The electrified doorknob: Pemulis's Delco-battery prank on Rusk's office, and its long aftermath

texture · UNDATED (Pemulis "at age fifteen"); litigation still live in YDAU

• When: UNDATED — Pemulis was fifteen; the resulting lawsuit is "still in litigation" in the YDAU present
• What: Rusk as the object of the students' active loathing, not just their scorn. "Pemulis loathes Rusk with a hard and gem-like flame" — why "is unclear and seems free-floating; Hal gets a different answer from Pemulis every time" (Hal himself merely "feels uncomfortable around Dolores Rusk and avoids her but isn’t aware of any particular reason"). The loathing's monument: "It was Pemulis who’d dickied in at night and hooked a Delco battery up to the inside brass knob of her locked office door, at age fifteen" — a scheme that "turned quickly disastrous" when an elderly Brighton-Irish cleaning lady took the under-calculated voltage at 0500h., surviving (thanks to rubber gloves) with "the permanent perm and irreversible crossed eyes," whereupon her rapacious personal-injury lawyer sent the Academy's Workman's-Comp. premiums skyrocketing. The prank's traces persist into YDAU on both sides: Rusk's doorknob now wears "a nonconducting rubberized sheath" (scene 108), and the administration's memory is long — Avril and Tavis are not "exactly a fan of Pemulis anyway, certainly since the electrified-Rusk-doorknob-and-litigation incident" (n.324, weighed by Pemulis himself among his 17-Nov liabilities).