Cheerilee opened the door to her classroom and walked inside. “Sorry I’m late, class, I was catching up with an old friend and lost track of time…” she trailed off as she realized her classroom was completely empty. Not only the students, but the chairs, desks, and chalkboard had all disappeared. “What in the world…” she wondered as she looked around.

“Miss Cheerilee, what are you doing on the ceiling?” Applebloom’s voice rang out from above her. Cheerilee looked up to see her students, along with all of the furniture, upside down on the ceiling. The door opened and Teacher’s Pet walked in, out of breath.

“Sorry I’m late, Miss Cheerilee. I overslept,” he puffed. Cheerilee watched in shock as he floated to the ceiling, rotating in the air. Oddly enough, the chubby little pony didn’t seem to notice. “Uhh, teacher? Why are you standing on the ceiling?” he asked. The class stared in silence.

“Oh, I… haha.. just felt it would be a nice change of pace, to keep the lessons fresh!” Cheerilee said, forcing a smile. Upside-down or not, she was still a teacher, and her job was to educate her students. She pulled herself to the roof using the Ponyville flag that hung off of the chalkboard, making her way over to her desk with great difficulty. Her students began murmuring among themselves.

She finally reached her desk and anchored herself upside-down to the ceiling by hooking her hindlegs onto her chair and grasping onto the desk with her hooves. The blood rushed to her head and her mane dangled down, but at least from this angle, her class looked normal.

“Weird new manestyle,” she heard Silver Spoon whisper to Diamond Tiara. “How do you think she gets it to stick straight up like that?”

Cheerilee clapped her hooves together to get her class to quiet down and almost flew out of her chair in the process. “Quiet down, class, it’s time to start today’s lesson on…” -she glanced at her lesson plan- “gravity. Great.”

Two long lessons later, it was finally time to stop for lunch, and it was a good thing, too. Cheerilee’s hooves were getting sore from constantly grasping onto the desk. She watched, smiling nervously as her students exited the classroom, gently dropping from the ceiling. As the last one left, she carefully lowered herself back onto the ground and went outside.

A face appeared on the globe behind her, smiling with a single tooth. “She’s dedicated, I’ll give her that,” Discord said as the furniture settled down from the ceiling. “It would be a little too cruel to leave her… hanging. But who’s to say I can’t place her in another sticky situation?”

When Cheerilee came back from lunch, she was relieved to see the room had righted itself. She took a seat at her desk and straightened a stack of papers as she waited for her students to return. In a matter of minutes, her papers were straightened and her students were back in their seats.

“Glad to see you got your mane back to normal,” Applebloom said.

“I am too,” Cheerilee replied, passing out a stack of worksheets. “Now then, on to our spelling lesson for the day. Follow along as I…” a large gray stallion in a giant vat of jelly was staring into the open window. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked, smiling nervously.

The pony responded with a smile of his own, a slow moving smile that began as a tiny grin and grew to crinkle his eyes. Cheerilee sighed and walked over, shutting the window. As she turned around, she saw the same pony in the window across the room. “What? How did you get over there so quickly?” she asked. That same smile slowly spread across the pony’s face as she walked over and shut that window, too.

“Stay calm, Cheerilee… it’s just another pony who wanted to see what was going on inside,” she said to herself. “Nothing creepy about that…” She spotted the jelly pony in the window in the back of the room, ran over, and slammed it shut. “Now then, class… let’s get back to spelling…” she said tiredly, walking back over to the blackboard and writing the word “saddlebag”. She walked across the room, checking each student’s work.

“Remember to curve your “S”, Twist. Let’s see a bit more of a tail on that “G”, Applebloom. Very good, Scootaloo! No, there’s only one “L” in saddlebag, Sweetie Belle,” she said. A knock came from the back window, but she ignored it.

Splat. Splat. Splat. A wet thwacking noise could be heard, slowly climbing up the outside wall. “Keep working, class, I’ll be right back,” Cheerilee said, opening the door and peeking outside. Nothing seemed to be wrong. She walked a little farther out and looked around, making a full circle around the schoolhouse. There was no sign of any jelly.

Cheerilee shrugged. “Maybe it’s safe to open the windows now. Some fresh air would be nice,” she said to herself as she opened the door. She took a step inside and found herself face-to-face with an entire classroom full of ponies sitting in tubs of jelly of different flavors. They all turned towards her, smiling that creepy smile. One of them held out a completed spelling worksheet.

“I’m all done!” it said in Scootaloo’s voice. A big gob of strawberry jelly rolled off of its hoof, splatting onto the ground.

“Big deal, we were first!” another one in a tub of mango jelly called in Diamond Tiara’s voice.

“Yeah, you jelly?” the pony directly beside that one asked in Silver Spoon’s voice. Cheerilee’s left eye twitched.

“Oh dear… I seem to be in a bit of a jam…” a pony in blueberry jelly said in Teacher’s Pet’s voice, holding up a half-torn worksheet. “Can it still count? I managed to preserve half of it.”

Cheerilee’s class watched worriedly as their teacher began to laugh softly, growing into hysterics and ending in tears. “There, there, Cheerilee, don’t be sad. It’s only half of a spelling paper.” Teacher’s Pet said in a concerned voice.

Cheerilee looked up. All of the jelly ponies were gone and her class was back to the way it used to be. She sighed in relief. “I’m sorry. I was just… really tired. Why don’t we all take a break from spelling and just call it a day?” She watched as her students filed out of the classroom and sighed again, making her way back to her desk.

“Miss Cheerilee? I noticed you didn’t have lunch, so do you want half of mine?” Applebloom asked, placing a brown paper bag on her teacher’s desk. “It’s not healthy to skip a meal. I know it makes Big Macintosh real crazy sometimes.”

“Yeah, I think that would be a wonderful idea. Thank you, Applebloom, that’s really sweet of you. What’s in it, anyway?” Cheerilee smiled as she reached into the bag.

“Just half of a sandwich with zap apple jam,” Applebloom said, walking out the door. Cheerilee froze mid-bite as a smiling pony in a tub of zap apple jam peered in through the window. She slowly pushed the bag away with shaky hooves and deposited the sandwich in the trash, walking hurriedly out of the classroom.

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