Sunday night was appalling -- not even a hint of sleep came to me. Tossing and turning -- which, at least, was a sort of luxury given my old single bed permitted so little of it -- I tried to will myself unconscious but it just wouldn't happen. My breathing was shallow and irregular and anxiety bubbled in my stomach -- one more sleep, if I ever managed it, and I'd be in my office for my first real day.
Almost obsessively, I'd been checking the red notice database -- obviously, as term hadn't even started yet, it was blank of names, yet sometimes I'd be checking every few minutes. I only stopped once Kam sent over an email, reminding me of the whole 'it's the start of term, nobody's got a red notice yet, maybe chill out, yeah?' thing. I wondered for a while how they knew what I was thinking until I realised that the Excel workbook tracked its visitors, even keeping count of the number of times anyone visited. Number of visits by Kam: 2. Number of visits by Beth: 0. Number of visits by Nadine: 1. Number of visits by Kelly: 18. 'Horror' doesn't even begin to cut it. Would I have preferred them to write it off as fear or excitement? Neither served me well -- I imagined Kam snickering to themselves at the thought of me turning myself inside out with all the waiting, and then I imagined Kam over my lap again, and then I was catching my hand trying to venture between my legs.
"It's just your job," I mumbled to myself, hot even with the window open, no sheets, and half-naked. "You're not meant to enjoy it. Sort your head out." I wished I could just fall asleep but, as 1am because 2am became 4am, it wouldn't come -- I even considered trying to knock myself out by slamming my head against something harder than, or equally hard as, my head, but that might have been silly.
From outside, I heard tuneless singing -- climbing off my mattress and stumbling through the dark to the window, hitting my foot on the desk chair as I went, I peered through the curtains, the window itself misty with condensation. Down below, on one of the tarmac paths between accommodation blocks, a group of girls came marching by, on their way home from a night out.
"On a Sunday night?" I muttered. I was so lame. God only knew where they could have been -- there couldn't have been many clubs open this late in Dorking. Crawley, maybe, or South London, then a very expensive taxi home, the driver asking them if the rumours about Crownbird were true and all of them assuring him they'd never been, or get, spanked themselves. I ducked behind the window frame as one of them glanced up at the building, vanishing from view, not wanting to appear a voyeur. I didn't need to be one -- not with my job.
This wasn't what I'd become, was it, I suddenly wondered with a flash of fear. The monster in the attic, the ghost at the feast, the mysterious lady working in the lonely little office in the academy's top floor, never doing anything but tapping away at a keyboard and dishing out punishments? I thought back to my life at St Andrew's, when I could've been like those girls, and chose not to be. When I was more concerned for my spider plant than myself, wasting away studying and fretting about amassing credits, never knowing what it was like to have your ears ring from a club's music or hook up with a charming stranger on the stairs at a house party. These were stories to me -- nothing lived. Now, I worried, would this change, or just continue? Here I was, back in academia, but even as staff instead of student it seemed so certain that nothing would be different. Once I was known across the academy as The One Who Punishes, assuming I even had the competence to pull that off, what more could my life be? A bit of effort was required -- Cherry had extended a hand, and Kam and the others surely would too, so all I had to do was accept them. Surely it was as simple as that.
Going back to bed, furious at the time, knowing now I'd be shattered for my crucial first day, I again tried to sleep, and I kept trying and trying until it became light outside. Maybe I drifted off. Maybe I didn't. By the time my alarm went I was almost delirious with tiredness and stress that I didn't even know. And then, suddenly, in quite a state of exhaustion before the day had even begun, I was out of bed, showering, and getting dressed.
Two coffees and a bowl of Crunchy Nut deep, I started second-guessing the outfit I'd picked for today -- I'd gone for some dungarees and a bright yellow shirt, but that was starting to feel a bit childish, a bit unserious, so I stuffed it all back in their draws and, as the first commotions of waking students in the corridors emanated into my room, I instead fished out some jeans and a tangerine cardigan which, despite Alexa's insistences, only sort of looked like rotting orange peel. Finally, shattered and not feeling ready at all, I went to work; as I stepped into the corridor, I bumped into Cherry, coming out of the kitchen eating a microwaveable crepe, almost formless in a puffy brown waterproof coat.
"Oh, hey," she said, looking as tired as I felt. "First day?"
"Yep; wish me luck," I replied.
"You won't need it -- it'll be fine, pet." I shivered at the nickname. Why? "Got any good spankings lined up?"
"I..." Quickly, I looked one way, then the other, down the corridor. Nobody was around -- the building was still half-asleep. "Not at the moment, no."
"That's a shame." She smiled and patted my shoulder. "Well, have fun." At that, she went back to her room, leaving me alone again in the corridor.
The morning was chilly and those students who had early starts were wrapped up a lot warmer than I'd thought to be -- I clung to myself all the way to my building before ascending in the lift and returning to the drab little office with its view over the Recreation Field. Standing at the window, wiping off condensation with some tissue paper, I saw a few early risers jogging the circumference of the courts. I logged on and, immediately, checked the red notices database. It was still empty -- and, I saw, Kam was on it, too. They vanished almost immediately upon my appearance.
Barely fifteen minutes into work, with an increasing pile of emails from students about various trivial issues, there came a knock at the door -- I nearly jumped out of my skin.
"Uh, come in!" I said quickly, and it opened to reveal Kam stood there, smiling, dressed in denim dungarees over a lemon-yellow shirt. Thank God I changed my mind about my outfit.
"Hey!" they said brightly. "Just wanted to check on you, make sure you're doing good."
"Well, I only just got in," I replied, trying not to sound too sarcastic.
"Well, yeah," they laughed, "but I mean, you feeling confident with everything? Know what you're doing?"
"I think so," I said, looking at the screen. "I did the training like twenty times and it's all feeling pretty natural thus far."
"Thus?" Kam sniggered.
"This." I smiled weakly.
"You look nervous.
"I am," I admitted. "About all of it."
"Well, there's no red notices, so you don't have to worry about that. I know you've been, with all those visits to the workbook." They winked at me and I felt myself shifting an uncomfortable red. "You also look tired, by the way."
"I'm not even sure if I slept."
"That's okay -- it'll be a quiet one, and then you'll get some proper sleep tomorrow. Same thing happened to me when I started."
"Really?"
"Oh, God, yeah, course." They nodded. "And then everything became fine."
"Well, you didn't have to spank everyone."
"Neither do you," they laughed. "Just some of them. Tell you what -- let's go out tonight."
"What, me and you?"
"Yeah, sure, why not?" Was I being asked out right now? I'd spanked them and they'd shown me their bare ass. It'd be weird to claim there was nothing there -- but maybe there was nothing there. "I can show you the village properly -- you haven't really been round the block yet, right?"
"I haven't actually, no," I said. Part of me wanted to refuse -- but that was the old part of me, I told myself. The new part of me, the part that wanted to be like those girls I saw last night, had other things to say. "That'd be nice."
"Awesome. And, hey..." They took a step forward and leaned over the desk, held up by their elbows, and I stared at their sly face. "If you don't end up giving any red notices today, maybe you can give me one, instead."
"I... oh." They almost howled with laughter at my answer.
"Okay, I'm gonna stop torturing you now," they sniggered, making for the door. "Have a good one -- and let me know if you need anything, yeah?"
"You got it," I said weakly, as Kam vanished back through the door and I found myself sat there, now terrified of what might happen after work as well as during. And excited. Very, very excited.
When I turned back to my monitor, at first I didn't even register what had happened -- but then, gradually and then all at once, I realised that a green pop-up had appeared in the corner.
"Notification: RED_NOTICE_INFO.xlsx." I stared at it until, slowly, like a ghost, it began to fade away -- quickly I brought the cursor over the box, causing it to flash back to full opaqueness, and clicked it, opening the Excel sheet.
Now, where before had been an entirely blank workbook, there existed a red box at row B, column 3.
"HANNAH COOPER," it read inside, a student ID -- 36793462 -- on the following row, and past that, under "reason for issuing," a block of text:
"Ms Cooper was caught on campus grounds in the very late hours while accompanied by a male companion. As it is strictly against Crownbird Academy's security policy for unauthorised persons to be on the grounds, Ms Cooper has received her second red notice." I stared at the text for quite some time -- I wondered what her first had been for, or whether this offence counted for two. I then saw that, on the final row, under "issued by," it read "Professor Ellsworth." So it was Nadine who gave me my first -- somehow, that didn't surprise me at all.
