This is Part Three of Four. I normally hate reading multi-chapter stories, but I hate 20-page stories even more. Ideally each chapter can stand alone if you don't have the patience to read all of them. Short version: Katie is a new graduate student who suffers wedgies and humiliation at the hands of her cruel roommate Maddie. Here, Maddie gets her friends involved. The public humiliation Katie suffers in the next chapter -- the finale -- will make the previous three chapters seem positively tame.
"Katie, do you mind sticking around for a few minutes?"
Katie looked up, startled. It was a Monday in late September, a month after the start of classes, and she was sliding her laptop into her backpack at the end of her program's weekly first-year proseminar. Dave Carpenter, the director of graduate studies, was looking at her from the front of the classroom, his expression inscrutable. Already Katie knew what this was about -- from across the room, she could see her midterm problem set atop his papers, with the letter C circled in red ink at the top of the page -- and she dreaded the conversation to follow.
A month earlier, after Maddie and Alyssa had left her in her bedroom in nothing but a cartoon-patterned diaper after an atomic wedgie and spanking, Katie had hoped that the worst was behind her: that those early encounters with her roommate would amount to nothing more than a sort of initiation, and that thereafter they'd have -- if not a friendship --then at least a mutually respectful distant relationship.
It was only when Katie found herself hanging off of the bathroom door's towel hook by her underwear two days later that she knew that the worst was just beginning. She'd forgotten to run the dishwasher, Maddie said, and "messy girls get hanging wedgies." Maddie had reached into her shorts and grabbed the waistband of her underwear, laughing at their childishness -- pink with green polka dots -- and, after tugging her shorts down to her ankles, dragged Katie across the apartment to the bathroom, exposing her naked butt as she squirmed to get away. Maddie's regular fitness classes left her arms toned, and with barely any difficulty she had lifted Katie off the ground and hooked her waistband to the door. She had hung there for two hours before they finally ripped, leaving her to walk back to her room naked from the waist down except for the humiliating remnants of the waistband.
Since then, wedgies had been a near-daily occurrence. Always they were a form of punishment: Katie had left her toothpaste on Maddie's side of the sink; Katie had forgotten to take the trash out; Katie had made a stupid comment in their marketing class. To her humiliation, she never found the ability to suppress her discomfort and embarrassment as she felt herself hoisted up by her underwear: Katie's tolerance of the pain of the cotton in her ass was outpaced by the growing intensity of Maddie's wedgies, either because Maddie was growing stronger with each yank or because her hostility toward Katie continued to grow.
Katie counted what small blessings she could. There had been no more spankings since that afternoon with Alyssa; even more fortunately, she hadn't been forced into a diaper again, and for all of Maddie's taunts and jeers -- "Wedgie Girl," "Wedgie Loser," the consistently shameful references to her
big girl underpants
-- Katie's mortifying peeing and subsequent diapering hadn't entered the conversation.
Most merciful of all was the fact that, for all of the wedgies Maddie gave Katie, the humiliation thus far hadn't left the four walls of their apartment. Sometimes Alyssa would be hanging out at their place and join in -- she and Maddie made a sport of lifting Katie off the ground together, both of them hoisting her waistband in tandem, laughing as Katie's legs flailed helplessly in the air -- but to Katie's knowledge, no one else at school was privy to Katie's private life as the Wedgie Girl; though Katie avoided Maddie in class and on campus, petrified that she would feel a sudden yank on her waistband, she miraculously had never been wedgied in public. In class and in study sessions in the library, Katie would study Charlie Broadman's face, looking for some sign that Maddie -- who always flirted shamelessly with Charlie, especially when Katie was around -- had told him about Katie's regular wedgies and the embarrassing underwear she wore beneath her school clothes.
Nevertheless, the first month of Katie's first year of graduate school had accordingly passed in a haze of misery and shame. The discomfort and humiliation of regular wedgies -- and the paranoid fear that one day she would be hoisted up by her underwear in front of her classmates -- had taken a toll on her academic work, and it seemed her professors were noticing.
"Take a seat, Katie," Professor Carpenter said as she approached him. His expression was not unkind, but something in its pity made her blush.
"Is everything okay, Professor?" Katie heard herself ask, her voice a nervous squeak.
"Well," Professor Carpenter said, studying her through his glasses. "Your midterm makes me think it isn't. Are you doing okay, Katie?"
Katie had to fight back her blushing as she remembered Maddie bouncing her off the ground by her underwear the night before. "Y-yes, it is. Why?"
"Katie, in my experience, it's normal for new doctoral students to go through an adjustment period. Perfectly normal. Doctoral work is hard, and it's a marathon, not a sprint." He studied her again. "And I've found that collaboration and support is the best way to get someone back on track before it's too late."
Fearing the worst possible meaning of these words, Katie forced herself to speak. "What do you mean by that, Professor?"
He smiled what he intended to be a kind smile. "Everyone enters this program at their own pace, and it's sometimes useful to partner up two people working at different speeds, for mutual guidance and support. I think that would be useful here, and I have a really great idea for you. I believe you know Maddie Cartright?"
The worst was confirmed, and as if waking up in a nightmare, Katie looked to the classroom door to see Maddie standing there, a leering grin widening across her face. She gave Katie a taunting little wave with the tips of her fingertips. "I'm here, Dave," she said sweetly.
Of course she's on a first name basis with our professors and I still talk to them like I'm a sixth grader
, Katie thought, her face hot with shame.
"At Yale, Maddie did things in macroeconomics that even the most advanced graduate students couldn't dream of. I think she would make an excellent study buddy of sorts for you, and I think the two of you will be great friends to boot. What do you think, Katie?"
"She's thrilled, Dave," Maddie said, smirking. "I'll keep her on top of things, don't worry."
It was with a lurch of nausea that Katie heard the rap on her bedroom door that evening. She was hunched over her desk, attempting to work through that week's problem set, but once again she was unable to focus. Before she could respond to the knock, the door opened.
There stood Maddie, and behind her was Alyssa and four or five girls Katie didn't recognize. They were all similarly attractive -- they reminded Katie of the girls from undergrad who'd worn their sorority's t-shirts to class -- and they all had the same look on their faces: one that was expectant, almost greedy.
"I was just telling my friends here about the little extracurricular tutoring assignment Dave stuck me with today," Maddie said sweetly. "They didn't believe me when I told them I'm an excellent teacher, so I invited them over to let them see for themselves."
Before Katie could reply, Maddie crossed the room and swiped the problem set from Katie's desk. As her eyes moved down the page, her face widened with an expression of unbridled joy that made Katie's stomach churn with fear of what would follow.
"Well well -- Dave really wasn't lying," Maddie said, picking up a red pen from Katie's desk and beginning to theatrically mark Xes over Katie's work. The girls behind her tittered, and Katie felt her face flush. "Yes, I see that normal review methods aren't going to be particularly effective with little Katie. I feel like this is a situation that calls for -- negative reinforcement. Lindsey?"
A tall, athletic, severe-looking girl in a t-shirt that said PRINCETON ROWING stepped from the group of girls into the room holding a cord of rope.
"Linds here was just telling us about an idea she'd always had when she was captain of the crew team at Princeton. I told her I thought she might finally get to put it to use."
"W-what are you going to do?" Katie asked, ashamed of how meek her voice sounded in front of these attractive girls, whom she gathered were MBA students at Wharton: girls who went out drinking every night and sleeping with the broad-shouldered ex-finance types in their classes whom Katie could only daydream about from afar. They all laughed at Katie's voice and the childishness she knew her expression betrayed.
"Well, since you decided to wear jeans today, that makes things a bit more cumbersome, but where there's a will, there's a way," Maddie said in a singsong voice. "Ladies, some help?"
Before Katie could stand to try to flee, the group of girls descended upon her. The former rower named Lindsey grabbed her arms and pulled them behind her back, and Alyssa and an attractive blonde proceeded to grab her flailing legs.
"No -- please don't --" Katie whispered as a fourth girl reached for the button of her jeans. She tried with new desperation to kick herself free, but it was too late. The girl -- Kaitlyn, Katie seemed to remember from their joint MBA/PhD marketing seminar she -- had unzipped her jeans, and together she and Maddie placed their hands on the pants' waistband.