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)
“Did you have to discipline any of them?” she asked, in a voice that seemed calculated for us to hear.
The guard jerked his head in Frannie’s direction. “Frannie over there had a phone she smuggled into the restroom. She got a whuppin’. I put it in the log.”
The woman fetched her glasses from where they hung around her neck on a silver chain and peered at the tablet.
“So you did,” she said. “I’ll make sure her foster father knows about that. She’ll probably go over his knee for it, too.”
My lips parted, and then I closed them as if I meant to do an impression of a fish. I swallowed hard and looked over at Frannie, who had lowered her eyes to her hands, folded tightly in her lap. Her face had turned scarlet. My gaze turned from her to the girl sitting just beyond her. She, a slim, brown-haired girl, met my eyes and I thought I could read in her expression precisely the words running through my own mind: What. The. Fuck.
The receptionist signed Mr. Garrison’s tablet. He turned to us.
“Bye, girls,” he said. “Can’t say as I don’t wish I was gonna be one of your daddies.”
The looking at everyone else pretending we couldn’t figure it out… it had already gotten old. I fixed my eyes on the floor, instead, feeling my own cheeks burn with mortification. Grasskiln, Nebraska, or Iowa, or Missouri, or Kansas—I honestly didn’t know at that point—represented hell, as far as I was concerned, even if the precise dimensions of hell hadn’t yet become clear.
A beep sounded from the direction of the front desk. The receptionist picked up a handset.
“Yes, they just arrived, Mrs. Brown. Should I start sending them in? Alright.”
She hung up the phone and looked down at something on her desk.
“Which one of you is Grace Franklin?” she asked. It took me a second to raise my hand, and I got a stern look from the woman, as if I had meant to deceive someone.
“You can go down the hall to the first door,” she told me, her voice dripping with disapproval.
I gave my fellow new residents of hell a final glance as I got up and started walking mechanically in the direction indicated by the receptionist. I thought I could see some sympathy in their eyes, but it might just have been exhaustion, which was still a feeling I could definitely get behind.
The door had a sign that said, Mrs. Gerald Brown, New Modesty Administrator. I blinked. It took me a moment to remember that in the old days, they talked about married women that way, referring to them by their husbands’ names. One of hell’s dimensions seemed closer to snapping into place. It stood slightly ajar, and I almost just pushed it open, but I stopped myself, inwardly patting my shoulder for my intelligence. I knocked instead, hoping the polite gesture might gain me some points, or sympathy, or something.
“Come on in, Grace,” called a woman’s voice.
Mrs. Brown’s office had a surprising coziness to it. A desk stood near the far wall, but the central space was occupied by two chairs and a low table, all of which seemed to have come from a bygone era of frontier life—a time when people called their living rooms parlors. She had just risen from the larger of the two chairs, and she had her hand out for me to shake.
When I had, trying to use just the right amount of pressure to tell her I was eager—but not too eager—to do what I had to do to become a law-abiding citizen, she gestured to the smaller seat, a much simpler rail-back chair with a thin cushion fastened to two of the rails by little ties. To my dismay, as I sat down, I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to Frannie, when she had to sit there. It already felt uncomfortable enough to my own, unpunished butt. I bit my lip as that thought led to another, even more distressing one: that maybe the purpose of that chair lay in how it would feel to a young woman who had recently learned the kind of lesson Frannie had.
“So, Grace,” Mrs. Brown said, picking up a tablet from the table and looking down at it. She seemed a little younger than the receptionist, in her mid-thirties perhaps. I saw a wedding ring and an engagement ring glittering very noticeably on her left hand. She had curves that put Frannie’s to shame, and blonde hair pinned up neatly at the back of her head, in a distinctly old-fashioned style that seemed to go perfectly with the furniture, and with the white blouse and long gray skirt she wore.
“Yes?” I asked eventually, trying as hard as I could to sound penitent and compliant. I didn’t feel penitent and compliant, of course, but I knew if I wanted to get out of Grasskiln soon-ish I definitely needed to act that way.