Miss Vargas ponders her options to get home

Maria flitted about the room, arms folded across her body, constantly changing positions as she buzzed with panicky indecision. Where are they? Where are they?! She checked her chair, behind her desk, beneath her desk, she scrambled around the aisles to see if her skirt and sweater might’ve been left there, tucked behind the table legs. She pulled a drawer she’d opened during the lesson, and overturned her purse, as if her missing clothes might conceivably be inside there somehow. Had they somehow fallen off her during class. The miniskirt she could at least imagine, but the sweater? Oh no… had she been so absentminded this morning she had forgotten to put them on altogether; introduced herself to class like this? No, surely not! This couldn’t possibly have been the students doing — could it? Calloway’s warning stirred in her memory.

Regardless of how it happened, she was faced with a problem! She was standing in just her lace and her stockings and her heels in a big, public building. She could attempt an escape. Looking out the window, the parking lot sat below them, an expanse of sun-baked asphalt with two dozen cars. Her car was on the far side. She knew a route that didn’t take her through the most populated portions of the school: Through the corridor, down a flight of stairs at the corner of this wing, out a side door, and then maybe twenty meters across some grass and open tarmac. Fully clothed it was a short jaunt. In her… unmentionables, it might as well be marathon. She couldn’t afford to be spotted by people! Not by any more people, at any rate. Everybody had a camera in their pocket these days, and these students could get it out to snap a dozen pics like the things were fused to their hands.

However if she waited… the school would eventually be empty. Once the last bell rang, the building would drain of students in the blink of an eye. She’d just have to sneak out in between the time the students went home and the last of her colleagues had left, and the time the janitor did the final rounds through the building before locking all the doors. She could hide behind her desk and listen to the building go quiet, or she could collect her fading courage and go now, crouch low to the ground, take the stairs two steps at a time, and make a mad dash across the parking lot. But if I’m spotted I’ll jumpstart a career as an underwear model in all the school groupchats… Why did I have to pick the sexy ones today!

Maria heard some footsteps and laughter echo faintly in the distance and flinched. She hadn’t made a move yet towards either choice, and right now she was just an underdressed idiot, motionless — and totally visible — in the middle of her classroom in some very flattering lingerie. Miss Vargas remained momentarily frozen between hiding behind the desk or hurrying out the door, trying to choose which kind of stupid she was willing to be.