Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 76857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Releasing an extended, shaky exhale, the general pinched the bridge of his nose, swearing under his breath.
I watched him collect himself, watched when he stood taller and straightened his jacket, as I hunched into myself on that damned couch. My arms wrapped tight around my middle as if it might hold in all the grossness I felt inside.
“You will be severely punished for your lapse in judgment. If I catch you outside the female dorms after dark again, you will force me to do something you are not ready for.” A strange change came over the man, as if he was trying to speak reasonably and gently. “I am asking you to please take better care of yourself.”
My lip shook as I asked, “You’re not going to kill me?”
“No.” He let out another exasperated breath and made damn sure I was looking him dead in the eye. “But I will kill any boy you are caught with. Remember that next time you want to help a failing student study for math. Their death will be on your hands.”
He may not have beat me, but the general kept his word. I was heavily punished for my part in the late-night escapade. One full year of extra labor every day after classes—time I used well. Always, an armed watcher supervised my work, yet they never engaged. And as I scrubbed the halls on hands and knees, day in and day out, I found something close to privacy for the first time in my life. Time to learn the secrets of my prison.
Mapping out surveillance devices when you had reason to linger in one place wasn’t as complicated as one would think. I knew exactly how I’d been caught last time.
I watched the instructors’ habitual movements and schedules. I discovered the best hiding places. Within five months, I began to sneak away from the females’ dorms simply out of spite. Just to see if I could.
Twice over the following year, I had run into a boy doing the same. Both times, I had let them kiss me in the dark.
After asking the older girls what the word rape meant, I had a better understanding. It meant boys kissing without permission. Well, it wasn’t rape if I asked them to do it.
In an awkward fumbling moment of foolishness, I even let one touch my breasts—a redhead who looked a lot like the boy I had tried to teach trigonometry to. They may have even shared the same birth mother.
We didn’t quite know what we were doing, groping in the dark, and I’m not sure either of us enjoyed it the way we were supposed to. But it had been my moment in that dirty alcove, using my body the way I wanted to use it. And he had kissed me a great deal.
I liked the kissing a lot.
He graduated days later. I never saw him again.
I attained my goal and enjoyed a brief sense of empowerment. One that fell away almost as quickly as it arrived.
A week later, I was summoned to the general’s office in the middle of the night.
And avoided his silent stare for ten straight minutes.
He must have known something, for he gazed at me with such deranged wrath. It was the only time I had ever seen the man untidy. Uniform wrinkled as if he’d been rushing to dress. Hair mussed, eye twitching, tense, he sat in his chair and seemed to go a little more insane by the minute.
He looked pointedly at the white couch as if to remind me what it signified yet said nothing else.
I know I must have looked pathetic in my adolescent uncertainty. Which broken rule had he discovered? For I had broken all of them in my rebellion against his tyranny.
Thinking about that poor, dead redheaded boy stirred up anger that had been growing for a year. Resentment for the unfairness of losing all my free hours. Bitterness that the general held all the power and I had none.
Angry, it was easier to finally meet his treacherous gaze. To really look at my tormentor as a person, not just a force of nature.
A person I did not like very much.
“Do you understand the consequences of consorting with the opposite sex after hours?”
I could be snide too. “Deeply, sir.”
“Tonight, a boy was apprehended on his way back to the boys’ dorm. There were signs of fornication. He had something on him that looks to be yours.”
Not only had I not been in the halls that evening, but I now knew how to make him just as uncomfortable as he was making me. “What is fornication?”
“Private, were you in the halls tonight?” He was in no mood for my games. “I smelled you in every room.”
Our sense of smell may have been slightly better than a human’s, but to blame me for a crime because he “smelled me” somewhere was absurd.