Least said, soonest mended

A documentary you saw once about the Littlerock-9 pops into your mind. Whenever a small group of outsiders is **** into a system that has functioned for decades without them there is bound to be trouble. You recall your mother's words about 'least said, soonest mended' and return the drawing to the envelope and return to your quarters. Arriving, you place it with the other half of the carton in a desk drawer and as you do you notice the Code of Conduct that you had been idly leafing through before the knock on the door.

Much of it was pretty straight forward - dress code, curfews, visitors to the dormitories, parking permits, and all the other things that come up in the course of running a school - but one aspect of the rules reflects the age of the stapled booklet. The primary redress to infractions in the code is by use of the paddle that you found here in your new office. Different levels of offenses were carefully categorized by the seriousness of the act and the number of strokes applied to the students bare backsides were carefully listed.

Even for a book published - you pause to check the year on the cover - in 1995, this seems to be a very outdated approach to discipline. Perhaps not as outlandish to you as some other policies you've researched in the past week because of the number of times you'd been walloped during your early years. But you were a rough-and-tumble boy in the high country of West Virginia, these were elite debutants with polished fingernails and perfectly coifed hair. You'd better get your hands on a updated handbook before you made a complete fool of yourself.

The obvious person to turn to is Ms. Naylor, but as much as you'd like to see her again, it is probably best to let things cool down a little before trying sway her opinion of you and your fellow male teachers. The next most likely option is the library, and after a quick check of the map you head back to the main building, only this time up the impressive stairway to the second floor.

The library dominates this level with books shelved well above your six feet on every wall and polished tables in the center of the room. A railing circles above the open floor where you are standing and you see more stacks on the floor above you. Above that floor you can see the thick beams and rafters that hold up the slate roof like the inside of a cathedral. Furthering the impression of a religious facility are the beams of light that stream in from the tall windows on both sides of the great room and the dormers far above. Once when you were in Prague you visited one of the centuries old buildings and saw a hall like this, but even that university chamber lacked the rich luxuriousness of this library.

You wander in silence stepping on thick burgundy colored carpets and trailing your fingers along the heavy wooden tables and plush chairs. Sturdy wooden ladders built into tracks on the floor slide easily along the walls allowing even the shortest of students to reach the shelves above your reach. Through doors on either end of the sixty foot room you see nooks and rows of computers, but the this main section could have looked like this over one-hundred and fifty years ago when it was first built.

After three or four minutes of half-hearted searching you give up and raise your voice, hoping that someone will be able to help you.

"Hello? Is anybody here?" You didn't even yell, but in the eerie silence of the empty library it sounds like you were using a megaphone.