AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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.”
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.
