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The callout system filled the vacancy at 5:41 in the morning, forty seconds after it opened and before it had dialled a single number.

A consolidated school district outside Columbus has been paying a substitute teacher who has worked all fourteen of its buildings, and not one of its fourteen principals can describe her. The licence on file belongs to a woman who died in Missouri in 2018, and the state of Ohio still lists it as active and current.

Dr. Thea Abernathy pulls the thread and finds it comes out through her own signature. Beverly Nowak, who has kept a second set of the sign-in sheets on carbon since the district system stopped agreeing with her hallway, is the only person in the county who can prove what happened. And the money was never the point: somebody has been putting one specific adult into specific buildings on specific days, and when the superintendent shuts the mechanism down, the woman signs into a building the following Tuesday anyway, on nobody’s payroll at all.