She churns down the school corridors to music that sounds like the theme for The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West; students scatter rather than get caught in the laser beam of her cool rage. In history class she makes one think of Harry Potter's Professor Snape, so regal is her malevolence, so acute her gift for the demeaning remark that cuts through the skin of her best students and into their fragile egos. Her intellect has veered into artful cruelty. Her ambition has been curdled by this life sentence in a town she was dying to leave, and...
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