Chapter 1

Grace

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.