Chapter 7

Shortly after they finished unloading the truck and removing the heavy equipment from their pallets, Mike bid farewell to Theresa and Marcus. As soon as they left, he returned the moving truck and returned with his car, parking in the loading dock tunnel to save himself the walk around the building. Inside the lab, he set about to precisely arrange the mill and lathe into their final positions with the aid of his trusty Johnson bar. It would take him the rest of the day just to get them properly oriented, shimmed to level, and bolted to the concrete floor. Several more days would be needed to connect them to power, perform axis and tool calibrations, align the spindles, and perform test runs. Still, he felt good about what they’d been able to accomplish so far that day.

Half a pizza still sat on the assembly table. Mike insisted Marcus take the other one home with him. He had access to the restroom upstairs, as well as the water fountain to refill his bottle. All of his necessities were taken care of. With nothing left to distract him, and no other plans for the rest of the day, Mike put in his AirPods, set his favorite Spotify list to shuffle play, and got to work leveling the first machine.

Ten feet overhead, Endora stood just outside the teacher’s lounge, staring at the basement door with red, bloodshot eyes as if in a trance. Muddy water dripped from her clothes onto the heavy, rough-sawn floorboards as the events leading up to her public humiliation at the hands of that cunt, Alexis Campbell, played out in her mind.

The six Elites hadn’t noticed her huffing and puffing her way up the hill from Leavitt Hall after waiting nearly forty minutes for Ms. Stafford and Mr. Bingham to finally leave. Nor did they pay her any attention when she slowed at the mention of Mr. Messina’s name. To members of the Elite, girls like Endora were practically invisible. Little more than background noise. Like servants or pets or houseplants.

When she first heard Alexis brag to her friends about sleeping with Mr. Messina, her heart sank with despair. Of all the vapid, undeserving sluts, why did it have to be her? Sure, she was incredibly beautiful. Almost painfully so. But Endora had never known Mr. Messina to act differently around the Elite, nor did he pay them any special attention. In fact, he seemed to purposefully ignore them. Even when that cocktease, Leah Carter, sat in front of him with her legs spread so he could see her hairy cooch, or leaned over his desk with her bare tits hanging down.

The more she heard Alexis speak of it, however, the more convinced she became that the bitch was making the whole thing up. It all sounded too fantastical. Too contrived. And she saw the skepticism on the faces of her friends too, even as they showered Alexis with praise and congratulations. No one was buying it. No one except Alexis herself.

Satisfied that Mr. Messina’s big, beautiful dick hadn’t been tainted by contact with Alexis’s diseased snatch, Endora was about to continue on her way when that cute, adorable spaz, Natalie, came tearing out of the dorm. Curious about what had her so excited, Endora lingered. And then she heard it. Natalie had watched the videos. No, she’d been shown the videos by someone else, and was now about to show them to the Elite.

Everyone on campus was about to learn of their existence. Nothing that explosive, that salacious, could ever be kept a secret. Every girl in the school would watch them, just as the eight members of the Robotics Club had watched them, and this would unleash the floodgates as five dozen horny teenage girls fought tooth and nail to be the first to fuck their real life porn star science teacher before he was inevitably fired. For Mr. Messina was definitely getting fired.

Endora realized that now. It was the only logical outcome. Ms. Haskell had shown the videos to Ms. Linda, and that old sourpuss was probably at that very moment in the process of firing him. All the talk of lawyers and lawsuits must have been because of this. Because of what Michelle had done. That dumb, fucking cow. How could someone so smart be so fucking stupid?

They’d worked so damned hard. They had a fucking plan. All they had to do was stick to it and Mr. Messina would have been theirs! He belonged to them, goddammit! Not anyone else!

Realizing that everything was about to come crashing down, Endora hurried to get back to the dorm so she could warn the others, but just at that very moment, Alexis suddenly stood up in front of her. Before she could get out an apology, before she even knew what had happened, Endora found herself sailing face first into the gross, disgusting pond.

Her clothes were soaked through and covered in streaks of bright green algae and shit colored mud. Her arms and chin were red and raw from where she’d scraped them over twigs and small bits of gravel on her slide into the water, those wounds no doubt crawling with bacteria and parasitic worms. By the time she managed to stand herself back up, with her pants and shirt clinging to her disgusting body like a skintight suit, the six Elites plus Natalie were already most of the way back to Overton. Her existence meant so little to them that they hadn’t even paused to revel in her misery. They had left that small joy to everyone else.

Rather than trudge through the crowd of onlookers to get back to her dorm room and clean herself up, Endora ran in the opposite direction. Away from the heckling crowd of Alexis wannabes. Back down the hill. Back to Leavitt Hall. With tears blurring her vision, she began twisting knobs and rattling doors, and to her great surprise, one of them opened. A side door that someone forgot to lock. She rushed inside, her feet carrying her down a dim hallway, to the very door before which she now stood.

As if possessed by an unseen force, she extended her hand to open it. The basement’s fluorescent lights shone on her mud-streaked face, and she heard a faint, high-pitched noise. A power tool of some kind, perhaps a saw or drill, but it sounded muffled and far away. She descended the stairs without fear, her feet moving of their own accord. The lab’s main work area stood empty, as if the force compelling her knew it would be so. The sound, whatever it was, came from one of the two storage rooms, but not the one where their flight case was stored. With hardly a thought, she turned to walk slowly and calmly in that direction.