The Principal Thing
Where bullies gather, the demon always comes. A short story.
In the beginning, it was just a boy.
Arnold wasn’t especially large or clever. But he was mean, and for a while, that was enough. He pushed, stole, tripped kids in the halls. His jokes were cruel, and they always landed. He smelled fear, and he knew how to use it. The teachers didn’t stop him, not really. Most of the other kids just wanted to survive. Some laughed along. A few cried quietly when no one was looking.
But nothing lasts forever.
The shift came slow. One day, a girl in the lunch line told him to pick up the tray he’d knocked over. She didn’t back down. But he didn’t pick it up either, opting instead to stomp off as threateningly as he could. That was the first little nail in the tire. Another day, a smaller boy said no, he wasn’t moving from his seat. Arnold shoved him out, of course. But the fact that this little runt said no—that was another nail. A few weeks later, Arnold shoved someone who laughed in his face, and suddenly he was the one who looked ridiculous.
There was a scent in the air, and the other students began to catch a whiff. Arnold didn’t look mean anymore. He looked, well, a little pathetic. Hitting kids who talked back to him, who dared to laugh. He suddenly seemed like he had a fragile little ego. There were even a few looks of pity.
He tried to adapt. He got louder. Meaner. He made up nastier rumors. But it didn’t work like it used to. People had stopped being afraid. Or worse—they’d started helping each other. The nice kids and the smart kids had begun speaking up, standing together. They ran for student council, organized tutoring, led assemblies. They mattered now.
Arnold had lost something important. Not just attention. Power.
And he hated them for it.
He wasn’t the only one.
That summer, in quiet corners of the internet and whispered conversations in neighborhood hangouts, other bullies found each other. The ones who mocked accents, who spread rumors like infections, who shoved and sneered. They shared stories of injustice—how they’d been punished for harmless jokes, how everything was too sensitive now, how you couldn’t even call someone a name without someone tattling.
They didn’t call themselves bullies. That would’ve required honesty. They called themselves the Straight-Thinkers Club. And they blew into the next school year determined to take back some of that intoxicating power they craved.
Their hangouts turned into meetings. In secret at first, then more boldly. They created a list of grievances, a sort of reverse honor roll. Names of the nice kids. The smart kids. The ones they said were ruining the school. They didn’t deserve their influence, the bullies said, because they were weak. They didn’t understand—brute strength was the only thing that made you important. The only thing that made you matter. The only thing that earned respect.
They wanted the old days back.
And in the new school year, they got them.
The new principal arrived just before the school year started at Daniel Drew Preparatory School, a private high school with ivy-covered brick, hand-painted honor codes, and an endowment that quietly dwarfed the town library’s entire budget. His name was Mr. Spedman J. Granger.
He was tall, a kind of hulking body neatly dressed, and spoke in the polished tone of someone who gave keynote addresses. He smiled often, but his eyes stayed flat. The first time he addressed the student body, it was through the intercom. His voice was smooth as varnish.
“Good morning, students. I am Mr. Granger, your new principal. This year, we return to discipline. To structure. To excellence. Respect will be our foundation. Results will be our proof.”
The students cheered. The nice kids clapped. The smart kids exchanged relieved looks. Maybe, finally, someone would enforce the rules fairly. The ad hoc rebellion against the bullies would hold. Maybe kindness would matter.
They misunderstood everything.
Granger took to patrolling the campus like a general. He walked with heavy, deliberate steps, nodding solemnly at teachers who stood at their doors, glaring at students who didn’t tuck in their shirts. Every infraction was noted. Every hallway whisper was recorded. He didn’t yell—he didn’t need to. A raised eyebrow from Granger was worth a week of detention.
In his office, he sat beneath a framed copy of the school’s mission statement: “Civics and Civility To Serve Our Country.” The wall beside it was blank at first. Then came portraits of former principals, school founders, and district leaders. Granger would sit at his desk, fingers steepled, staring at them like chess pieces.
He began keeping late hours. Janitors found him in the dark auditorium, sometimes standing on the stage alone. Once, a custodian overheard him reciting the morning announcements to the empty chairs, rehearsing them like a sermon.
He kept a whiteboard behind his desk, filled with names. Not students or staff, not directly. Just categories: “Obedient.” “Susceptible.” “Subversive.” He moved magnetic tags between them daily.
He started calling some students into his office not for discipline, but for “conversations.” No one noticed at first that these were mostly the students who’d been known as bullies.
Rather than telling them his vision of discipline meant that there would be no more bullying, he told them they were “misunderstood.” That the school “needed real leadership,” and he couldn’t do it without them. He gave them slogans, tactics, even reading material—pamphlets on organizational hierarchy, crowd control, narrative management.
He aimed to turn them from bullies into his faithful army, ready to do his bidding and institutionalize their bullying.
Anyone who got in the way of the Straight-Thinkers, now called the S-T, was the one who got into trouble for “provoking unrest.” To challenge the S-T was to challenge Mr. Granger himself.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
To the S-T, he said, “You’re the last line of defense.” To the PTA, he said, “They’re a student leadership initiative.” To the teachers, he said, “They’re just kids trying to be involved. Why would you be against that?”
At a second PTA meeting, Granger delivered a slide deck titled “Raising Resilience: How Structure Saves Minds.” He spoke of kids being “overstimulated” and “corrupted by softness.” He ended with: “A generation without rules is a generation without spine. And without spine, there is only collapse.”
He received a standing ovation.
After the meeting, he handed out pamphlets titled “Order Is Compassion.”
In the staff lounge, he left a different set of materials: one-pagers titled “Neutrality Is Complicity,” followed by disciplinary forms pre-filled with the names of certain students, mostly the smart and nice ones.
And late at night, alone in his office, Granger would pour himself a mug of black coffee, sit back in his leather chair, and smile.
He was winning.
Granger installed new hallway signs: Respect. Responsibility. Results. He talked about how he was making great changes—the likes of which the education world had never seen—and how so many other school boards and leaders were calling him, Spedman J. Granger, to praise him for what he was doing. No one else could have done it. He would quietly add, “I think they mean it because they get so overcome with emotion.”
Clubs now required approval. The Good Deeds Society was denied for being “vague.” The study groups were canceled. The school paper was “temporarily suspended.” The S-T Club, of course, didn’t need approval at all. Mr. Granger had set that one up himself.
A new group of hall monitors appeared—students wearing brown sashes and carrying notepads. They wrote down names, recorded infractions, and submitted weekly reports.
The Straight-Thinkers began holding mandatory meetings in the auditorium. Each one opened with a chant: “We are the shield. We protect the school from chaos.”
New recruits had to “report” a student first—someone disobedient, disrespectful, or disloyal—to earn their sash.
Lily Tran got detention for “excessive vocabulary.” Alex Gutierrez was punished for “projecting superiority.” A teacher’s aide was removed for showing “unbalanced empathy.”
When Mr. Alvarez, a popular science teacher, gently questioned the new discipline policy at a staff meeting, he was placed on leave. An email announced he had “chosen to pursue other opportunities.”
No one saw him again.
Soon, posters appeared in classrooms and hallways: Freedom through Structure. Loyalty through Order. And Rebellion is the first symptom of disloyalty.
At first, students joked about them. Then they realized they weren’t optional.
A group tried to start a counter-club: Students for Fairness. They wrote a mission statement, drafted rules, submitted paperwork.
It lasted three days.
On the fourth, its founder was summoned to the Reform Room. When she came back, she withdrew the application and never spoke of it again.
The S-T Club began running morning announcements. They talked about “traditional values,” and “protecting the school’s integrity,” and showing respect to the greatest principal any school had ever seen, Mr. Spedman J. Granger.
They weren’t pushing kids in the halls anymore. They were calling them in.
One student was written up for smiling “too much” in math class. Another was flagged for looking out the window. Students began walking with their heads down, unsure what might count as defiance.
The smart kids stopped raising their hands.
The nice kids stopped organizing meetings.
The S-T didn’t need fists anymore. They had clipboards.
And every morning, Granger smiled into the intercom: “Remember: the rules are for your protection.”
No one dared ask—protection from what?
Teachers who tried to help found themselves quietly removed. Some resigned. Some were investigated. A few disappeared without explanation.
Granger claimed their replacements would be “more aligned with school values.” Anyone who didn’t read the signals and tried to stay on risked being fired. Often, it came with a rumor—something inappropriate, something vague but damning.
By midyear, the school was unrecognizable.
Loyalty pledges replaced assemblies. All books required approval. Parents who complained were warned not to interfere.
One mother was banned from campus for sending too many emails.
Mr. Rourke, the history teacher, kept two lesson plans: one for class, one in case Mr. Granger walked in.
The Straight-Thinkers Club began assigning patrols. Brown sashes now came with armbands. Arnold—the boy who had started it all—was effectively the vice-principal, and he acted like it. No one dared cross him. With Granger behind him, he could shove anyone he wanted, take any kid’s lunch, demand anything at all.
Students were ordered to run errands: cleaning, note-taking, even washing Granger’s car. They called it “service learning.”
Those who refused were sent to the “Reform Room”—a windowless classroom with cameras in every corner and a rotating staff of three.
Rumors spread. Students said they were kept for hours, denied water, and questioned about their “loyalties.”
One girl came back pale and silent. Her friends said she barely ate for days.
At night, some students claimed they saw Mr. Granger walking the perimeter with a flashlight. One swore he was laying out small orange cones in geometric patterns. No one asked what he was doing. Whatever it was, they assumed it was brilliant. Too brilliant for them to understand.
Then something broke.
Granger began accusing the S-T of betrayal. He berated them during meetings, stripped them of sashes, and reassigned leaders. He accused them of the very things he’d taught them to do—bullying, violence, disloyalty. He said they had misunderstood his vision. He said all he ever wanted was civility.
One day, he demanded the S-T prove their loyalty by standing silently in the rain for an hour.
When one boy went home sick, he was expelled.
Later that week, Granger changed the school motto: Loyalty is proven in discomfort.
He began assigning strange tasks. Students were told to erase chalkboards repeatedly, count ceiling tiles, sort paperclips by color. If anyone asked why, they were told, “Discipline must become instinct.”
Rumors spread that Granger wasn’t reporting to the district anymore. That he’d locked teachers out of meetings. That even the janitors were being monitored.
Then came the fire.
It began in the teacher’s lounge late one night. A janitor, who later disappeared from the staff roster without explanation, said he saw smoke curling under the door just before flames burst out.
The sprinklers didn’t activate. The alarms didn’t go off. The fire moved like it had a plan.
First the lounge. Then the main office. Then the counseling center, the computer lab, the school records room.
Doors that should have slowed it down had been propped open. Flames followed the wiring. It moved too fast. Too deliberately.
Panic tore through the dormitories and classrooms. Students smashed windows. Smoke filled the stairwells. Teachers shouted conflicting orders—there was no plan. The S-T froze, then scattered.
And then Granger appeared.
Soaked from the rain, sleeves rolled up, eyes wild, he ran from room to room shouting, “Is everyone out? Has anyone seen the janitorial staff?” He kicked in doors. Pulled two first-years from a locked bathroom. Carried a framed copy of the founding charter from the flames and laid it on the lawn like a sacred text.
He emerged covered in soot, coughing into his elbow, fire extinguisher in hand. Students saw him directing firefighters. Teachers saw him cradle the school mascot statue like it was a wounded child.
Spedman J. Granger was a hero. Then he vanished.
By morning, half the school was gone.
Granger held a press conference. Cameras zoomed in on his bandaged hand. His voice was solemn, practiced.
“We nearly lost everything,” he said. “And I will not sleep until I find out who did this.”
He didn’t have to wait too long to get some shut-eye. He blamed the S-T Club.
He said they had become radicalized. That they had betrayed the values they were supposed to uphold. He released anonymous reports, disciplinary memos, partial emails.
The media ran with it.
S-T members were suspended, expelled, even charged. Some protested, but most didn’t. They believed in him. If he said they had to take the fall, then that was their duty.
“If he’s throwing us under the bus,” Arnold told a reporter, “then it must be a good bus.”
One student, when asked why he didn’t fight back, said simply, “You don’t fight the fireman when the building’s burning. Even if he lit the match.”
A few weeks later, Granger announced his candidacy for district superintendent.
His campaign poster appeared stapled to the scorched gates of the school:
INTEGRITY. DISCIPLINE. LEADERSHIP.
And in the bottom right corner, just small enough to miss at a glance: Paid for by the Committee for a Stronger Future.
A local pastor, now a close ally, began telling his congregation that God had called Granger to great things. He would go on to Congress. He would become President.
And maybe even higher than that.
Spedman J. Granger would always be where bullies who longed for power gathered. He’d be there, summoned like a demon from hell, willing to use them, get what he wanted, and throw them away.