“Bark like a dog.” The order came down to the diminutive teacher who was struggling to keep himself on all fours. He let out a soft, strained woof, and heard a giant cluck of a tongue from above him. “No. That's not good enough. I want to believe it.” He tried again, but as he barked he lost control of the weight pressing down on his back and he crumpled spread-eagle onto the desk. The thick textbook threatening to crush him settled over his little body. His breaths were short and shallow. He clawed weakly at the ground beneath him, muttering out a plea for mercy.

“Do you get it yet?” From high above him, a young teenager stared dispassionately down at the book, knowing beneath it was a small bug of a man, someone she had reduced to practically nothing. “Do you see how much pressure we're under from just one class?”

Harvey Wilson tried to explain that he did. He wanted to tell her how sorry he was, and that he'd never ever assign such a workload to another student ever again. He wanted to beg for her mercy, and be allowed to do anything to prove his sincerity. Instead, he let out a long squeal that Nicole mistook for crying.

“Don't think your tears are going to get you any sympathy, little Mister. You signed up for this work, I expect you to be able to handle it. Is that clear?” He recognized the words. He had delivered a remarkably similar line only the day before, when he had been the one in power. He had always prided himself on his stoicism. He was unshakable. He was the rock that anchored the class and made it work as well as it did. Unfortunately for Harvey, a rock could never stand up to a girl who could move mountains.

“And you know, this textbook wasn't the only one. There was another.” Harvey's heart sank in his chest. He knew that was his death knell.

“Pl... pl... eeeeeaaaaase...” It came out more as an exhalation than anything else, and it was much too quiet for Nicole to hear. She hefted the other textbook up, this one hardback. She looked at the small ridge made in the large paperback book draped over her tiny teacher.

“Sorry, Mister Wilson. Fair is fair, after all. I can't be giving you preferential treatment; what would everyone else think?” She felt a tingle in her loins as she said the words. She loved talking to people who knew they were about to die. There was something so demonically callous about it that truly appealed to her. She laid her head down sideways on the desk, peering into the small hole and the face of her former teacher.

“Bye-bye!” She said in a high-pitched voice. He had maneuvered one hand to reach out for her, and she wiggled her index finger at him, smiling. His last thought was how demeaning it was to end at the hands of this bratty teen, a girl who had a vendetta against him simply because of her own unwillingness to apply herself. It just wasn't fair.

The sound of his body crunching beneath the weight of the textbooks was easily overpowered by the thud with which the second book fell. In a heartbeat he was reduced to a crushed mess, smeared not only against Nicole's desk, but the cover of the textbook he himself had helped write as well. Nicole looked at the now-flat book and nodded. Her eyes wandered to the far side of the desk, where another man was held down by two pieces of scotch tape. The giant teen rolled her chair over to position herself directly in front of him.

“Mister Barnes.” She said. Nicole had a knack for making a man's name sound like a threat. He swallowed.

“Please, Nicole, I can expl-”

“There's nothing to talk about, Sir. You know what you did, and you know what needs to be done because of it.”

“Please! You took Cathy, for God's sake! We had an agreement!”

Nicole just rolled her eyes. “People like me do not have agreements with... things like you.” She said. “I told you to look the other way every time. No exceptions.”

“She was my sister!”

“She was a nuisance, and you went to the police when you were told not to.”

“She was my sister!”

“If you say that again I'm going to gouge your eyeballs out.” Nicole said coldly. All the moisture in John's mouth dried up. He was arguing with an insane student who wielded complete power over him. “Do you want that, Mister Barnes?”

“N... no...” He said fearfully. She leaned in closer, her terrifying visage chilling him to the core.

“No what, Mister Barnes?”

“N-no ma'am, I don't w-want that.”

“Then prove it. Show me what your eyes are worth.” She straightened up in her chair, looking down on him from on high like a goddess. Her long brown hair framed her face, and he looked up at her in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

She rolled her eyes, sighing. “I mean, do something you couldn't do without your eyes. And make sure it interests me.”

Lee's heart hammered in his chest. He looked up at the titaness, wild-eyed. “What do you want? Tell me what you want! You can't just do this! You can't kidnap and terrorize and murder people! You can't get away with it!”

Nicole sighed again, picking up a set of fingernail clippers from beside him. He watched her hoist the large metal object into the air, swinging out the arm in the middle, and cleaning her fingernails with it. “You really think I can't? Sweetie, I've been getting away with this since I was a little girl. I don't even know if my body count should be in the hundreds or the thousands.” She briefly stopped cleaning her nails to look down at him. “If I killed you, you'd be a forgotten number, you know that?”

He was trembling beneath his restraints. “Why? Why are you doing this?”

“Well, what else was I gonna do tonight? Not homework.” She scoffed. “Now, Mister Barnes, get ready for what I can only imagine is going to be horrific pain.”

“W-what?” He had already gone ghost-white.

“Well, I told you to do something and you failed. Now I'm enacting punishment.” She lowered her hand beside him, the wicked curve of the fingernail cleaner pointed directly at his face. His eyes went wide and he thrashed and shrieked underneath the tape like a wild animal. Nicole held his head still between two fingers, and delicately lowered the blade towards his eye. He screwed his eyes shut, praying that he could stop the inevitable with a paper-thin strip of flesh.

"You only said not to say those words! Please, I didn't say them! Don't do this!"

“The rules changed, Mister Barnes. Don't be scared now.” She cooed down to him as she rested the curved metal against his face. He was crying now, begging to be spared. She gently massaged the head still squeezed between her fingers, which only served to demonstrate how easily she could break him. “It's okay. It's gonna be okay, sweet baby.” As she spoke, she dipped the fingernail cleaner through his eyelid on one side of his eye. She twisted it up, scooping out the eyeball and a fair amount of blood in the process. He wailed and squirmed, but Nicole continued to try to soothe him. “There, there. It's okay baby. We're half done.”

“Please!” He screamed, his head whipping back and forth since Nicole released it to move the clippers to her other hand. “Please don't! Please stop! Oh my God please let me keep my eye!” He wailed. Nicole just watched him squirm, blood trailing down his face from the new hole in his face. Nicole had wiped the mess on the clippers off on her floor, giving it a mild look of disgust before returning to her tiny captive.

“Are you going to use your eye to please me?” She asked. “I don't have use for things that don't make me happy.”

“Yes! I'll do anything! Please, let me do anything oh my God it hurts! It hurts please make it stop!”

“Well you know I can't do that. But what I can do is give you a chance to prove yourself. Show me how you can use your eye to make me happy.”

“I DON'T KNOW!” He shrieked, his voice shrill and panicked. It descended into blubbering and sobbing once more, and Nicole just clucked her tongue, placing the metal hook against his other eyelid.

“You know what you could have done was told me how beautiful I am. That would be putting your eye to use.”

“You are! You're beautiful! You're beautiful! You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen in my life!”

“Mm-mm.” Nicole shook her head. “Too late. I had to tell you what to do. That's boring to me. I want my pets to be imaginative and enthusiastic to please. I can get any old sack of shit to lay on his back all day and ask me what to do.” As she spoke, she coldly gouged out his other eye, his screams slowly rising once more. “Initiative is what attracts me to an individual. It was your initiative to disobey me that first put you on my radar, and now it's your lack of initiative that is costing you your gross little eyes.” She wiped the second eye off beside the first, bending beneath the table for a moment to reach, then came back up.

“You... you bitch... you horrible bitch monster cunt!”

“Now now, there's no need for name-calling. After all, if either of us looks like a monster, it's definitely you. Want to see? I have a mirror right here.” She giggled softly. “Oh. Right. My mistake. Here, let me make it up to you by getting these big scary strips of tape off of you.” She ripped up the tape, pulling it slowly across his flesh to draw out his suffering. She grinned as he screamed. Nicole dropped her former Vice Principal to the table and picked up a nearby pencil. Its tip was already sharpened to a wicked point.

“Go on. Run along. I won't bother you anymore.” Lee could hear the teasing tone in her voice. He stumbled slowly across the surface, collapsing onto all fours every time he tried to stand. He crawled forward, oblivious to where he was headed. He was sure with every extension of his arm that it would slip off into a vast, unknowable chasm.

“Uh-oh! Look out, Mister Barnes!” She exclaimed, jabbing him in the side with the tip of the pencil. The sharp end dug into him; not enough to draw blood, but it hurt just the same. He winced, holding his side and looking frantically around out of reflex. He yelled into the darkness surrounding him in a feeble attempt to overcome the sounds of his beating heart, of his frantic breath, and of Nicole's soft laughter.

The pencil struck him again, this time boring into his back from above. He collapsed to the ground but it kept on him, pressing sharply against his flesh. He screamed for mercy, writhing beneath the pencil like a worm on a hook. He felt Nicole's breath wash over his body. He knew her face was near, but he couldn't tell where exactly it was. He lashed out, clawing all around him, but her faint laughter persisted.

“Let me go! You've had your fun!” He tried to reason, but he knew it was useless. He still couldn't fully accept how unfair the situation was. His life to this point didn't matter to the teenage girl. The man he had been, the relationships he had made, the achievements he had obtained. All of that was nothing to her. He existed for a fleeting pleasure, and then would become like his colleague beneath those textbooks off to his... well, nearby.

“Bark like a dog and I'll let you up.” The familiar command came. “Mister Wilson was a terrible dog. Be better than him or I'll kill you too.”

“You don't really expect me to baaaaaugh!” He screamed as she started to drill the tip into his back, twisting it back and forth in her fingers. “Bark! Bark bark bark!”

“Good boy. You're much better than Mister Wilson. You really sound like a dog, almost like it comes really naturally to you to sound like an animal." Nicole giggled. "Now what should I call you?” The pressure on his back eased up, and he shifted uncomfortably. “I think I'll call you Spot. Because, you know, you'll never spot anything ever again. Do you like your new name, Spot?”

“Please let me go...” He whined. She drilled the pencil into his back again, eliciting another scream.

“Dogs don't speak. They bark until their Master tells them not to and then they go quiet. Do you understand?” Lee barked, and Nicole nodded happily. “Good boy. You're learning very quickly. I'm very proud of the progress you're making.” The pencil lifted off his back, and he immediately began crawling forward again. Nicole noticed his determination and laughed. “Do you even know where you're going? You're headed towards the wall.”

He stopped. Was she lying? He couldn't tell where her voice was coming from. Suddenly, a hard rod slammed into his side, spinning him around. He scrambled desperately for purchase but found none, instead subjected entirely to the will of his captor. She eventually stopped, and looked down at him with a playful glint in her eyes.

“Okay. Try it now. See if you can crawl off the edge of the desk.” He slowly rose to his hands and knees and began to move again. Almost immediately she was laughing again. “Oh my God you're so stupid! You're headed at the wall again!”

“Fuck you, you goddamn bitch!” He shouted up at the sky, rolling onto his back and shaking his fists. “How dare you fucking make fun of me!”

“Oh. Poor Spot. Too stupid to keep his mouth shut. You're lucky I find your face repulsive or I'd spit down your throat 'til you drowned. Instead I think I'm just gonna keep you around and make you suffer.”

“Wh-what?”

“Are you fucking deaf, too? I said,” She drew in a deep breath, lowering her mouth to be directly beside him. “I'M GOING TO KEEP YOU AROUND AND MAKE YOU SUFFER, YOU DUMB BITCH.”

“Nicole!” A voice from outside her door scolded her sternly, followed by quick stomps getting closer by the second. The teenage girl's face flushed red and she quickly swept the tiny man into her lap, spinning in her chair to face the door just as it opened. Her mother stood in the doorway, her face twisted into a scowl. “Why are you yelling and swearing in my house?”

“I-I'm sorry, mom!” She said, flustered. “I was just... upset at my homework. It won't happen again, I promise!”

“See that it doesn't, or you'll be grounded for a month. That means no TV, no internet, no-”

“I know what it means, mom!” She said, her voice a soft whine. Nicole's mother looked at her for a second longer, her eyes sliding over the desk.

“I'm very pleased to see you studying hard, though, Nicole. You're a good kid.”

“Thanks, mom.”

“No problem. I'll see you tomorrow. Keep it down.” She shut the door behind her, and Nicole sighed, looking down into her lap. The tiny man was gone. Nicole looked at the ground and saw her former Vice Principal in a flat-out sprint towards her bed. She was surprised by his sense of direction this time, but unfortunately his size kept him from making any real progress. She stood up and kicked him over, sending him sprawling a foot away.

“You nearly got me in trouble, you little shit.” She said venomously. She crouched, getting a better look at him. Blood was coming out of his ears now, too, and she wondered if her screaming had done that. A smirk tugged at her lips.

“I guess you really are deaf, dumb and blind now, huh?” She teased him with her toe, easily negating every effort of his to climb back onto his feet. “Well jeez, I don't need an animal that can't even understand simple commands. You really are worthless to me now.” She plucked him up by an ankle and laid him out on her tongue. He was squirming and flailing, trying to resist her even though they both knew it was hopeless. She closed her mouth and swallowed, sending him feet-first down her throat. He felt nice as he descended, but she quickly lost track of him. Nicole gathered up a few tissues and wiped up the drying viscera of what had once been her teacher, then threw it in the trash.

“Somehow I think doing this homework won't really be necessary anymore. Might as well have a bit more fun.” She said to herself, sitting back down at her desk. She leaned over her backpack and opened up one of the pouches on the side. From within the pocket, five sets of eyes looked up at her, taking in the sight of their gigantic classmate for the first time. Nicole smiled.