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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?
“We’re having this meeting,” Mrs. Brown finally continued, “to tell you about the rules and requirements of the New Modesty courtship program the state has assigned you to, here in Grasskiln. I have some good news, too. You all have dates tonight.”
CHAPTER 15
Grace
I looked up. I could see out of the corners of my eyes that all the other girls had also raised their eyes to focus on Mrs. Brown. She smiled back at us beatifically, her eyes traveling around both circles, with a special twinkle for the foster mothers that seemed to say, Isn’t it wonderful? These girls will learn how to date the old-fashioned way, just like we did when we were their age.
“Your suitors have each chosen to court you with the help of the New Modesty’s matching algorithm, which lets them have access to some of your information—our own version of a dating app.”
Mrs. Brown looked around again, this time just at the girls in the inner circle, as if to make sure we had followed everything she said. I couldn’t figure out what I thought, or felt, about the news she had just delivered. The hypothetical, pretend figure of my suitor—the one Jake kept talking about, who would apparently have embarrassing rights over me and my body—had just materialized into an actual man. He had swiped, or tapped, or… something… on my picture in the New Modesty’s app. My stomach churned, but I also felt a distressing sort of warmth in my chest.
“Now you girls have probably never been on a proper date in your lives,” Mrs. Brown continued. “Here in Grasskiln, though, we do things the traditional way. The men who will be your first suitors are all a few years older than you, and they know how to behave themselves and how to treat a young woman in whom they mean to show an interest, romantically speaking.”
I looked around at the other girls in the circle. I could see the same uneasiness in their faces, especially Frannie’s and Cora’s, that I felt at this part of the older woman’s little speech. I definitely didn’t mind older men. I hadn’t ever dated one, of course, or even—because Mrs. Brown was right that date didn’t really describe what I and other girls my age did with guys—really hung out with one in anything like a serious way. Once, though, a guy in his late twenties had shown an interest in me, at one of the parties we had in the dorm on Saturdays.
It had made me feel a little special, and a little naughty. He had a job at an office, and he talked about real stuff, like his plans for the future and how the fucked-up state of the world economy would make it difficult to ever own a home. If he had tried to kiss me, I would have let him—and I probably would have let him do a lot more. A friend had pulled me away to drink a shot, though, and when I had looked for the older guy again he had left the party. I had guessed, with a mixture of regret and relief, that he kept a regular schedule, the way a more mature man would.
“That means,” Mrs. Brown said, pulling my focus back to her, “that you girls don’t have to worry too much about your own conduct, as long as you make up your minds to pay attention to your suitors. Courtship for young women in Grasskiln is all about learning to follow the lead of the man who will quite possibly be your husband—that is, from the point of view of our traditional community, your leader ‘til death do you part.”
I stared at her, my jaw slack. I had gathered all that, I supposed, from everything I’d experienced with the Carpenters. I realized though that I hadn’t actually put it together with my situation until the administrator of the New Modesty Authority in Grasskiln had made the connection completely solid.
My leader. ‘Til death do us part. My husband—but not, like, lovey-dovey husband, the kind who takes you to the Bahamas and lies with you on the beach until you tell him to get up and get you a piña colada.
“So,” Mrs. Brown went on, leaning forward a little and focusing on each of us in turn, very intently. “Let’s get one uncomfortable—in more than one way—detail over with. The men you’ll meet tonight have all achieved approved status. That means the New Modesty Authority has done extensive background checks on them as well as verifying that they’re each compatible with the one of you they’ve chosen to court. It also means that they have the right—and the duty—to punish you on your bare bottoms should you misbehave, just as your foster fathers do.”
I felt like my eyebrows had shot all the way to my scalp.
“Wait…” Cora said. I looked over at her to see that her face had gone very red. “You… you can’t…”
