(Evening of same day, back home):

It's been quite a day – and we haven't even reached the climactic battle yet. There's a skirmish coming up tomorrow morning, but it's only the prelude to the real showdown.

What happened immediately after the last entry: I hid the vehemently protesting Leia Origami in my jacket pocket, and opened the door to let Gorman in, while glancing around hastily in case there was anyone else in the corridor. There wasn't – the students had long gone home, and so had nearly all the teachers.

'I, uh, just had some paperwork to finish going through,' I explained hastily.

'So I see,' said Gorman, glancing at the folder. 'Another holomessage from the Origami Rebels?'

'Did you send me this?' I snapped. 'To make fun of me?'

'Oh, no, I'd be too frightened to make fun of a principal!'

Something in his tone stopped me. It sounded like a Star Wars line, but I couldn't place it. 'Is that a Han quote?' I asked.

He shook his head. 'Anakin. Attack of the Clones. Haven't you seen it?'

'I haven't watched any of the prequels,' I said. 'Are they any good?'

'They're – different,' Gorman said. 'They give you a lot more context. They make sense of how people who started off meaning to be heroes ended up as villains.'

'"Empress Principalpatine,"' I said bitterly.

'So? They've been calling me Jabba the Hutt for years. And Rancor Breath. And Space Slug. And the only reason they don't call me Darth Vader is that one of the kids has already chosen Vader as his Star Wars avatar. Just treat it as a compliment.'

'It's a compliment to be compared to the most evil man in the galaxy?'

'Teenagers always rebel, okay? So if they want to see themselves as the good guys, they need to cast us as the villains. It means we're memorable enough to be part of the mythos.'

I was on the verge of retorting, 'I'd rather they remembered how to do quadratic equations,' when I realised that, actually, no, I wouldn't. Of course I want our students to remember how to solve math problems – and to remember it for life, for long enough to know when politicians are trying to fool them with fake statistics, not just for long enough to pass this year's tests and ensure that we don't lose our funding. But when they look back on their schooldays when they're our age, I hope they remember things like finding a hummingbird hawk moth, and staging an impromptu gender-flipped production of Oliver Twist in the school cafeteria, and sticking up for friends who are being bullied for being gay or poor – or who are on the verge of being expelled by me. And I hope, when they look back, they'll think, not 'Yeah, we had a few laughs before we realised that the adults were right and passing tests was all that counted,' but 'That was when we realised we could change the world.'

'So why can't they rebel against things that matter?' I said aloud. 'Against climate change, or the destruction of Brazilian rainforests, or Wendy's handing out crappy plastic toys that aren't even recyclable and just go straight in the trash?'

'They probably still want the toys,' Gorman pointed out. 'They are kids, after all. But yes, there are plenty of bigger problems for them to rebel about. By the time they're in high school, they probably will. But why would they expect adults to listen to them about complex issues, if we won't even listen to them about something they have first-hand experience of, like being forced to watch patronising remedial videos of material they've all known since fourth grade?'

'You're still a Rebel at heart, too, aren't you?' I said. 'Did you want to be Luke, when you were young?'

'No, I wanted to be Han. He gets the girl.' And he smiled at me. Gorman doesn't smile a lot, or not with his mouth anyway, though there's a sparkle of amusement in his eyes more often than people think. This wasn't a 'clowning around playing at being a villain doing an evil laugh' smile, either. This was an actual smile, and it lit up my office.

I wanted to kiss him right then. (Actually, I've wanted to kiss him for quite a long time, and in the privacy of my office, it wouldn't contravene my ban on Public Displays of Affection.) But Leia Origami, still hidden in my jacket pocket, whispered to me, It's not over yet.

'So, what do you Rebels want?' I asked.

'Give us the worksheets if you must,' Gorman said. 'Just don't make us listen to that kriffing singing calculator any longer.'

I didn't mention that I already knew that he pressed the mute button after the first few minutes of every video and just told the class to do the worksheets in silence.

'And for Force's sake, don't spend yet more school money on buying the souped-up digital version for next year,' he added. 'Even with the discounts we got from Edu-Fun for buying their test papers, school meals and floor wax at the same time, we can't afford it.'

'I hadn't made any final decisions about the floor wax…' I began, realised how pathetic that sounded, and broke off.

'So, just hypothetically, if a class didn't watch the videos and just filled out the worksheets, how long would a typical test prep session take, do you suppose?' I asked.

'Five minutes – ten at most. With no loss of accuracy in the answers. Better accuracy, in fact, because they're not bored out of their tiny skulls.'

'That leaves a gap of nearly an hour on the timetable,' I said. 'Don't you think they'd cause trouble, left without activities for that long?'

'They're not babies. They're a creative lot. If they're quiet, it doesn't matter what they find to occupy themselves – silent reading, or drawing, or…'

'The Dreaded Origami?' I suggested. I remembered a comic book I had once read about an orphan boy who tried to raise some money by teaching his friends martial arts, only to realise that he had sent off for a book on origami by mistake, and that his pupils were quite dubious about how learning to make a paper duck could enable them to beat up enemies with a flick of the wrist. If only the cartoonist could have met Origami Yoda and Darth Paper...

But in real life – why had I ever banned origami? Other principals worry about drugs, teenage pregnancy, child abuse, eating disorders, guns and knives. As far as I know, I am the only principal anywhere who had somehow turned folding paper, of all things, into a disciplinary problem. Of course, after Lori Calhoun had outright defied me in front of students, and pointed out that she had bought in a number of new books on origami, I had to compromise on that one.

'Creative bunch, aren't they?' I said. 'They'd do better if they had proper art materials, of course.'

'They'd do better if they had a proper art teacher,' Gorman retorted. 'Somehow, I don't think Tammy Richards is likely to come back now.'

'She was pretty angry, being sacked at such short notice,' I said. Telling her hadn't been as bad as telling Kimberly Hardaway, who used to teach chorus and drama, though. Tammy had just glared at me, but Kimberly had looked as if she was struggling not to cry.

'Not so short that she didn't manage to get a new job for this semester, over at Federle Middle School,' Gorman said. 'And Kimberly's teaching at Tippett Academy.'

'If I offered to bring back the elective classes, do you think the kids would accept me if I offered to stand in as drama coach, just for the last month of this term?' I asked. 'Then over the summer, we can work out what to do about hiring staff for next year.'

Gorman frowned (even more than his normal expression looks like a frown anyway, but it was a pensive frown rather than an angry one). 'Not sure. What about band and choir?'

A thought struck me. 'I do know someone who can sing, urgently needs a job, and is cleared to work with children.'

'Really? Who?'

'Adam Turner.'

'Who?'

'Mr Good Clean Fun.'

'Adam Good Clean Fun has a surname?'

'Yes.'

'And you think the kids are going to put up with him full-time? I know he's your friend, but they don't even like him when he comes in to do an assembly every couple of months. After his gig at the test-prep pizza-boats party, I they'd probably bludgeon him to death with used paper tissues if he ever showed his face here again.'

'I think they might forgive him,' I said. I'm not going to tell anyone – especially not Adam himself – that my students now feel sorry for him after they found out that he's having to work as a table-clearer in a restaurant to make ends meet. For anyone else, that would simply be a boring, low-status job. To someone like Adam, it must feel like dangling over a sarlacc pit.

'But do you really think he's going to fit in here? He's weird and obsessive, he gets into insane situations like trapping himself in the bathroom because he's afraid to touch the door-handle, he goes around with a puppet and holds conversations with his own puppet in public…' Gorman broke off and started to laugh. 'What am I saying? If there's one place on Earth he belongs, it's McQuarrie High School. Not that I'm saying he will fit in here,' Gorman clarified. 'Just that if there's anywhere, it's here.'

He grew serious again. 'What happens about funding, though? Art materials and Lego bricks and costumes all cost money. The Funtime videos have already cost the school fifty thousand dollars – that was why you sacked Kimberly and Tammy and the others, to save on their wages. And why you insisted on making every student in the entire school watch these videos, whether they needed remedial education or not, just so you could feel we were getting our money's worth. Right?'

And we got a reduced rate on the videos because we were testing them before they were rolled out across the county. Next year, they would cost even more.

'I'll see what I can do,' I said, remembering how the students had complained in the case file about my saying the same thing to them. The fact that it's true doesn't stop them complaining – or speculating that I've just been spending the time watching funny Youtube videos of cats, which I haven't. Funny webcomics for science geeks – well, only occasionally, and only when I'm really tired and stressed. 'I've got some phone calls to make. If you could, uh, come round to my apartment this evening, I'll let you know how I've got on then.'

'Yes, your Princessness.' And Gorman left, before I could work out whether he was flirting with me in character as Han, or telling me off for being bossy, or underlining how far I wasn't a heroic rebel leader like Leia. Or maybe all of those.

Author's note: When I wrote the first draft of this chapter, my husband commented that the relationship between Lougene and Gorman was healing a bit too fast to be plausible. On balance, he was right, but I needed to start writing the next chapter before I could see how to rework this one.

The comic that Lougene refers to is The Perishers, which appeared in British newspaper the Daily Mirror from 1959 to 2006.