Mrs. Lee-Reilly paced the thickly carpeted floor in her office for a moment. She was annoyed by the necessity of what she was about to do and irritated that it had come to this.

Nobody was backing her at the district level in terms of continuing a volunteer drive for shrinkees. The administrators agreed in principle with the goal of getting all teachers certified to have experience with shrunken students but they wouldn't empower her to recruit them. They were too worried about parent backlash and lawsuits and frankly were amazed that her single volunteer had not complained. To make matters worse, they wouldn't send her juvenile delinquents anymore either, there had been too many complaints about rough handling from the mothers of those little brats. She seethed as she recounted the opposition to get this task done.

There was a timetable in place here. Her goal of getting the whole staff certified in order to accept students from a special state-run disciplinary program would give the district a noticeable bump in funding from the state, and would be a feather in her cap that would certainly guarantee she would move upward, but the district wouldn't give her enough money to hire a consultant to oversee the training or to hire shrinkee subjects, so Lee-Reilly had to do it herself with what she had onhand - and with exactly one volunteer. Not too much money, but she thought she could make a scholarship offer right out of the competitive scholarship fund without violating any bylaws if it was made contingent on the specific "learning achievement" that the shrinkee would be doing. Most of the district administrators were skeptical of her plan, but the superintendent was pleased at the deft financial maneuvering and had okayed it. Lee-Reilly had been thrilled at the last minute support, and was up all night trying to get the paperwork finalized to get the volunteer's role set in stone, and now it was time to execute it.

The plan was to give Brett some more serious inducement than extra credit to get him to repeat the process he went through with Ms. Olivier among all the other remaining uncertified teachers. And it would be in he form of an enforceable contract that would give them the right to extract anything given if he failed to deliver. She'd had most of the teachers ceritifed before the supply of unwilling participants dried up, but there were still 7 teachers who weren't. That meant they needed many one-on-one sessions with students, but only one current volunteer.

She had the teachers' names on an Excel sheet on her tablet:

1. Mrs. Wendy Gu, art, 35

2. Miss Fatimah Erenli, history and social studies, 29

3. Ms. Loren Issakinen, computer science, 28

4. Mrs. Alicia Gomez, Spanish, 43

5. Mrs. Katie Samson, chemistry and statistics, 47

6. Ms. Nancy Henderson, physical education, 49

7. Mrs. Alka Padmanabhan, algebra/pre-calculus/geometry, 32

Why had they had to make it so hard on her? Some of them had excuses for being unavailable for the training sessions like Katie and Nancy, but, why couldn't they just get the damn training and certification done before they ran out of their old supply of shrinkees? Why did some of them pretend this was unfair or cruel? Lee-Reilly's mind boggled - being a naturally cynical person, she found it hard to imagine that anyone would make sincere stands against discipline like this.

Shaking her head, she reached for the mouse on her PC and put on her headset. The headset was clunky and she had to brush her hair around it and adjust her glasses. The PA app was already open on her desktop - good, because it could take 2 minutes to sync with the obsolescent speaker system they still had installed.

She clicked through a menu as she did every morning for announcements, but this time had a speciifc short message to deliver:

"Mr. Brett Henderson, please report to the front office. Repeat, Mr. Brett Henderson to the front office." No sense in embarrassing him about mentioning the P-word, was there? She snickered slightly.

The young man had been in chemistry lab, but Katie Samson never talked over announcements, so he would have heard her. As she expected, he was only a short walk from the front office. The school secretary directed him to the back of the front offices, to the principal's office itself. That would be new and intimidating for him, she thought. Perfect.

-----

"Come in Brett, please pull the door shut, and have a seat."

The boy did as he was told, he looked around a bit nervously.

"Now Brett, do you know why I'm calling you into my office?" she said sternly.

Brett twiddled his fingers - "ehhhh no, I don't ma'am."

She immediately softened and smiled at him. "Of course you don't! You've never been in my office before Brett. You haven't caused a lot of problems from what I've heard. And I want to thank you."

"Th...th..thank me?" Brett stammered. He was confused but appeared to be less worried now.

"Yes, I want to thank you for helping Ms. Olivier get her certification. Thanks to your five evenings including two where you agreed to perform physical constrainment, Sondra was able to get her shrinkee handling certification from the certifying body."

Yes, Brett remembered, those two fateful nights. The third enumerated test, in-mouth constrainment, they had skipped, as the rules of certification only stipulated two of the three were required.

"Oh! You're welcome Mrs. Lee-Reillly. I guess it was way more serious than I thought but I liked Ms. Olivier so I didn't mind helping her out." Brett said quietly, not wanting to talk about the particulars much.

"That's great! And I admire your attitude. Would you believe, Brett... that we actually find it quite hard to recruit volunteers to do the shrinkee training with us from among the student body? Even though many of the students do like their teachers here, I'm told..."

Brett could 100% see why that was difficult, given that he had been up a teacher's butt and stuffed in her smelly shoes, but he played dumb. "No ma'am I did not realize that."

"Oh I'm afraid so - we still have 6 teachers left actually, who won't be able to get certified without the help of another volunteer..." Lee-Reilly said expectantly.

Sensing the shift, Brett tried to play dumb even more. "Oh um that sounds bad I guess. Do they need to be certified, uh, for, like, their careers?"

Lee-Reilly feigned sadness and told him, "yes they do unfortunately - the disciplinary measures for some of the worst-behaving students mean that we need to have every teacher capable of shrinking students and confining them if needed."

Brett nodded. "Okay I guess that sounds like it will be a problem." Silence from the principal, who still had this look on her face like she expected him to say something. "Are you like, asking me to help again? Because I really, y'know, need my evenings and weekends for eh eh socializing and living life and of course homework heh. And that is with 6 teachers and I may not even, y'know, love those teachers all that much. Is that weird?"

Lee-Reilly smiled sweetly again, starting to soften even moreso. It was time to employ the stick and carrot. Carrot first.

"Brett, I'm going to level with you - I would like for you to help us with all the remaining 6 teachers. There are no other volunteers still in the program and we have had to postpone recruiting for it for the moment. Your extra credit for just Ms. Olivier helped a lot, didn't it?"

"Yes ma'am it did. But if I did even one more of those uh certifications, I would already have more than enough for an A in most of my classes. I don't really need that much extra credit, y'know?"

"Oh I know it Brett. You weren't a bad student - you don't need 100% of your grade in extra credit. You earned a C average in general. I'm not offering extra credit alone- I am offering you a scholarship when you graduate. You do want to go to college, right?"

Of course he did. Brett nodded vigorously "yeah of course. But how are you doing this?"

"We have already discussed it at the district meeting. Simply put: I feel perfectly happy to offer you a scholarship from the school's competitive assistance fund... and I think we can make sure you get A's in your classes this year and senior year provided the teachers tell me you're still trying as hard as you always have done. I am happy doing this because you are saving us a lot of work. Saving the district money on bringing in last-minute consultants to help us get certified, and you yourself are learning a good deal about professional working relationships by doing this for your teachers. Go home and talk about it with your family tonight and tell me tomorrow. I think you deserve it if you help us and give a little testimonial in the end."

She saw him starting to get that triumphant look in his eyes, and then proudly presented him with a tablet that showed two tabs on the browser: one was what appeared to be a legal document containing a scholarship award page for decent sum of money. That would pay for his first fall semester tuition at a state school, he thought. But the second tab in the browser said "NOT CERTIFIED" in the tab heading. He switched to the tab and it looked like some kind of report with multiple fields in each row, showing 6 teachers by name, courses taught, and age. So this was the list, he thought.

Pretending to consider the details of the scholarship agreement, he furtively read the second tab, and it had the list of the 6 teachers on it. He kept his facial expression blank but was reacting to them all in his mind. Thankfully for him, they all were women (about 70% of the faculty at Westwood was).

Mrs. Gu was a very nice, pretty Chinese lady with a big smile and he'd had her in freshman art class, that was a long time ago (she was 35? Looked younger than that to Brett)... Miss Erenli he had never taken a class with and he had not seen her too much in the halls (she was pencil thin, wore a hijab, and had a friendly face).... Ms. Issakinen was a blonde, tall Finnish woman, a strongly-built Midwest expat who had movie-star good looks, but wore thick glasses and was purportedly an excellent programmer who had decided to stop working at a big tech company to teach. He looked forward to her CS class next year. Mrs. Gomez was the Spanish teacher, raucous, laughed a lot, and had a little bubble butt. He had some misgivings about Mrs. Samson, who was his current chemistry teacher. The woman was capable of tremendous charm, but a little bit strict and demanding in how she instucted students to talk. A Southerner by birth, she was also very obese, somewhat pear-shaped, and had somewhat of a cackle when she laughed. The students enjoyed hearing her Alabama tongue say the names of elements, and they found it amusing when she told students how punishment happened in the South when she was younger, as though she was nostalgic for it, but she laughed it off so they weren't sure she was serious. Mrs. Padmanabhan was a quiet Indian lady whom he'd had for algebra II and he might have for pre-calc next semester, hopefully calculus if he made it - math was his worst subject and she did not seem to like him all that much, showing no patience with his sense of humor.

So there was some trepidation. What guarantee would he have that something like the bathroom incident with Ms. Olivier wouldn't happen again? Did he really trust teachers he'd never studied with like Miss Erenli? Was Mrs. Samson going to be brutal with him?

Some strange thing stood out to him on the sheet - the indices by each of the teachers names went 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. The last number was 7 and it should have been 6. A data entry error?

-----

Lee-Reilly cleared her throat, bringing Brett back to reality. Now it was time for the stick.

"So Brett, I hope you understand what we're trying to do here with this program. It would be very bad for us to lose the ability to accept students in the special disciplinary programs next year because the teachers here aren't trained with shrinkees. You agree that would be bad, right?"

Brett nodded, interested in what she was now about to say.

"It would be very bad for the school and the community - there would be these students who would be stuck without a place to get educated safely. I personally don't want to risk that happening, so I would really appreciate your positive decision and signing this agreement to do it. If you can't sign it by tomorrow, I'm afraid we're going to have to remove the extra credit we've given you so far - but the possibilities are limitless for what we're offering you here. You could be the first of your siblings to go to college - Don is still one of our janitors here and, well, he might not be able to make it long term.

Brett stared. Was she really threatening his older brother Don's job? He used to drive for Uber and did odd jobs and this was a step up for him. Brett really didn't want to have to share his room with Don if he lost his job and had to come back home. But then there was a second angle to this blackmail in taking back the extra credit. Already he had bragged to his mom that his grades were up. If he didn't follow through, he wouldn't get to inherit the old Honda CR-V as he'd been promised.

The principal had cornered him and he knew it.

He said "I'll do it. I could really use the help with college - my mom was talking about a lot of sacrifices we'd have to make for me to make it." It was only partly true - he had expected to take on student loans, and this would at least give him some breathing room before he had to do that. But the GPA assistance through the end of this year and senior year would give him much-needed help on getting into a university and not settling for community college, which steeled his nerve as he confidently signed the document sign-off sheet.

Mrs. Lee-Reilly said happily "I knew we could count on you Brett!"

-----

After he left the office, he wondered about that stupid numbering error. What if there was a seventh teacher, and if so, who was the seventh teacher? He cursed himself for forgetting to check if there were filters on the list he was seeing, even though he had taken an intro computer class which taught Excel and knew how that stuff worked. He audibly gasped after a thought appeared while walking through the empty commons back to chemistry lab.

What if it was mom?

Brett's mother Nancy was the PE teacher at Westwood. She had a big heart and a foul mouth; though not a tremendously gifted educator, she could hustle with the best of the boys on the gym track in spite of being a bit overweight. She coached the girls softball, volleyball, and track teams. When she came home and took off her shoes and socks Brett could smell it a mile away. She did sweat a lot on her job. Not only did he not want the awkwardness of being confined on his mom's person, but his skin got goosebumps at the horrible thought of being shrunk and underneath those sweaty feet. Ms. Olivier's feet were big but not super stinky in general; even so the smell had been magnified by 100x time when he was shrunk down under them, so how much worse would mom's be?
Brett shuddered. He had not heard mom mention anything about the shrink training. She had been coaching multiple teams during several away tournaments over the past few months, and had had a sub cover her classes a few times. With very little spare time, she might have not done the shrink certification yet. But he knew her position on discipline and she likely would not have any problem with shrinking students. If Lee-Reilly told his mom to make her socks extra stinky, he knew for sure that mom would oblige for her younger son.

Brett was again livid with himself. The document he had signed in the principal's office probably specifically named the teachers who he would be assisting with certification, but he didn't have it with him anymore, and he had been too dumb to read the details of what he had just signed.

As the chemistry class dragged on, all he could do was hope that the index 7 was just a data entry error and there were only 6 teachers. He was comforted somewhat by Lee-Reilly's specific statement of "SIX teachers" but still had a nagging feeling that would only slowly dissipate. Surely now that he had volunteered with Lee-Reilly and shown good faith, he could ask her about it and she would not force his mother to punish him to the extents of human endurance.