Chapter 12

Grace

The doctor's office seemed perfectly ordinary at first. I needed that because checking out at the department store and on the short walk to the doctor my heart had been going a mile a minute, just thinking about the things Shelly had said and trying to sort out all the feelings they had awakened inside me.

Sitting in the ordinary waiting room with the ordinary magazines and the ordinary aquarium, I gradually seemed able to dismiss what she had told me as a serious concern. Jake's way of taking an interest in his wife's underwear, I thought, really didn't have to do with me. The idea of ‘courtship' and of having a ‘suitor' had taken on a degree of reality, and I acknowledged that although it made my tummy flutter a little, I didn't actually object to meeting guys who wanted to date me.

I didn't take seriously, though, the assumption that Jake and Shelly had both clearly made, that my suitor would behave to me the way Jake behaved to Shelly. I could see, I thought, why Selecta and the government wanted to send girls like me to towns like this one. I already felt like a new kind of future had opened up, one in which I wouldn't feel the temptation to shoplift—unless out of sheer boredom with my comfortable life.

But I would have the choice of what guys I wanted to date, obviously. I had no intention of choosing a man like Jake. All the crazy shit that had gone down in my foster parents' living room last night… it was already in the past, and only getting further away. Eventually, I probably wouldn't even remember what it had felt like.

I shifted in my chair, and to my dismay the memories and the mental images came rushing back, like a flat denial of my previous thought. The soreness in my butt blazed up like fire, and I had to bite my lip and blink back the sudden water in my eyes. Worse, the sensation revolved around the horrible thick panties Shelly had insisted I wear out of the store, along with the other clothes she had bought me with the New Modesty subsidy money: a modest dress in a light green cotton blend, like the old one Shelly had loaned me but in my size and in a bit more contemporary of a cut; a plain white bralette; white cotton socks and black flats just like the ones I had found that morning under the chair. As I squirmed and felt the bruises the family strap had left, the sensation of having the training panties on made me terribly self-conscious of my whole mortifying old-fashioned outfit.

That will fade, though, I insisted to myself. The agony had already receded by something like half, since the night before, when walking up the stairs—with my jeans off because I couldn't bear to have the denim in contact with the skin of my ass-cheeks—had made me whimper at each step.

If I had to have a suitor—or suitors—I would make damn sure they didn't have family straps hanging on their mantelpieces.

The door leading from the reception area to the exam rooms opened, and Frannie came out, followed by a middle-aged lady who could have been Shelly's slightly younger sister.

"Cousin Martha!" Shelly said, getting up from her own seat next to mine. "You folks have one of these girls, too?"

Frannie and I looked at each other, and I knew that my face had gone as red as hers. I saw her brow crease, and I felt my own do the same, as if in some sort of synchronized embarrassment routine.

"Sure do, Shelly," Martha said. "Frank and I started training her last night."

The bizarre mirroring exercise with Frannie went on; all four of our eyes widened. I felt sure she could tell just from my own reaction that Jake and Shelly had begun ‘training' me too, but to my horror Shelly didn't leave Frannie and Martha in any doubt.

"Grace here got a whipping, too, I'm sad to say," she said. "And Mr. Carpenter taught her about what that means for a Grasskiln girl."

My eyes and Frannie's had remained locked. The mutual gaze became heart-poundingly intense as we understood that we had undergone the same humiliating, but also shamefully arousing, treatment from our foster fathers. We both blinked and looked down at the floor.

What that means for a Grasskiln girl. Something about the way Shelly had said it carried a disquieting note of… of generality. The thought that I would be able to choose a suitor whose mantelpiece lacked a family strap suddenly seemed less likely. I chewed the inside of my cheek.

"Frannie here is all set for courtship, anyway," Martha said. "We'll see you at the orientation meeting?"

"Sure will," Shelly said. I looked up at Frannie. She still had her eyes on the industrial grade carpet of the waiting room. As if I could read her mind, or the exact pattern of pink in her blushing cheeks, I understood that all set for courtship meant that she had come here to the doctor's office for the same reason Shelly had brought me.

IUD. I didn't even know what it stood for, but I knew what it did.

"Grace?" said a nurse's voice from the doorway. I looked up. "You can come with me. Mrs. Carpenter, you can come along too."

Something clicked in my mind at that point, something that tied my tummy into a knot. I realized I'd let myself get lulled, somehow—I'd managed to persuade myself that Grasskiln was just a quiet midwestern town where a girl who had made a mistake could get a second chance. The ‘foster parent' thing seemed weird, but it had also seemed like it wouldn't last very long, because I would start the ‘courtship' thing, and I would go off on my own and show I had reformed myself or whatever.

But the nurse had just extended Shelly an invitation to come in and be present at my gynecological exam and at the insertion of a birth-control device into my vagina. She had issued the invitation in the most casual way possible, as if it were entirely normal for a nineteen-year-old to have her fake foster mother present at that intimate procedure.

That went together with the vague but alarming idea that I had become a Grasskiln girl—apparently the kind of girl who got whipped and then fondled by an older man.

While his wife looked on approvingly, rubbing herself through her skirt. While she sucked his huge, hard cock in eager expectation of him fucking her.

Pounding her shaved pussy with his masculine hardness as the girl watched and tried desperately not to play with herself.

The nurse's words seemed despite their apparent innocence to put it over the top.

"She can't," I said. "I'm… I'm nineteen. I don't want her there."

The nurse, a tall dark-haired woman about ten years older than me, looked me up and down, pursing her lips.

"You'll probably want to ask about this at the meeting later, Grace," she said in an abrupt, clipped tone. "I don't have all the details. But the program you're in turns you back into a minor for the purposes of healthcare. Your foster mama has to be present for your exam, because it concerns your sexual health and your courtship."

"But—" I protested.

"You can ask at the meeting, honey," Shelly said. "Nurse Cathy here told you she doesn't know the details."

I looked at Frannie, who still had her eyes on the floor, and then at Shelly's cousin Martha, who had her attention on me, one eyebrow raised as if in curiosity to see whether Shelly's new ward would show herself to be controllable or not. Then I turned to Shelly, my eyes beaming a plea for some respect for my modesty and my privacy.

She shook her head, though.

"You don't want me to tell Mr. Carpenter you made a fuss, do you, Grace?" she asked. "I'm guessing your backside is already sore enough for you."

I heard a little choking sort of noise from Frannie's direction. I glanced over at her again, to see that she had raised her eyes to mine, her cheeks bright red. It was my turn to look away, catching my lower lip between my teeth. My face burning, I stepped through the door the nurse held open, with Shelly right behind me.

"Go ahead and take everything off," Nurse Cathy told me in the exam room. "Put your clothes on the hooks and put on the gown that's hanging there." She turned to Shelly. "You can sit down in the chair over there, Mrs. Carpenter. Is Grace in her training panties yet?"

I froze, standing in front of the hooks the nurse had pointed to, just looking at the blue hospital gown. I'd only had one gynecological exam before and the memory of how strange and oddly revealing the gown had felt came back to my mind, jumbled with my mortifying memories from the night before. The new impression, of Nurse Cathy asking my foster mother about my underwear, seemed to root me to the spot, unable to start undressing.

"She is," Shelly confirmed. "Only for a few minutes, though—we just came from the store."

"I see," the nurse replied, tapping something on her tablet. "Well, Grace, we're quite busy today, so hurry up, please and get undressed. While you do, go ahead and tell me about your sexual history, please. Were you intimate with anyone before you were enrolled into the New Modesty?"

I scrunched up my face very hard for a moment, feeling a little bit of water well up in each eye, which I then blinked away furiously. Then I started to take off my dress.

"I dated," I told her, determining to give as little information as I possibly could.

"Boys?" the nurse asked.

I nodded. I had the dress off. I hung it on one of the hooks. At least talking to the nurse while I took off my clothes distracted me a bit.

"How many?" Nurse Cathy inquired. I thought I could hear a bit of disapproval in her tone, as if she felt certain I would say ten or twelve or twenty.

"Two," I told her. I sat down to take off my shoes and socks, focusing my attention entirely on my feet.

"Mm-hmm," she said, tapping the tablet. "And how intimate were you with them?"

I swallowed hard. "What does that mean?" I demanded, looking up at the woman, who had an unapologetic, unsympathetic look on her face.

"Grace!" Shelly put in. "Keep a civil tongue in your head, or Mr. Carpenter's going to hear about it."

"Mrs. Carpenter," said the nurse, "you said Mr. Carpenter disciplined her last night?"

"That's right," Shelly told her. "Then he brought her to orgasm several times."

More taps on the tablet. I bit my lip hard, but a little whimper came out through my nose nonetheless. My face felt like the surface of the sun. The feeling of unreality I had had about the previous night seemed impossible to remember now.

"And your husband uses a paddle?" Nurse Cathy asked.

"A strap," Shelly supplied. "It's been in his family a long time."

"Thank you." The nurse tapped for a few seconds, then she turned back to me. "Take your underwear off, too, Grace," she reminded me, "and put on the gown, please."

She waited for me to stand up and turn around before she continued, "How intimate were you with the boys you dated? It means exactly what it sounds like."

I started to pull the bralette over my head.

"I don't know," I said, hearing sullenness creep into my voice. I clearly couldn't defy the stupid nurse, because Shelly obviously only needed the slightest excuse to report me to Jake. At least I didn't have to be happy about it. "Second base, I guess?"

"So that means you let them touch your breasts?" Nurse Cathy asked. "Under your shirt and your bra?"

I looked down at the bralette in my hands, and at the little A-cup mounds of my breasts, with their tiny pink nipples.

"I don't usually wear a bra," I said as dismissively as I dared.

"So, under your shirt?" the nurse followed up patiently. "They touched your nipples?"

My mouth twisted to the side. I dropped the bralette onto the chair and hooked my thumbs into the waistband of my horrible training panties before I could think enough about it to get embarrassed.

"That's right," I told Nurse Cathy.