Coulson and Melinda stood frowning outside the gates of Julia Academy. Coulson wore a formal suit, while Melinda had, unusually, traded her usual skintight combat gear for a light short-sleeved dress. The dress and high heels felt so awkward and uncomfortable that she could barely stand them.
If she had a choice, Melinda would rather fight a group of terrorists than show up at a school dressed like this! That day, a teacher had called them and insisted they come to Ms. Maine's office before school let out that afternoon. The teacher hadn't said what it was about.
"Melinda, what do you think this is about? Could Annie have set some little troublemaker on fire?" Standing at the school entrance, Coulson took off his sunglasses and, for once, made a small joke to Melinda.
"Give me a break, Phil! If that were really the case, it wouldn't be a teacher calling us. It'd at least be the police." Melinda figured Annie had probably just been acting up.
"Fair enough! Well, let's go see what the teacher has to say. I'll bet a hundred dollars Annie beat up some poor kid. Want to take that bet?" Coulson said with a grin as he put his sunglasses in his jacket pocket and headed inside.
"..." Melinda shook her head and gave Coulson an exasperated look. Phil really must have been bored lately. She wasn't about to bet on something so pointless!
Maine Lynsky was one of the school's teachers. In the United States, elementary school teachers were generally expected to teach several subjects, and Maine was no exception. She mainly taught math, English language arts, and science. She was also the advisor for several students.
Public K–12 schools generally didn't have homeroom teachers, and home visits by teachers were strictly forbidden. Private schools, however, were different.
At private schools, a small group of students was usually assigned an advisor. The role was a little like that of a homeroom teacher back in China: the advisor guided several students and wrote reports on their progress at school for their parents a few times each year.
And when a student did something truly outrageous, the school might call in the parents for a meeting. Teachers usually didn't criticize the student directly or try to pin the blame on them. Instead, they would first talk to the parents, hoping to find the root of the problem there.
That was why Coulson and Melinda were now walking into Ms. Maine's office in an awkward silence!
They were two senior agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., yet now the school had called them in to "talk to the parents." The experience left Coulson and Melinda, both currently single, feeling awkward—and a little strangely curious.
"Hello. It's nice to meet you both. Please, have a seat!"
Ms. Maine watched the two middle-aged visitors—Coulson and Melinda—as they entered, then flipped through the student information folder in her hands.
"So you're Annie's parents? Phil Coulson and Melinda May?" Seeing the names in the guardian information section, Ms. Maine looked puzzled. Annie's surname didn't seem to have anything to do with either of them. She found that rather odd.
"Uh, no, of course not! We're just Annie's uncle and aunt. Her parents... well, they work for the government in a sensitive capacity, so we're temporarily acting as her guardians." Coulson hesitated for a moment, then quickly came up with a fairly convincing explanation.
"Is Annie having trouble with her studies?"
Melinda found the role she was playing deeply uncomfortable. She was much better suited to being a field agent in combat than pretending to be Annie's parent! Feeling increasingly ill at ease, she wanted to get this over with as soon as possible, so she hurriedly spoke up.
"No! Annie's doing perfectly well in school! In fact, she's doing great in every subject. In some of them, she's even far above the average for students her age." Maine thought of Annie's music teacher, who had promised her an A+ after just one lesson.
And then there was Annie's math class. One day, Maine had given the class a perfectly ordinary problem. When Annie raised her hand and said she knew how to solve it, Maine asked her to work it out on the board.
And then... Annie wrote a whole pile of mathematical formulas on the board in front of Maine and the entire class. What Maine found hardest to accept was that, aside from the final answer, she couldn't understand a single step of the solution—even though she was the math teacher!
Afterward, she took a picture and sent it to her former university advisor, who had a doctorate in mathematics. His verdict was that the solution was correct, though the process was overly complicated and some parts involved extremely advanced mathematics. Of course, a few of the formulas looked rather strange. Her advisor thought Maine had come up with the solution herself, praised her, and encouraged her to keep pursuing mathematics.
Maine hadn't dared correct her advisor's misunderstanding. She'd just stammered out a response before hanging up. How could she tell him that she hadn't solved the problem—that it was an eight-year-old girl in her class? That would have been downright alarming!
"If it's not her schoolwork, then what's the problem with Annie?"
Coulson and Melinda were confused. If it wasn't her studies, had Annie reduced some poor kid to ashes? If so, surely Ms. Maine wouldn't be sitting there so calmly. Then she must have beaten some kid black and blue. Hopefully the child hadn't been too badly hurt. Besides, wasn't it perfectly normal for kids to squabble and fight?
Coulson remembered once hitting a classmate hard on the head with a broken brick when he was a kid. Fortunately, all the other boy got was a bump. Otherwise, Coulson might have spent his childhood in juvenile detention.
"Here's what happened. Yesterday... during our lab session, you probably can't imagine what I saw!"
Maine took a moment to steady herself as she recalled what had happened that morning. It was supposed to be a perfectly normal lab lesson: dissecting frogs. She'd needed to go back to her office to get some essential materials, and expected it would take a while. So she'd planned to let the students observe the live frogs in the bucket while she was gone...
But she never imagined what she'd find when she returned to the lab. There, surrounded by a small fire, was a group of students eating roasted frogs! Good Lord! Her students had made a little bonfire right there in the lab and roasted the frogs she'd planned to use for the dissection lesson!
And the culprit was undoubtedly Annie!
She'd talked her classmates into it and led the way in roasting the frogs! They'd even used pieces of two broken wooden chairs to fuel the fire. But what Maine couldn't figure out was where Annie had gotten the matches or lighter to start it.
Maine had been so scared she nearly had a heart attack! The school nurse later confirmed that the students were unharmed, and the frog legs were edible and had been thoroughly cooked...
After the incident, the first thing the facilities department at Julia Academy did was install security cameras in that classroom, along with automatic sprinklers and other fire-safety equipment. The teachers were also ordered never to leave students alone in the lab during a lesson again!
"We're very sorry about that! We'll pay the school's bill for any damage Annie caused." Coulson and Melinda exchanged a look and secretly wiped away their sweat. They apologized on the surface, but inwardly they were relieved. Everything was fine! She'd only roasted a few frogs, not people!
(Revised 1)
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