Ancilla

Beginning/Prologue (part 1)

Due to Wattpad's new draconian community standards (yes, they are draconian, compared to other publishing platforms and to the standards of the publishing industry in the real world) I feel obliged to state up front that Ancilla complies with all of Wattpad's standards. The one single incident in Ancilla that involves a couple of teenagers involves two high school seniors, and in the United States, many high school seniors are 18 years old. The scene also does not depict anything sexual, for all that there is some brief nudity. 

I considered excising it, but decided against it. Why? Because it does not violate community standards. 

Also, it is important for establishing my protagonist's character, and for setting up future plot events, and (most importantly) it is part of my independently published print edition. The Wattpad and Inkitt editions of Ancilla exist because not everybody can afford to buy their books, and I wanted to make Ancilla free to anyone who cannot buy books. I'm not going to make non-paying readers read a bowdlerized, censored version of my novel. That's just wrong.

The graphic descriptions of lovemaking in Ancilla - and for the record, mostly I write about lovemaking, not just about sex, although there are a few notable exceptions here - only feature consenting adults. 

Let's get on to the story, shall we?

Introductions are polite, so let's start here.

(Don't worry, this early bit won't take very long. We'll get to the more exotic fare soon enough, I promise).

I was playing in the backyard of a neighbor. I was maybe ten or eleven years old at the time. My companion was a five-year-old who had started following me around whenever she saw me – I have no idea why my actual peers avoided having anything to do with me, whereas children much younger followed me around as if I were the Pied Piper, but that seemed to be the case, and I wasn't really in a position to object. It kept me from getting too lonely, and later, it turned into some paid babysitting jobs, which meant I could buy more books than what I could purchase with just the tiny allowance my parents kept me on. When I was still in lower school, though, it was more of a trade: I got somebody to play with who didn't bully me, and the parents tolerated or even welcomed my presence in return because they got free, unofficial babysitting, and time to themselves.

So, at any rate, I was in the girl's backyard by the jungle gym, as some of the other kids on the street, including her big sister, played soccer in another part of the yard. Most of us hadn't bothered to change out of our school uniforms yet. You could tell which schools we attended by our uniforms. Some of us wore white dress shirts with navy jumpers or trousers – they attended a parochial school a few blocks away. A couple of girls wore plaid jumpers or skirts with their white dress shirts. They attended the nearest of our city's two country day schools. Yes, we had two. (The boys there looked like boys at any private school: navy or khaki trousers, white dress shirts or polo shirts. At that time, public school children had no uniforms at all, and boys who attended private schools mostly dressed alike. The only real variety was in the uniforms the girls wore). The girl who attended the more distant country day school had the best uniform, I thought: She had a dark blue blazer with a crest on it, a coordinating striped rep tie and pleated navy skirt, and a white dress shirt that had a really cute collar. Her knee socks blended in with the uniform perfectly, and the whole effect was very well put together. I thought she looked like one of the characters from The Facts of Life, only her uniform was blue, not red.

Meanwhile, I wore what the other three older kids were wearing, which was the plaid skirt and white dress shirt of the lower school that was only a few blocks away. Our plaid wasn't that different from the plaid of the nearby country day school. We had to wear saddle shoes, though, and their students did not. The saddle shoes were almost impossible to find unless you bought them from a store that had an arrangement with the school. We hated wearing them. We thought they were ugly and uncomfortable. The kids I attended school with who were playing soccer had bagged their uniform shoes and kept on the cleats they'd worn for soccer practice. Why they felt a need to keep playing soccer with their neighbors after they'd just finished two sweaty hours of soccer practice with their classmates on our school's athletic field, I had no idea.