Episode 1: The paperclip premiere

”In the series premiere, Miss Vargas acquires firsthand experience with her students’ antics, and the teacher is taught a thing or two herself about the manifold uses of paperclips.”

Introductions went a lot faster than she had budgeted for. There wasn’t much to say really. Some names, everyone was local or from nearby, some quick questions about what they’d done between high school and now, a few jokes to break the tension. Maria had decided already that the room was better than its reputation. It’d take a while before she knew everybody’s name by heart, but there were already some she could file away in her mind who she’d remember first.

Jordan. Second row, center, an affable twenty-three-year-old and popular with the others. She’d need to win him over first to get the rest of class to follow suit.

Maria decided to start with languages. Spanish, specifically. A simple refresher to start off the course couldn’t do any harm, and enough accented Spanish was spoken around the area that it could be genuinely useful for these kids.

Jacqueline. By the window, third row. That denim jacket and slouch scream trouble, but nothing a firm hand can’t fix. She just needs someone to believe in her.

Miss Vargas turned to the board and began writing a couple lines of Spanish conjugations. Jacqueline popped some bubblegum. Ignore it for now. See if the behavior persists. “Spanish gives you two verbs for to be,” she said. “One for what is temporary or transient. One for what is a permanent, inherent characteristic.” She wrote a few more lines on the board. El suéter está aquí. El suéter es de lana. “The sweater is here, for now. The sweater is wool, it’ll always be so. Is the difference clear to everybody?”

Trevor. In front and to the right of Jacqueline. Quiet, broad shoulders, answers in full sentences. The kind of student that’s easy to like for a teacher.

Heads nodded. Pens scribbled notes. Owen. Daydreamer. Maya. Dry wit.

Miss Vargas pivoted back to the blackboard. She naturally dismissed the feeling of slight pulls near her sternum and along her hip as she reached up to underline está. That was just the stretch, the ordinary tug of tight cloth when one wrote too high. She didn’t look down to see the small bent paperclips on fishwire Jordan and Jacqueline had somehow managed to hook onto her zippers, thrown in the liminal seconds Maria's gaze was turned away but the zipper on her chest still half-turned towards the classroom, as the taps and scrapes of chalk and her own lecturer’s voice were much louder than the faint tingle of metal.

The lesson found its rhythm. Maria sank into the details of her lecture, and the students were focused intently on her every word. So far everything seemed to be going well. It might’ve been a mean thought, but maybe Miss Calloway just wasn’t cut out to handle this class, while Miss Vargas was thriving. The fishwires were much too thin for her to casually glimpse, particularly while so engrossed with other matters. Slowly, both zippers crawled lower. Each tug was timed to a larger motion — a step here, a reach there, a pivot or a turn there — drowning out the small sensation. Maria leaned over to open a desk drawer, and her sweater zipper ran down another two inches when she came back up, exposing the full curve of her bra. She stretched high to clean some more space at the top of the blackboard, and the skirt tab ticked down a few more teeth.

Jordan raised a hand, asking Miss Vargas to confirm some assumptions he’d made in his notes. Maria came down the aisle and bent over his notebook. The path between desks was narrow, and so when Trevor’s eraser rolled off his desk and he stooped to retrieve it, he bumped into Maria’s hip with an “oops, sorry professor,” while she steadied herself against Jordan’s desk. Behind her Jacqueline used the opportunity to tug the wire and draw the last of the miniskirt’s zipper down, letting the garment whisper down her hips and to the floor. Nobody in class laughed. They were all committed to a stony silence. At most, a phone camera silently snapped a picture.

Miss Vargas was unwittingly walking around in her black lacy panties, showing her curvy ass to the entire classroom.

Vargas, still reading Jordan’s notes, remained unaware of her appearance. She nodded he’d been correct, and pushed herself up from his desk to return to the front. Her sweater hung open. The upwards motion had been enough for Jordan to hold onto the wire and let her do the work for him. She did not notice. She merely thought she felt light as a feather today.