Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
But I would have the choice of what guys I wanted to date, obviously. I had no intention of choosing a man like Jake. All the crazy shit that had gone down in my foster parents’ living room last night… it was already in the past, and only getting further away. Eventually, I probably wouldn’t even remember what it had felt like.
I shifted in my chair, and to my dismay the memories and the mental images came rushing back, like a flat denial of my previous thought. The soreness in my butt blazed up like fire, and I had to bite my lip and blink back the sudden water in my eyes. Worse, the sensation revolved around the horrible thick panties Shelly had insisted I wear out of the store, along with the other clothes she had bought me with the New Modesty subsidy money: a modest dress in a light green cotton blend, like the old one Shelly had loaned me but in my size and in a bit more contemporary of a cut; a plain white bralette; white cotton socks and black flats just like the ones I had found that morning under the chair. As I squirmed and felt the bruises the family strap had left, the sensation of having the training panties on made me terribly self-conscious of my whole mortifying old-fashioned outfit.
That will fade, though, I insisted to myself. The agony had already receded by something like half, since the night before, when walking up the stairs—with my jeans off because I couldn’t bear to have the denim in contact with the skin of my ass-cheeks—had made me whimper at each step.
If I had to have a suitor—or suitors—I would make damn sure they didn’t have family straps hanging on their mantelpieces.
The door leading from the reception area to the exam rooms opened, and Frannie came out, followed by a middle-aged lady who could have been Shelly’s slightly younger sister.
“Cousin Martha!” Shelly said, getting up from her own seat next to mine. “You folks have one of these girls, too?”
Frannie and I looked at each other, and I knew that my face had gone as red as hers. I saw her brow crease, and I felt my own do the same, as if in some sort of synchronized embarrassment routine.
“Sure do, Shelly,” Martha said. “Frank and I started training her last night.”
The bizarre mirroring exercise with Frannie went on; all four of our eyes widened. I felt sure she could tell just from my own reaction that Jake and Shelly had begun ‘training’ me too, but to my horror Shelly didn’t leave Frannie and Martha in any doubt.
“Grace here got a whipping, too, I’m sad to say,” she said. “And Mr. Carpenter taught her about what that means for a Grasskiln girl.”
My eyes and Frannie’s had remained locked. The mutual gaze became heart-poundingly intense as we understood that we had undergone the same humiliating, but also shamefully arousing, treatment from our foster fathers. We both blinked and looked down at the floor.
What that means for a Grasskiln girl. Something about the way Shelly had said it carried a disquieting note of… of generality. The thought that I would be able to choose a suitor whose mantelpiece lacked a family strap suddenly seemed less likely. I chewed the inside of my cheek.
“Frannie here is all set for courtship, anyway,” Martha said. “We’ll see you at the orientation meeting?”
“Sure will,” Shelly said. I looked up at Frannie. She still had her eyes on the industrial grade carpet of the waiting room. As if I could read her mind, or the exact pattern of pink in her blushing cheeks, I understood that all set for courtship meant that she had come here to the doctor’s office for the same reason Shelly had brought me.
IUD. I didn’t even know what it stood for, but I knew what it did.
“Grace?” said a nurse’s voice from the doorway. I looked up. “You can come with me. Mrs. Carpenter, you can come along too.”
Something clicked in my mind at that point, something that tied my tummy into a knot. I realized I’d let myself get lulled, somehow—I’d managed to persuade myself that Grasskiln was just a quiet midwestern town where a girl who had made a mistake could get a second chance. The ‘foster parent’ thing seemed weird, but it had also seemed like it wouldn’t last very long, because I would start the ‘courtship’ thing, and I would go off on my own and show I had reformed myself or whatever.
But the nurse had just extended Shelly an invitation to come in and be present at my gynecological exam and at the insertion of a birth-control device into my vagina. She had issued the invitation in the most casual way possible, as if it were entirely normal for a nineteen-year-old to have her fake foster mother present at that intimate procedure.