The woman sitting on the hard chair, blinked. It made no difference how uncomfortable the seat was, her eyes, her whole body was tired, she yawned, made a loud ‘hey... ‘ sound, and looked around guiltily, but everyone else was just as tired as her; she could no longer focus on the monitor in front of her.

She hit pause, and a picture of an empty classroom froze. She took a sip of her now-cold coffee, and spat it back into the cup.

Monica, the woman at the console next to her, glanced up. She grinned and sipped from her bottled water.

Heather, the first woman, grunted, a sound half between a laugh, and half ‘WTF?’ She stood up, and said that she was going to the ladies. She picked up a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and started walking out. Monica picked up her water, and followed.

Several minutes later, the pair returned to their seats, having refreshed coffee mugs and water bottles, neither of which was allowed inside the high school media centre’s studio; but when the principal and one of her teachers also exited to take a break, they would also return with fresh drinks, who was going to stop them?

The mindless task of watching footage from the school’s CCTV cameras had to be done, unfortunately none of the cameras was motion-sensitive, and ran 24/7.

All four women – the school principal, and a teacher, neither of whom would get overtime for this, and two parents, volunteers, members of the PTA committee – had decided to flick forward at three-minute intervals, the chances of missing anything exciting were there, but ... they could be fairly certain that if anything did occur, they would catch up in the aftermath. Mostly it was noting down that the janitor had been in classroom such and such, time was so and so, or the endless monotony of watching students making their teacher’s lives a misery between the 07h30/08h00 and 15h30/16h00 time periods, when normal classroom activities were on the go.

Even the studio equipment was not the latest and greatest, but rather what the school could afford. The reason, just like any other reason for this evening’s activities, were that implementation on the ground resembled the laws that came out of congress like a house cat resembled a lion. Yes, there were schools, predominantly those catering for the progeny of the elite, usually in big cities, that could afford Big Brother on their own tab, but many small towns found themselves cutting into other just as, if not more important budgets. Nobody had seen fit to increase the grants to schools to cover costs of yet another already failing program thought up by politicians in their ivory towers.

And thus, it was that the school’s security camera footage was not being audited by an outside agency, but by volunteers. And volunteer availability made certain that no two teams were ever the same. Monica had been there the first Friday of the academic year, and now six weeks later was her third stint, Heather had only just begun, and the principal, Ms Foster, only had two deputies or senior teachers that she could trust to supervise, while Ms Williamson was fortunate enough to only have to suffer through this onerous task once or twice in the year.

They sat and watched empty desks, or crowded corridors, kids picking their noses, or blowing spit balls across the classrooms, or girls giggling at unseen phone screens.

The more innocuous of the deeds was disregarded and discarded, while others were noted for the attention of teachers and/or authorities, but ... the older equipment did mean that prints of screenshots were grainy at best, leaving perpetrators for the most part essentially unidentified.

All four women had gotten to the point where they were watching the clock as much as watching their monitors. It was 21h47, Monica’s heavy-lidded eyes were just sliding shut, yet again, when Heather let out a small screech.

“What ... what happened... ?” came in various guises from the other three in the room.

“Look, look here.”

Heather rewound the DVD disc, back to a frame, where the date-time in the bottom right corner showed today’s date, 15h40, in other words, only four hours ago.

The women all crowded around the monitor, to watch as Heather unpaused the action.

The door opened, and two girls entered the classroom, one could be seen pocketing a key, they split up and went to opposite corners, their phones out.

Three minutes later, another girl, like the previous two, a junior or a senior, by their apparent sizes appeared in the doorway, she was prodding a boy, a freshman by the size of him to enter the room.

He entered the room and then stood there. The girl was verbally abusing and/or berating him. The four women wished that they had an audio to go with this video. The scene may have been better understood. And then ... things started happening.

Michael glanced at his watch, a quarter to four. Stacey found this rude action a good cause for more verbal abuse, “don’t look at your watch, you need to learn your lesson.”

“Oh, okay, what lesson?”

As Stacey spewed forth invective, he was thinking, ‘darn, I might miss the last bus, ‘ but he had more important things to think about, like, ‘at least it doesn’t seem like she invited the whole football team to come kick my ass.’

He interrupted her to ask, “so, where’s your pair of minions?”

The other two girls were upset, but later that evening, it would be seen that they continued to film what was occurring.

“How dare you, “ Stacey screamed, “those two are my friends.”

All of the shouting and swearing (some new words that Michael had never yet heard before) and vitriol had still not caused Michael to lift his hand. Stacey’s plan had been for Michael to have a serious sense of humour failure, which if filmed, she could have blackmail on him, that he would even be able to be made into her gofer. The possibilities were endless, ‘he’s a freshman, just through puberty, with all of the little niggles that go with that’ – leering at all the good-looking girls – that just pissed Stacey off, she would make him a cuckold.

Michael was technically still going through puberty.

For some it is an extended period of personal hell, for others...

Michael had the itchy armpits and groin where hair had sprouted, his balls had ‘dropped’, but his voice was still prone to cracking.

While Michael was not cooperating with her plan, Stacey was losing her cool, and there was nothing that her friends could do to help her, especially when she raised her hand and slapped Michael’s face.

Hayley and Tanya looked on in horror, as Michael grabbed her hand, and pulled her towards one of the benches.

Michael spoke for the first time in minutes, “I don’t know where you get off telling me about lack of respect because I refused to vacate a spot that I know,” and he changed his voice to a girlish falsetto, “this is where we always sit,” voice back to normal, or as normal as an adolescent breaking voice can be, “I know that that is a lie, so, you were trying to set me up.”