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One afternoon last summer, one of my students, Miguel, had stopped by my house randomly to say hello. His family lived in the neighborhood and he'd been walking by, he said. Miguel had always been a nice kid, nobody I'd ever had any trouble with, but from the moment he showed up on my doorstep, there was this nervous tingle in the back of my mind about that tiny remote possibility of someday sitting in a courtroom trying to reassure a jury about a no-witness encounter with a student in my home. Miguel hadn't made it past the front steps, and that was a student who had never given me any trouble a day in his life before or since.

Now I was walking into my living room with the Stern sisters, one fresh from being kidnapped in a trunk and the other obviously compromised by my indoctrination attempt. In fact, as we walked into the living room, I saw I'd even left Taylor's video playing muted on the screen. God, I was stupid. If that knock on the doorhad been the police, I'd already be boa