A/N: Response time!
Gs33022, I'm glad you enjoyed Bill's appearance! Now that Violet has accepted the shifts, you're going to be seeing quite a bit more of him later on. He's still fairly minor, but appearances still will be notable.
The rest of the week passed, and it was finally Friday. Of note, as Willy Wonka saw Violet to the foyer that morning so that she could head out to school, he thought about how much differently the day was intended to turn out originally. It was, after all, not only the day of Violet's first shift (which she had told Mr. Wonka about achieving when she came back from Bill's Candy Shop that one afternoon), but also October first, the day that Mr. Wonka was planning originally to hold his Golden Ticket tour. At least I'm still holding on for now, he thought to himself.
Violet began to notice something consistently in the afternoons between landing the job and now. If she came back to the factory just after school, sooner or later, someone about her age always would head to the gates and peer through for a little bit, frequently taking big sniffs as he did so. He didn't look like somebody who went to school with Violet—after all, he was dressed casually—so all Violet could make out of him was that he was much less affluent. He had a somewhat messy mop of blond hair and always was wearing a large sack slung over one shoulder. Violet assumed that he must have been the paperboy of whom Mr. Wonka had spoken when he was citing jobs that youths could land. In any case, the boy surely seemed interested in Mr. Wonka's factory; he would stay and watch for a few minutes before leaving. The factory being so vast, Violet wondered if he could see her shadow through one of the windows? Fortunately for her, the lodging was way out back, so when she could see him, she was always in the foyer, so probably not. Still, she hoped that she was not casting an odd shape for anybody outside to see at dusk. Violet could not see the front of the factory from the lodging, so she didn't know if this kid wandered out at night to peer in once again or not.
It made Violet think of a seriously awkward event that occurred on the very night of her tenth birthday. She had had a normal celebration during the day, and it was about nine-thirty at night. Violet had been in bed, as always, and the door to her room had been closed and locked securely. Additionally, although her bedroom was in the back of the house, the blinds on the windows had been pulled all the way down and shaded for safety. Suddenly, Mr. and Mrs. Beauregarde had been interrupted from their rest in the living room (reading the newspaper and doing needlepoint, respectively) by the sound of the doorbell ringing. It had turned out to be the next-door neighbor, Mrs. McDuffy, who had come over to deliver a late birthday card. She had wanted the birthday girl to come up front and receive it personally, and she very nearly had walked across the living room and towards the hallway with Violet's bedroom before Mr. and Mrs. Beauregarde had been able to get rid of her just in time by saying that it was late and Violet would see the card in the morning. True, the door had been locked, but who knew what contingency plan Mrs. McDuffy might have had? It probably would have been just waiting for Violet to unlock the door, but even that would have been a disaster. Thank goodness the neighbor had been deferred. While not quite as severe, Violet felt that the paperboy was somewhat like Mrs. McDuffy in that situation, peering into the place without knowledge of what eyeful he might be getting.
This was unimportant right now, though. School was going to start soon, so Violet had to focus on heading to the building and then going to her very first shift afterwards. As she left the front door and headed down the red carpet, Mr. Wonka watching her, both of their minds were full. Mr. Wonka was thinking of the tour he had had to postpone, and Violet was wondering not only about how working at Bill's Candy Shop might go, but also what that mysterious boy possibly could be doing glancing through the gates on a consistent basis.
...
School went by somewhat normally that day until third period came around. It was history class, and at first, nothing out of the ordinary occurred. There was just a lecture, followed by an assignment to copy down notes from the textbook. Violet was focused enough on the assignment that, without thinking, she shifted one of her cheeks, popped her gum, and started to rotate her jaws on autopilot. Immediately, she caught the attention of the pupil sitting to her right, who raised his hand.
"Yes, Mr. Flannery?" the teacher called.
He pointed to Violet. "I think Violet's chewing gum!"
The teacher became stern. "Miss Beauregarde, is this true? This is a gum-free institution!" She got up and walked over, looking towards Violet's mouth.
Violet closed her mouth immediately, shifting her gum to a position just below the side of her tongue. "I don't know what you're talking about."
The teacher didn't buy it. "Open up."
Violet opened her mouth very nervously. Unfortunately for her, part of the white blob could be seen very clearly under her tongue.
The teacher pointed to the trashcan near the door. "I thought so. Spit it out, please."
"But I could just stash it for later! I won't put it back in during class, I promise!"
The rest of the class found this quite entertaining. Some of them were struggling not to laugh.
"I said to spit it out!"
Violet rolled her eyes, defeated. There went her chance of chewing this piece for the world record. She walked over to the trash can, spat out the gum, and proceeded to head back to her desk.
"Just where do you think you're going, young lady?" the teacher suddenly demanded sternly.
"I'm just taking my seat again," Violet answered innocently.
"Not so fast, Miss Beauregarde. Come over here, please!" Pointing and patting at the same time, she indicated a spot right by the front desk.
The other students were looking entertained again. Violet was just confused. Regardless, she heeded the imperative and walked over to the teacher's desk anyway.
"Bend over!" the teacher demanded. Violet did so.
"Stretch your arm out on the desk!" Violet proceeded to extend her left arm fully, but with the wrist facing sideways and the fingers curled.
"With the palm UP, please!" the teacher further demanded, rotating Violet's arm manually and extending out the fingers so that they were lying flatly.
Her classmates were clearly enjoying this. With Violet's palm in the proper position, the teacher walked to the nearest corner of the room and took out a long, yellow, bamboo-looking cane with tick marks. Violet looked at it in scared shock. Suddenly, her being asked to come in front of the class like that became all too clear.
...
Violet rubbed the sore welt on her left palm as she came out of the school building several hours later. The pain had gone fairly quickly, but the soreness was still quite irritating. She didn't know which was more embarrassing: the fact that she had been given such a punishment in front of the class, or her discovery that she could yip involuntarily like a chihuahua. On the slim plus side, at least school policy had spared her hiney. Violet couldn't possibly imagine having to rub the soreness there, let alone trying to sit on it. The worst thing here was that she had to leave her left glove off in the cold. She hoped that Bill would not see the welt that she did have. A fresh piece of gum in her mouth, she reached the end of the sidewalk, walked down the crosswalk, and arrived at the shop.
She was just in time to check in, as a group of younger children were on their way there, too. Violet walked inside and alerted Bill to her presence.
"Oh, this is excellent timing, miss!" he greeted. "There are just three minutes until you'll be due to start! Why don't you come along back here?" He lifted the flap on the counter to let Violet behind it and escorted her to the storage room she had been shown when she applied.
"I've been running low on Slugworth's Sizzlers, so when you're all set, getting some from this area to put on the shelf can be the first thing you do today."
Violet nodded. She was in the process of taking off her winter clothes and putting them in a stack nearby. "What do they look like?"
"They're in this box over here. They're shaped like marble-sized hot coals, kind of reddish orange." Bill indicated the box. "The Sizzlers go on the fourth shelf to the right of this room, from the customers' perspective, on the second shelf from the bottom."
Violet nodded again, taking a few packages. As she did so, Bill could see the long, red mark on Violet's left palm. "By golly, Violet!" he exclaimed, astonished. "What happened to your hand?"
"I got caned a few times at school today," Violet said, hanging her head.
"Oh, dear! Well, I hope that it won't interfere with your handling anything today."
"It won't," Violet assured him. "It stopped stinging a while back."
"Well, that's good. Still, that's not a very good way to start a weekend!"
"You don't have a gum rule, do you?" Violet asked. Truth be told, even if Bill was going to tell her to spit it out during her shift, she wasn't going to listen; rather, she planned on just sticking her gum behind her ear and then sneaking the gum right back into her mouth when Bill was occupied. Besides, she had started a brand-new piece anyway, though not by choice, and it still had some flavor left.
"I should think not," Bill answered her. "After all, lots of people who come in here eat their candy right on the spot, and that includes starting to chew their gum before they go out of the door."
Violet gave a sigh of relief. She was not about to be busted twice on the same day.
She picked up several of the packages of Slugworth's Sizzlers and came back into the main area behind the counter, placing them in the indicated spot. By now, a few children had entered the shop and were now needing Bill's attention.
As Violet was heading back into the storeroom, she caught a glimpse of the window of the shop and noticed the same boy who always stopped by Willy Wonka's factory in the afternoons. She figured that surely, this kid would step into the shop, being as fascinated by candy as she assumed him to be. Instead of entering, however, he just stood by the window, peering inside, with a forlorn look on his face. After about a minute, he left. Violet was absolutely puzzled why, but she brushed it off quickly. After all, as far as she was concerned, he was just a face in the crowd.
Bill's Candy Shop proved to be a bit more popular than Violet had expected. In just the hour and a half that she was there, she had to restock not only the Sizzlers, but also the Scrumdiddlyumptious bars, the mints, and even the gumball machine. Eventually, the shift ended, and Violet was tasked with sweeping the storeroom before going.
Bill gave her £6.25 in cash, double-checking to make absolutely sure that it was the correct post-decimal amount. Violet looked it over, too.
"What about taxes?" she asked.
"Oh, don't worry about that, Violet!" Bill assured her. "Around here, this amount is far too low for deductions to be required. You won't need to start worrying about that until university. In fact, this is too low for you to worry about income tax."
"Okay, then!" Violet answered. She put the cash payout into her handbag, put on her coat and hat, and left, Bill calling out in a friendly manner that he would be seeing her tomorrow.
...
Mr. Wonka was in the foyer when Violet came back. He knew that she was back late from the job (which was the subject of a very brief and non-notable conversation), and, luckily, he did not notice before she vanished into the Wonkavator that she had a caning mark on her left palm.
Violet made slight modifications to her routine when she returned to the lodging. She changed from her school uniform directly into sleepwear, as she had less time to herself now than usual. Dinner was smaller than usual; she had a few Oompa-Loompas over to help cook some chicken tortellini, which was gone within half an hour, with brownies for dessert. The brownies that she couldn't eat were set aside on a counter. Afterwards, she spent a lot of the early evening listening to a comedy sketch program on the radio in the sitting room. Violet wished that Mr. Wonka would just get a TV installed—radio was SO two decades ago, in her opinion—but she would have to do with this. She considered the money that she would be earning from Bill, but even that was likely wishful thinking.
When Violet transformed a little while later, before even heading to bed, she tried to see the long welt on her hand out of curiosity. The mark was a deep, rich shade of purple.
A/N: No, I don't agree with academic corporal punishment. (It's now banned in most countries, including all of the nations in Europe, anyway.) However, schools were extremely fond of it back then.
