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)
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.”
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.