✅ A Dose of Humiliation

39. Making Plans

This bonus chapter is dedicated to James, with many thanks for supporting me! I hope you're enjoying the story so far.

"You've really never been punished?" Josh said thirty seconds later, and I could tell his eyes were wide in disbelief. Even for the privileged kids like some of his friends, that was an outrageous concept. "For anything?"

"I tried rebelling when I was younger," Serena admitted in a matter-of-fact way. "I always wondered what it would feel like. Daddy stopped my credit card once, so I had to live on my allowance for a couple of weeks. But it was like... a token gesture. And I couldn't find anything worse to do without actually hurting someone. I think if I keyed the neighbour's car or something I would have gotten a proper punishment, but how could I do something like that? I don't want to destroy a work of art, and half those things are irreplaceable. So I gave up, and accepted that it was something I'd never understand."

"Wow," Marcie mumbled. I couldn't tell if she was envying Serena there, or terrified by the thought that a life like that was even possible. It was starting to look like those two had opposite lives in every way possible.

There were no more questions, but when Mr Pine gave up on drumming advanced trigonometry into impressionable young minds and released us, there was something else I had to say to Serena. Marcie wanted to grab my wrist and bring me along to history; scheduling was weird, so Serena wouldn't be in the same class as us for that. Something to do with the school's ethos of making sure that everyone had a wide variety of friendship groups; they shuffled us around for every class. But Serena promised that she would bring me to the right room before the end of the five minute transition period.

We went to the bathroom, and found a few minutes to talk while we stood at a row of identical sinks, the one in the middle dripping constantly. I idly wondered if every single bathroom in the school had exactly one broken faucet; it certainly seemed to be the norm. But right now, there were other things on my mind.

"Mr Pine wouldn't just give in to blackmail, would he?" I asked.

"Even if the claim is baseless, it could be a big problem for the school. The influential families are the ones that can afford to choose where they send their kids, and they're the ones most likely to take unfounded accusations seriously."

"Yeah. But even so, I think he would have told Becker to take a running jump. This was your decision, wasn't it?"

"You think I'd do that?"

"I remember the first time we met, I wondered why this rich, popular girl would want to hang out with us. It's like different worlds. And you were fascinated by Marcie's lisp, asking how it felt, and how it made her feel. And how I felt when I thought about what might happen to me. You know everything that's in the public about the Punishment Pill, and I never understood why. But now, you just said... when you were younger, you wanted to get punished to find out how it feels. And that got me wondering..."

"Yeah," she said. "But it's not like..." And then she trailed off to silence. I didn't want to push her to talk about this, but I wanted to know if the guesses in my head were anything close to the truth. After a minute, she spoke again.

"Okay, I'm kind of obsessed. I was curious when I heard they were making new laws about kids getting punished for being a problem at school. And the more I found out about the system, the more amazing it was. The complexity of the science behind it, with experts from so many fields pooling their knowledge, and how much effort they're putting in. I couldn't stop asking questions. And you're right, I did come to chat with you just so I could have a first-hand opinion. But I'd like to think we're friends now, it hasn't all been about my weird fascination. You're a good person, I knew that when we first met, and we got a surprising amount in common for girls from such different backgrounds. I don't want you to think I'm treating you like... a freak to study, or something."