Even as she realized what she would use, her feet were whisking her down the hallway toward her classroom.
Breathing fast, not used to exertion, Cilla hurried through the doorway of her room and went straight for her desk. What she wanted stuck out of one of the cartons she had packed, too big to fit inside under a lid.
It was a souvenir of days long gone, a talisman of ancient times when teachers had still possessed power and students had feared them. It was a piece of history that she had kept in the back of the bottom of a drawer, as if imagining that it might someday return to service, that a wind would sweep away the incompetent leaders and restore the schools to the centers of discipline and learning that they had once been.
The wood felt solid in her hand as she drew it from th
