Skin Deep Enough
Copyright© 2026 by Danielle Stories
Chapter 1: Paper Cot
The nurse’s door swung open, exposing me to the open hallway in clear view of everyone. Nurse Phelps returned and slapped a metal tray down on the counter beside me. The clang was the punctuation to her sentence, a period made of stainless steel.
“We know the principal is going to discuss this,” she stated, her voice devoid of warmth. She stopped her bustling and finally looked at me, her gaze lingering with clinical distaste on my hunched form. “Despite you needing to change your bloody tampon.” She let the crude description hang, a deliberate vulgarity. “Judging from how unbothered you are, sitting there like that, sure, he’ll need to discuss why you were even dressed to be stripped in the first place.”
The tray held nothing of comfort: a blood pressure cuff, a tongue depressor still in its paper wrapper, a sealed plastic cup as if she expected me to provide a sample of my humiliation for the lab.
“You’re lucky not to be suspended already for allowing this to happen,” she said, the words crisp and cold as the instruments. She didn’t look at me again, arranging a pen on a clipboard with precise, irritated taps. “Disrupting the school day, causing a scene during a sanctioned Spirit Week activity...”
Oh, I’m so sorry. Did the spectacle of my assault clash with the pep rally schedule?
My internal commentary was a searing, silent scream. I didn’t voice it. I just stared at the blue highways on the inside of my wrists, the tributaries of veins that seemed to map the only escape route out of my own body.
“Likely the principal will have to suspend you for this,” she continued, her eyes chips of ice behind sensible glasses. She shot me a swift, scanning glance that felt like being doused in solvent. “You drew unnecessary attention. Attention from the school’s elite. The donors’ students.” She let that word, donors, hang in the antiseptic air like a chemical scent. “You understand? You deserve everything you’re experiencing now.”
The brunt of her words carried a cold, administrative finality. It wasn’t just blame; it was a verdict. Her eyes traveled over me, the knobby knees, the touching thighs, the vulnerable geography between them, and her lip curled, just a millimeter. A tiny tremor of pure disgust. “Looking at you, sitting there all confident in your own skin ... I expect nothing less than you were bagging them. My thought was that ... you were asking for that kind of attention.”
Bagging them.
The phrase dropped into the silence like a stone in a still pond. Bagging them. As if male attention were a trophy, and my nakedness was the cunning trap I’d set.
She had already denied my request for a blanket. Denied the whispered plea for a towel. “We need to assess the injury,” she’d said, her voice leaving no room for the injury being anything but my flesh. Now she was constructing the narrative: I was a hunter who’d bagged my own humiliation. Because seeing a victim would require seeing a crime, and seeing a crime here was simply bad for business. Better a slut than a casualty.
“You should’ve been more careful,” she added, arms crossed over her boxy, daisy-print scrubs, a parody of cheer. “Honestly, the way you were carrying on. Flaunting.”
“I was wearing jeans,” I said, my voice a rusty hinge. “A blouse. Shoes.”
“Well,” she snapped, as if my voice was a physical affront, “you didn’t guard yourself.”
Guard myself. The official recommendation from the Mesa Mirage High School health services office.
Nurse Phelps’s verdict was delivered with the sterile finality of a surgical clamp. “If your choices led you here,” she said, her voice flat as the paper sheet beneath me, “then you can sit in it until a parent or guardian arrives to remove you.”
So I sat. The vinyl was glacially cold against my bare thighs, seeping into the bones. Then came the deeper urgency, the insistent, shameful pulse. The soaked string.
With a stiffness that felt robotic, I reached between my legs. The paper crinkled obscenely loud in the quiet room. With Nurse Phelps standing sentinel by the sink, arms crossed, watching with detached scrutiny, I pulled the used tampon out myself. I held it, a small, bloody secret in my clenched fist. She did not offer a bag, nor a wipe, nor a moment’s respite from her gaze.
“Dispose of it,” she said, nodding to the stainless steel biohazard bin.
I shuffled off the table, took the two steps, and dropped the damning bundle in. It landed with a soft, final thud.
But the true depth of the humiliation was the walk to the sink. Dampening a rough brown paper towel to clean myself, the water lukewarm and insufficient. Placing the fresh tampon from my purse on the counter with a tiny, defiant click. And the nurse, who had already made it clear she considered my nakedness appropriate attire for the guilty, issued her next directive.
“Well?” she said, her tone a flatline. “Go ahead and change it. Right here. You’re a contamination risk.”
A contamination risk. My own body, a biohazard.
So I did. In the full, glaring fluorescent light, under her impassive gaze, I performed the most private of acts. The rustle of the wrapper was deafening. The process was a clumsy, pathetic ballet of averting my eyes and trying to hide what could not be hidden. When it was done, I stood there, the fresh string a new, tiny accusation against my thigh. I didn’t move back to the table. I just stood by the counter, my arms hanging loose, defeated, waiting for the next blow.
Then came the worst part. The door hissed open again.
My mother’s face didn’t just fall; it shattered. It was a collapse in slow motion. Her eyes, wide with a maternal alarm that quickly morphed into something else horror, then a blazing, incredulous fury performed a devastating triage: from me (naked, hunched like a wounded animal, fingers fumbling at my sides), to the nurse (a statue of bureaucratic indifference), to the stark, space on the counter where a blanket or a gown should have been. The absence was a screaming presence.
“Where are her clothes?” Her voice was low thunder, vibrating with a fury that shook the very air in the tiny room. It wasn’t a question; it was an indictment. “Why is my daughter sitting here with nothing?”
Not with clothes. Not with a hug. Not with a whisper of Are you okay, baby?
With fury. Directed at the scene, at the nurse, and already, I could feel it curdling, turning toward the epicenter of the disgrace: me.
Nurse Phelps was unflappable. “Ms. Delane. Your daughter was involved in a disruptive altercation. We needed to assess physical injury following the event. She has been non-compliant and agitated.”
My mother’s eyes snapped back to me. They weren’t soft. They were knives and shame and a deep, withering disappointment all sewn into one searing glare.
“What the hell, Amara?”
She didn’t look at me like I was her daughter. She looked at me like I was at a crime scene she’d been called to identify.
“I told you to stop making yourself a target,” she hissed, yanking the oversized purse strap off her shoulder like it was a weapon she was unsheathing. “To keep your head down. And now this? What, are you trying to get expelled? To ruin everything?”
I tried to speak, to summon the rusty hinge again, to say they stripped me, Mom. They held me down. But my voice was hiding in the back of my throat somewhere, probably under a pile of memories it wanted nothing to do with. All that came out was a choked gasp.
She stepped forward and grabbed my arm. Her fingers were cool, her grip tight, possessive.
“Mom!”
“Get up. You’re coming with me.”
“I don’t have anything on.”
“Oh? I hadn’t noticed.” Her laugh was made of glass, sharp and brittle. She didn’t let me cover up. Didn’t let me linger. Just pulled, like I was her broken doll, my bare feet slipping on the linoleum as I scrambled off the table.
The walk from the nurse’s office to the front entrance was a gauntlet through a silent, staring dimension. The hallway, usually a river of noise and motion, was between periods. A few stragglers, a teacher coming out of a classroom. I heard a gasp, sharp and feminine. A kid dropped their phone, the clatter echoing like a gunshot. A teacher I didn’t recognize muttered, “Good lord,” and turned away, but not before his eyes took a snapshot.
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