'She put cowpat all over Tommy's face.'
'She hits people all the time.'
In chorus, like a Greek tragedy.
'Dorothy Gael, is all of this true?'
The terrible head turned toward him. Not a Fury, he thought. A Gorgon. A glance turns to stone.
'Why are you asking me, Clark?' the child said. No 'Mister,' just a hard, blunt last name like in a bar room.
The child was smiling at him. 'Everything I say is a lie. I got to lie all the time.'
Mr. Clark was thinking he had never seen the like of it for pure evil.
Dorothy was thinking: My uncle does that to me every day in the dirt. Is that the truth you want to hear?
'Dorothy. You're going to come with me to the Principal's office.'
There was no gasp, just silence. The children were almost sorry then. Girls did not get the Strap. This was a real change. Girls keenly felt the distinction of Straplessness both as a privilege and a penance. In part, they wanted to be beaten because it was an approved achievement that was denied them. But now that it was happening, the change, the revolution, was shocking. They were too young to have seen many changes.
'Let's go then,' said Dorothy Gael. She almost sounded bored. As she walked up the aisle, she bumped her
