The Spelling Bee Champion Who Couldn't Write Her Own Name

By the time I wiped the blood off the blackboard for the third time, Lisa's pen had pierced three answer sheets. This eighth grader, who has won the spelling championship for four consecutive years, is now repeatedly drawing some non-Euclidean figures on the table with her left index finger. Barcode-like bruises appear under the skin of her right arm, changing the code synchronously with the flickering lights on the auditorium.

"The game is suspended!" I rushed over to hold her twitching wrist, and the touch felt like holding an overloaded server chassis. The principal coughed on the judges' table. He was wearing a math joke tie today - π≈3.14 with a gallows drawn next to it.

Lisa suddenly looked up, her pupils contracted into feline vertical lines: "Teacher, do you know that the Fibonacci sequence will kill people after the 13th place?" Her voice was double reverberated, and the second voice was clearly the former principal who died in a car accident last year. The chalk in my pocket automatically drew a fractal pattern on the cement floor, pointing to the iron door of the storage room with an "earthquake damaged" seal.

Before the security arrived, I found 37 bottles of eye drops of different colors in Lisa's locker. The labels on the bottles were marked with Morse code to indicate the expiration date, and the brown liquid at the bottom smelled like burnt neurons. My phone suddenly vibrated, and I received an email from Lisa's mother asking for leave, and the time of the email was 9:47 a.m. three days later.

"You shouldn't mind your own business." The janitor pushed a lawn mower to block the corridor, and the blades rotated to the melody of "Alice". He opened the hay box, which was filled with spelling competition trophies with teeth marks. When I stepped back, I stepped on a crumpled cafeteria ticket, and on the back was written in ketchup: They traded vowels for life.

At this moment, I was curled up in the ventilation duct of the biology laboratory, and all the microscope slides under the ultraviolet light showed human faces. Specimen No. 19 is unusually active, copying Lisa's handwriting on the glass: "Run away, substitute teachers are all palindromes!"

The locker below suddenly heard a coin falling to the ground - it was Lisa's favorite 1943 steel coin. But the frequency of its landing formed an SOS signal, and the vibration frequency was completely synchronized with the data of my heart monitor APP.

(Did your phone just receive a word push from an unknown source? It is recommended to check the permission settings of recently installed educational software. Don't worry, it's just a story - for now.)