Chapter One
What I did just wasn’t that bad. I absolutely knew I shouldn’t steal, sure. And I knew that shoplifting earrings wouldn’t get the same kind of sympathy that, say, stealing a loaf of bread to feed my family might have. But when the judge delivered my sentence I thought I hadn’t heard him correctly.
“Defendant remanded to Selecta Non-Violent Offender Correction Services,” he said, and then he actually knocked his hammer thing on the little wooden block on top of his desk, or his bench, or whatever.
Correction. Like, prison? Standing there in the courtroom, next to the lady who had called herself my court-appointed advocate (or something) I turned around wildly. Somehow I knew what I would see: two officers of some kind, big men in white shirts with badges, coming toward me.
I turned to the lady—the advocate—with wild eyes. “What? What does it…?”
She had a smile on her face. I couldn’t believe it.
“I told you, Grace,” she said, her voice telling me that her patience with me had started to wear thin. “This is the best you can hope for, and you’re lucky to get it.”
I shook my head. She had told me a shitload of things. How was I supposed to remember all of them? I couldn’t even remember her name.
Ms.… Rogers?
Ms. Rogers, if I had actually recalled the name correctly, sighed. I could see in her face that she actually did want to help me, which of course made me feel worse, which of course made me mad, because I was the one who had just been remanded, or whatever.
“They’ll explain it to you when you get to the New Modesty bureau,” she said.
“The what?” She absolutely hadn’t said anything about the New Modesty. I would have remembered that, because everyone at school had heard of Selecta’s fascist little New Modesty towns, where men were men and women were women and everything happened in a traditional, old-fashioned way.
Ms. Rogers nodded, her eyes showing her obvious effort to remain patient and helpful.
“Yes, Grace. That’s the deal I got you, because your profile matches with their correctional program. The alternative was prison.”
I felt my forehead crease hard, and my heart rate sped up like a hundred beats. I had told Ms. Rogers that I would do anything that kept me out of prison. I did remember that. Her face turned sympathetic, obviously in response to the fear in my eyes.
“I do wish you all the best, Grace,” she said, reaching out to touch my shoulder gently. “From what I’ve read, this program should help you figure some things out about what you want in life.”
I felt my face go scarlet. No, the woman hadn’t said that I had no idea what the hell I was doing, as a nineteen-year-old living in one of Selecta’s basic-income dorms without a plan to find a job or even a hobby. She might as well have said that flat out, though; why would I have any need to figure some things out about anything, let alone what I want in life, if I did have the slightest clue about the world—or even about myself.
“Grace Franklin?” one of the white-shirted officers said.
I turned to him. My lips parted, but I couldn’t seem to get a word out of my mouth.
“This is Grace,” said Ms. Rogers, and then she turned back to me. “Don’t make things any more difficult than they have to be, okay?” she said, in a tone that struck me as almost pleading. “The program is probably going to be difficult for you at first, and it will seem strange, but they know what they’re doing.”
The officers had a lot less patience than my advocate.
“Let’s go, Grace,” said the one who had spoken before. “You’ve got a pretty long ride ahead of you.”
The long ride happened in a white minibus with SELECTA in red letters on the side. A bored-looking guard sat up front with the driver, barely paying the passengers—me and four other girls of about my age—any attention, except when we tried to talk to each other. Whenever he noticed that, he got up and yelled the same thing, every time: “What the fuck did I say, girls? No fucking talking. I can beat your butts black and blue if I want, so don’t tempt me.”
When we stopped for a bathroom break, he made us line up outside the gas station restroom door and he sent us in one by one. When I took ten seconds too long, staring at my face in the mirror in hope of figuring something, anything, out about what the fuck I was doing here, he pounded on the door and yelled, “Grace, get your ass out here or you’re gonna get it whupped.”
As I exited the bathroom I shot a furtive glance at the other girls. I wanted to ask them if they thought the guard actually could do what he threatened. Wouldn’t it be like a Get Out of Jail Free card for us, if he tried to follow through on that kind of thing? Maybe we could provoke him, and then, like, blackmail him or something when he actually did try it?
None of the others would meet my eyes. With an inward shudder I wondered if that meant that they somehow knew that the guard could do what he was promising.
I got the unwelcome answer only a few moments later. The girl behind me, whose name according to the guard’s clipboard was Frannie, took too long in the bathroom—much longer than I had taken. The guard pounded on the door, telling her to get her ass out here, but unlike me, Frannie didn’t. She called out that she had diarrhea, but even I could tell she was probably lying. The guard opened the door, which made the rest of us gasp, and hauled Frannie out. She didn’t even have her jeans down, but she did have a phone in her hand. They had taken away my phone the moment I’d gotten arrested, so I blinked in surprise.
“Give it to me,” the guard said, turning the blonde girl to face him.
Frannie looked at him with terrified eyes.
“I was… I just…” she stammered. I couldn’t even tell if she was racking her brain for a plausible lie or just scared out of her wits. I tried to tell myself I would have managed to pretend I didn’t care, but a crawling in the pit of my stomach told me I would probably have reacted the same way Frannie was. The guard, a very big black man with muscles bulging out of his uniform, had an expression on his face that seemed to make clear just how serious his threats had been.
Frannie didn’t give him the phone; he plucked it from her hand. Then we all watched in horror as he dropped it to the ground and smashed it with his heel. I saw a shudder of terror go through the blonde girl’s curvy body. Another girl let out a little gasping cry, and I couldn’t help sympathizing; the wanton destruction of a phone seemed an act of brutality that guaranteed more to follow.
“But—” Frannie started. The guard ignored her entirely.
“You can call me Mr. Garrison,” he told her. “Go over to the wall there and stand with your nose against it. Then pull down your jeans and your panties to your knees. You’re going to wait while the rest of the girls finish up their business. Then I’m going to whup you until I think you understand your si-tu-a-tion properly, and you’ve helped these other girls understand theirs, too.”
He pronounced situation in such a distinct way that it sent a thrill of terror through my body. I felt as if until that moment I hadn’t really understood my situation either. I looked over at the wall next to the restroom door where the guard had pointed. My own heart had started to pound at the thought of the other girl having to take her pants down that way, in the open. It was a warm April day, wherever in the Midwest we were—Iowa, maybe, by this time—but obviously that didn’t make much difference.
“Do you understand, Frannie?” Mr. Garrison asked, his voice thunderous. Over by the pump, I saw a middle-aged man turn his head in curiosity to see the scene unfolding at the bathroom.
Frannie’s jaw had gone slack. She seemed frozen in place.
“Do you understand, Frannie?” the guard repeated. “Say Yes, Mr. Garrison.”
“I-I—” the girl stammered.
Mr. Garrison pulled her around and she let out a little cry of discomfort. He marched her to the brick wall and stood her there, facing it.
“Are you going to pull down your own pants,” he growled, “or do I have to do it for you?”
I felt my face pucker into a mask of distress. As the guard clearly intended, I had no choice but to see my own ‘situation’ in Frannie’s. If I had managed to smuggle a phone, I would have tried to use it, too. Not that anyone would have cared too much, let alone come to save me or anything. But being able to text one of my dorm mates just to let them know how hard my life sucked at the moment would have represented an irresistible temptation. And I would have ended up with my face against the wall, faced with Mr. Garrison’s impossible question.
Frannie had seemed pretty tough, a few moments before—the way we all did, or at least I thought I seemed tough, and the other girls certainly seemed that way to me. She lost it completely, though, at this point. She turned to the guard with a sob, tears seeming to spring from her eyes.
“Please… I… you smashed it. I won’t… Mr.… Mr. Garrison…?”
The guard’s face took on an expression of disgust that made my heart race and my stomach churn.
“Put your hands against the wall, girl,” he commanded.
Frannie blinked at him, her eyes going wide, but she obeyed his instruction tentatively. I could tell that she had grasped at the order as some kind of compromise from Mr. Garrison, but I could also tell that it really was nothing of the kind. Still, she reached out and laid her palms against the brick, then turned to the guard with a pleading look, as if to say, See, I did it. Now can I just get back on the bus?
But the next thing he did was to reach around to the front of her waist so that he could unbutton her jeans. Then she started to struggle—not in any really defiant way, but clearly out of sheer panic. The rest of us, still standing in the lines in which Mr. Garrison had put us, one line of the girls who needed to go into the restroom and the other of those who had finished, looked at each other uneasily. I swallowed hard when I saw that every face seemed to have the expression I knew mine wore: a mixture of distress for the girl getting her pants taken down and helpless but guilty gratitude that it wasn’t us.
“Don’t make me get the others to hold you in place, Frannie,” the guard told her coldly, his breathing completely unaffected by the effort required to hold her in place with one arm across her chest, covered by a black concert t-shirt from some long-ago band, and the other around her waist. “You’re not gonna sit down for a week, if I have to do that.”
“You can’t!” Frannie yelled, as Mr. Garrison showed her just how incorrect she was about that, easily using one hand to unfasten her jeans and pull down the fly. Her arms flailed out, but the guard clearly had training, or experience, or maybe both, in doing this, and Frannie’s little fists made contact with nothing but air.
He shoved her up against the wall, his left hand on the small of her back to keep her in place while he dug his right into the waistband of her jeans and panties and pulled them down to the middle of her thighs. Frannie kept yelling and struggling, but Mr. Garrison’s strength overcame hers as if he barely noticed her resistance. Then, without further ado, he started to spank her with his huge open hand.
[divider]Chapter Two
Grace
I let out a little cry of my own, and so did at least one of the other girls. Frannie herself just kept sobbing.
“Let me know when you’re ready to follow my instructions,” Mr. Garrison said, his voice as calm and even as if his arm weren’t moving steadily back and forth, his hand sending sharp slaps through the open air around the gas station as it made contact with Frannie’s quickly reddening ass.
I felt as if I must be dreaming. I looked over at the guy at the pumps, who had obviously finished filling up his car’s tank but now stood watching, as if it were, like, okay to watch a young woman get punished with her pants down. A shudder went through my whole body as I found that as much as I didn’t want to watch it myself, my eyes just had to turn back to the mortifying scene of the enormous black guard spanking the curvy blonde girl, his hand moving from left to right and back, distributing the blows evenly between the two sides.
“I…” Frannie sobbed. “I… I… just…” Her body heaved with every spank, and her words rose in pitch with each broken attempt to protest. She still struggled against Mr. Garrison’s tight grip around her waist, but her resistance looked more and more like it came from a rag doll rather than an actual young woman. Her backside had turned a bright pink now, and she clenched it and unclenched it in a way that made my stomach flip over and my chest fill with some emotion I simply couldn’t name.
“Okay!” she screamed. “Okay! Please… please, Mr. Garrison…”
He stopped spanking her and he made sure she would balance securely on her feet before he took his arm from around her waist. The guard’s movements seemed somehow more gentle, now that Frannie had yielded. I bit my lip, feeling my forehead crease very hard. More of that unnamable emotion rose in my body at the sight of the big black man suddenly taking care of the blonde girl he had punished that way.
To my dismay, the sight sent a sensation through me, too, an urgent, practically electric tingle that traveled through all my limbs. I found that part of me seemed to envy Frannie, even as I couldn’t stop looking at the fiery evidence of the humiliating lesson the guard had delivered. I swallowed hard, and looked over at the other girls. I thought I could tell that they had just been looking at Frannie’s whipped bottom too—and, like me, had turned their eyes away only an instant before.
“Hands behind your head, girl,” Mr. Garrison told Frannie. “It’s time for you to learn how to behave when you get your butt whupped. You’re going to get enough of it, where you’re going.”
My jaw dropped, and I glanced over again at my fellow—what? prisoners? I realized I didn’t actually have the slightest idea what I should call myself. Detainee? I got back looks that I thought mirrored my own: confusion and dismay.
One of you: ask him! Where are we going? What are we? I tried to beam the command into the others’ eyes, but they just beamed it back into mine. It was Frannie who actually asked the question, her voice a choked sob as she followed Mr. Garrison’s instruction and laced her fingers behind her disheveled blonde locks.
“Where… where are we going… Mr. Garrison?”
He turned around to survey us all, his face full of a kind of fake wisdom, as if he thought the things he knew lay far above our youthful inexperience.
“You girls are headed to a town called Grasskiln,” he said. “It’s a special kind of New Modesty town, where they know how to reform girls like you and get you ready for old-fashioned courtship and marriage. They get good results, too, even if it comes with some very sore butts for the brides.”
[divider]
None of us talked at all for the last three hours of the journey. Frannie sniffled in her seat, her face turned toward the windows. Looking around nervously—everyone except Frannie was looking around, it seemed like, almost constantly—I could see I wasn’t the only one taking in every little squirming movement the spanked girl made in her scarcely padded bus seat.
For some reason, the vivid pictures of what had happened at the gas station just wouldn’t stay out of my head, no matter how hard I tried to replace them—even when I tried to remember the trauma of getting caught shoplifting, or the humiliation of being led into the courtroom. I told myself it had to be because of Mr. Garrison’s obvious intent that we all should understand that the same thing could happen to us. I forced myself to look out the window at the fields going by, the shoots of whatever crop they grew here starting to get high as we approached summer.
The fields gave way to a small town, and I saw a sign that said Grasskiln Supply, and then one that said Grasskiln Liquor, and then we were driving down what had to be the place’s main drag. I managed to get a look at a green street sign, just before the bus stopped. Main St. Yup, like in an old movie. As I climbed out of the bus under Mr. Garrison’s watchful eye, I saw that the cross street was called Lincoln, and I wondered if I had arrived at the cultural center of the ‘back to basics’ trend the news feeds kept harping on—the trend that of course included Selecta’s rural community subsidy program, the New Modesty.
As if the world could read my mind, when I turned to see where the girl in front of me was headed, following Mr. Garrison’s directions to go straight from the door of the bus into the glass door of nondescript storefront where we had parked, the sign over the door said New Modesty Authority.
Inside I found a reception area complete with a front desk and a middle-aged lady sitting behind it. Three girls, including Frannie, had already sat down in the standard, semi-padded plywood chairs, and when I met her eyes the woman at the desk pointed to another, a weary expression on her face. I sat in it, and the girl who had come in after me got the next chair over.
“Is this—” she started to say to me quietly, but the receptionist interrupted her.
“I’m pretty sure the guard on the bus told you girls not to talk,” she said with an air of disapproval that seemed to apply not just to the girl who had spoken but to me as well, for having committed the offense of sitting next to her. “That applies in here, too.”
The last of us had entered the waiting room and sat down. Mr. Garrison followed her in, carrying a tablet, which he held up for the receptionist to sign.
“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.
Mrs. Brown looked up, an unreadable smile on her face.
“Grace, you’re here to learn to behave yourself among decent people. I’m afraid that no matter how you try to maintain this appearance of contrition, I know better, and so will your foster parents. Thankfully, the program in which you’ve been enrolled provides for all the correction you’ll require, as well as thorough supervision during your courtship. When you leave your foster parents’ care, you’ll be ready to submit properly to your husband.”
[button color=”red” size=”small” link=”https://www.stormynightpublications.com/product/shameful-reformation/” ]Read More Info and Buy![/button]