The First Day 2

>> Inspired by the CG artist Thew's picture: Student Teachers

You had to hand it to them ... The bastards got them real good. It was a nasty, mean-as-hell thing to do, especially to people you didn't even know, who hadn't done anything to deserve it—but the staging had been clever. She'd give them that.

And as for the three of them, the way they'd walked right into it ... Hardly did them credit. Maybe they had deserved it, after all. Just for being so stupid and naïve.

There had been a moment, right before the end, where she hesitated. Where she could have saved herself, before she stepped through the door. She'd thought, "Hold on, this is a bit strange, isn't it? The way this is arranged ..." But then she'd shrugged it off, and walked ahead to her doom. Maybe if she'd been by herself, she would have been more cautious. But since the other two didn't seem to have any worries, she let herself be swept along. Probably the other two had felt the same way.

Doing it to the three of them at once was possibly the cleverest part of the trick. Not only did it triple the payoff, at the conclusion ... It had made the three of them complicit. They had propelled each other through the trick, reassuring each other with their presence and acceptance that nothing was wrong, when it should have been obvious from the start. Brilliant! Evil, but brilliant.

It was the end of their tour. They'd been led all over the school—and they'd been on their feet for hours. It had been exhausting and irritating, because it was a huge school with a complex layout, and the tour hadn't been organized very well—so they kept having to go back and forth from one end of the place to the other, over and over, rather than seeing everything systematically. "Let's see the math department ... Now let's go across to the music rooms. This section around us is for art—but we'll come back." The excuse offered for this patternless pattern was to avoid disrupting classes in progress ... When it was finally all over, they'd been invited to use the new steam room, in the women's locker room. Which supposedly had just been installed. And it was a perk for the staff, to get to use it after school hours. The school day hadn't actually been done yet at that point—one more period to go—but since their orientation was finished, the three student teachers were told to go ahead and indulge themselves for a while. None of them had been initially receptive to the notion, but their guide had persisted ... "Go ahead. It feels great." The girl hadn't been a teacher herself but a senior student in a special program, working half-days as an administration assistant in the school offices. "I know it's been a long tour and we've run you all pretty ragged. Piled a ton of new information on you. I don't want you all to go home feeling overwhelmed. So unwind for a while. Sample of one of the special advantages of working in this school."

So in the end, they all decided to do it. Just for twenty minutes or so. To unwind, like the girl said.

Her high heels were too new—her feet had been killing her, after all that walking. So many damn stairs.

They put all their clothes and things into lockers. Of course they didn't have swimsuits with them—"Trust me," the guide girl told them, "It's better not to wear anything. Swimsuits just get itchy. The whole point is to sweat, after all. Makes your butt breakout, if you're not careful. You're all grownups, right? It's no big deal. And you'll have towels to wrap up in, of course." Except of course they didn't—none of them had brought towels, just as none of them had brought swimsuits. And the school wasn't a health club—how many schools would provide towels for their students or their staff members, seriously? This was a rich private academy, but still ... they really should have known better.

But they were told they'd be given towels, in the Towel Room—God, it was so embarrassing that they'd believed this bullshit. The guide said it was on the way to the steam room, pointing to a door at the end of a short corridor, at the back of the locker room. "Just straight through there. Steam room is on the other side. Grab a towel for yourself off the shelf as you pass through."

So they went ahead, like sheep to the slaughter. All three of them prancing along completely naked. All three of them pretending like they weren't slightly freaked out to be doing that. Some people can strut around bare naked in a locker room and not feel uncomfortable about it—but only a few people, and only if they do this sort of thing all the time. The rest of us just fake nonchalance and fumble along as best we can, with varying degrees of success—embarrassed by our embarrassment, as much as by our exposed bodies. But it was only supposed to be for a few moments—then they'd have towels. Soon as they stepped through the door into the Towel Room.

Sheesh.

She had kept her glasses on. That was a little silly—they would have fogged up in the steam room. Hadn't even thought to take them off until she'd already shut her locker. And she was just too blind without them. It was no big deal. Foggy lenses you can wipe off, when you need to. Not the case with foggy vision.

She followed the other two women, the redhead and the blond. Hadn't caught their names yet.

They all went through the door, one right after the other, into bright light. Into noise. But not a one of them realized the truth until it was too late and they'd already passed through. Maybe if the redhead had screamed, or the blonde. But they didn't, and neither did she, when it was her turn. Too much shock.

Because of course there was no fucking Towel Room. The door was an exit, into a hallway. A crowded hallway—countless chattering students. But the chattering stopped. It was replaced by gasps. And then by hoots and whistles and howls and snorts, and then giggles, and then peals and peals of raucous hysterical laughter.

Also, inevitably, the clicks and bleeps of flashing camera phones.

Well, fuck. What else could you say?

She covered herself as much as she could. Not that everybody hadn't already seen everything. The others took it harder than her, it seemed. The blonde seemed about to start crying, and she also looked like she was about to wet herself on the icy tile floor.

And God, that floor was cold, so cold it stung—made her stretch up on her toes, like she was still wearing those awful painful heels—though part of that had been because of the protective stance she took, or rather, cringed into, when she huddled her shoulders and squeezed her knees together tight as she could ... Yes, if she was honest with herself about it, it had been much more from the childish girly cringing than the coldness of the floor, that forced her to stand silly like that, pigeon-toed. Wobbling like a drunk.

The redhead freaked out the most, screeching and swearing. Pretty much lost her shit, as they say these days ... She was the first of them to try to go back through the door. Sensible thing to try, but it turned out, of course, to be locked. Well, certainly. They would have made sure of that. The ones that planned this. Just the guide alone? Or were there others in on it?

The redhead refused to face the facts. She kept jerking on the handle and beating on the door with her fist. As if that was gonna do any good. But we must be understanding. How many of us would handle ourselves any better, in this position?

As for her, the only reason she didn't flip out just as much was because she'd frozen, like a deer in headlights. It was almost like she fainted—she didn't fully faint, she didn't fall down. But she could tell, vaguely, that she was no longer herself—no longer completely, properly conscious. The whole world around her, and all the ogling students with their laughter and their camera phones—it was all very distant-feeling, like it was happening to somebody else. Like she was just sitting at home safe, watching this happen on television. A psychological defense mechanism—disconnection. In that state, there was no horror or shame. Not at that moment. That changed, of course, later on, after she'd got home. She had herself a good cry over everything, the unfairness and the cruelty, the humiliation and her stupidity. Later on when that was done, in her bath—not sure why she felt the sudden impulse, but unable to suppress it—she would masturbate, fingering herself in such a fury that water splashed all over the room ... she even got some on the ceiling. Thinking, as she did that to herself and as she came, of all those students' faces and their fucking flashing cameras again. The laughter and the whistles and the howls and the clicks. There had been lust, too. On those faces, in those eyes. How many students were jerking off the same time she did? How many of them were thinking of her, over the other two women? She'd never know, and it didn't matter—except it did.

But back while it was still happening, in that critical moment that had seemed so endless—until it ended, in no more than half a minute, with some kinder souls running up to them with coats—all she had felt was amusement, believe it or not. No, really. She had maybe felt almost as amused by what had been done to her as all the students were. Her disconnection let her see it all the same way they could.

And it had been a pretty good trick, perfectly executed. Neatly played.