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)
Shelly and the other girl’s foster mother knew each other of course, and the receptionist knew them both.
“Hi, Irene! Hi, Shelly!” she said brightly. “How are you keeping? You can go ahead and take Lisa and Grace back to the conference room. Two of the other girls are already here.”
Walking past Mrs. Brown’s office I remembered to my surprise that I had only gotten to this strange town the day before—not even twenty-four hours. My stomach lurched at the thought that the New Modesty’s mortifying program had already begun to seem, against all logic, somehow normal.
The conference room had chairs in two circles, one inside the other. Mrs. Brown stood in front of one of the chairs in the inner ring. I could see that Frannie had the seat on her right hand, and Frannie’s foster mother sat in the one behind it. The other early arrival sat next to Frannie, a black-haired, olive-skinned girl whose name, I thought, might be Maria but could also have been just about anything else for all the attention I had paid on the bus.
“Come on in, girls,” she said to me and the other girl. “Have a seat. Lisa, why don’t you sit next to Rosa.”
Rosa, not Maria. Who gave a fuck. My mouth twisted to the side as I realized, to my dismay, that I gave a fuck. My cheeks, already on a low simmer, had blazed up to medium high.
“Grace, you can sit next to Lisa,” Mrs. Brown said. “Foster mamas, you can go ahead and sit behind your girls.”
Your girls. I felt my forehead crease. Something about the way they talked, here in Grasskiln, seemed to stir unwelcome feelings despite the apparent innocence of the words themselves. Clearly, according to Mrs. Brown and the New Modesty Authority—according to the entire population of Grasskiln, as far as I could tell—I belonged to Shelly… and to Jake.
I swallowed hard as I remembered Shelly, the previous night, bent over in front of her husband, pleading with him to give her the shameful thing she obviously needed so badly.
Please, sir… I want your beautiful cock in your wet little pussy.
I belonged to them… my pussy belonged to them… but not to keep—no, not to keep, but to train… to get me ready to belong to someone else.
A suitor.
I felt my face going red as I stared down at my hands, folded in the light green lap of my embarrassingly modest new dress. Keeping my face bent, I shot glances around the circle. A girl who had come in after me and Lisa was sitting down in the last empty chair, between me and Mrs. Brown. I saw Frannie flicking her eyes around the same way I was, but the other three girls seemed to have their focus on their laps, or the floor. I noticed more than one blush, and I thought I saw another girl wince a little as she shifted in her seat.
“Alright,” Mrs. Brown said, sitting down in her own chair. “Let’s get started. I hope you’ve all had at least a little bit of a chance to start settling in. Looking around the circle I can see that your foster mamas have managed to get you into some more appropriate clothing than what you arrived in.”
I looked up, and took in fully for the first time that not only Lisa and Frannie and I, but also Rosa and whoever that last girl was who had just sat down next to me, were all wearing nearly identical, slightly updated but definitely old-fashioned dresses. We looked like a home economics class from the 1950s.
Again I wondered, to my distress, whether I was the only one wearing the horrible training panties. As the thought rose into my mind I did everything in my power not to squirm in my seat, but my sudden focus on the sensations of the lower half of my body made it impossible. I shifted a bit, and I had to bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep from letting out a little whimper of discomfort and embarrassment as the bruises flared back into life, alongside the unique, distracting feeling of the extra padding from my mortifying new underwear.
Part of me wanted to look around to see whether the same thing had just happened to any of the other girls, but I found I couldn’t raise my eyes from my lap. Mrs. Brown had let silence fall for a moment, as if she meant us to think about what she had just said. I wondered suddenly whether she, in fact, knew exactly the conflict and shame her words had raised in me. That idea made my tummy flip over, but maybe it also meant that all my fellow ‘foster kids’ had felt the same kind of reaction. Did Frannie and Lisa and Rosa and the other girl—Cora, I remembered suddenly—all fall into Doctor Simmons’ category of girls like me, whose humiliating needs would be met in this strange town?