Chapter 3

A million drops of water will hollow out a stone

Three months passed, and a patient repetition of daily chores created a new normality for Lucian Gaines – even in a world as weird as Norton’s Academy of Excellence.

Since he started classes, things sped up.

Life became more palpable, more real – though increasingly bizarre. He was at a school after all, a school with its strict schedules and classes, tests and exams and all the usual tedious chores.

There was the daily routine of getting up at six, running half naked through skin-chilling air, showering, having breakfast and morning classes. There was running again, in autumn sunshine or punishing rain; lunch and afternoon classes, running into dusk, resting, having supper, doing evening activities, cleaning up and going to bed.

It went on day after day, week after week. Everyone did it, and no one protested.

GRA, Lucian found out at his first class back in October, stood for Grace; they were classes about how to move and behave graciously. It was home of the Smile and the Curtsy.

And the Gliding Step.

Lucian remembered the choking embarrassment when their teacher, an ageless, very thin former ballerina called Ms. Fontaine, asked him to walk over to the front of the class where he was supposed to mirror her every move and facial expression.

For a week he’d succeeded in staying an outsider, watching what the woman did to make gauche and awkward teenage boys like Kelly and Harper, Jo and Madison move gracefully. He’d marveled at their willingness to adapt and perform, only to immediately change back to their gangling, roguish teenage ways as soon as class ended.

It gave him the first inkling of a different kind of escape.

What if it all was just an act? Look at Kelly. One moment the boy was a floating, smiling angel, the next moment he farted and they all rolled on the floor, laughing.

Maybe he could do that – put on an act and hide behind it? Be there, but not really?

One of the few moments of almost happiness at his former school had started the day Miss Winthrop, the English teacher, had asked him to join her theatre project. They would perform Romeo and Juliet, and to his amazement she’d asked him to be Romeo.

For days he’d been sick with nerves, sleeping poorly.

But from the very start of reading the dialogues he’d felt a change come over him – a withdrawal of everything scared and shy. And when they really went on stage to do rehearsals, it felt like stepping into a warm cloud – a different, secluded world.

Amongst the other actors were two of his worst bullies, but when he started playing, they seemed to disappear.

The girl playing Julia had always ignored him; or maybe he’d always been too shy to be around her. But now, as long as he was Romeo, he could be close to her without stuttering, smile without blushing. He could joke and laugh, and notice she laughed back.

It felt as if locks had been removed from his limbs, from his mouth and his mind.

They did their own costumes, and he’d advised her on how to look best. He’d even helped her do her hair and face and dress, feeling incredibly at ease.

His parents hadn’t been at the performance. He’d hardly noticed. For hours after the curtain closed he’d felt elated. There’d been a little party to celebrate. He got many compliments. But when the evening was over, Julia left with one of his bullies.

The next day everything was back to dismal normality – the off-hand tormenting, the ignoring.

But for a short time he’d felt how it was to be someone else – to have this invisible shield around him. To send this new and different person out into the world, making him cope with everything he could not.

Could he do it again, here at this terrible place? Was it a way to escape, even without leaving?

Standing in front of the classroom in his silk nothings, he doubted it very much. He stared mutely at the woman’s mimicking – once more certain he ought to flee this crazy school at the first opportunity.

There was the Smile, of course, in a myriad of subtle variations. She also tried to have him imitate twenty ways to neigh his head and look coy from under his bangs and eyebrows.

“Grace,” the woman had told them the first day of classes, “might well be the most important thing you’ll learn here; the one indispensable skill to survive in an ugly world.”

Watching her go through Pouting 101 and ten perfect ways of turning your head, insisting he’d imitate her, he felt nausea climb up from the pit of his stomach. His face was on fire and he didn’t know where to look: at this woman or beyond, where his classmates were.

He ended up looking down at the shining tips of his ballet shoes.

When Ms. Fontaine finally started showing how to twist one’s wrist in a dozen elegant ways, Lucian’s stomach started heaving.

No playacting or make belief could remove him from the wave of nausea that attacked him.

He ran off to find a bathroom, mumbling excuses all the way.

“So you got sick in Ms. Fontaine’s class? What happened?”

Lucian sat on the bare wooden stool in Dr. Kurtz’s practice. It felt hard through his thin silk shorts. He just stared at a point just north of the woman’s left shoulder, and didn’t respond.

“What was it?” the doctor insisted. “A sudden nausea? Something you ate?”

He shook his head sideways, hardly noticeable.

“Lucian,” she said, to get his attention. But he kept his absent gaze, saying nothing.

The woman looked down into his file.

“Did you take your pills?” she asked.

He just barely nodded.

“I’ll have to examine you, honey,” she said, rising from behind her desk. “Just to be sure you’re fine.”

Lucian shrugged – examinations had become routine.

Without being asked, he pulled the flimsy top over his head. Then he slid off the stool and pulled down his shorts and his thong-like briefs. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling made his pale skin shine.

Running from class, he had tried to vomit after reaching the toilets, but nothing came, just some bitter-tasting bile. Then he’d stumbled to his room, where Harper came to get him for a visit to the doctor.

Her hands felt slippery in the blue latex gloves.

He lay on the table, naked, as she prodded his body and listened to his breathing. Then she spread his legs and cupped his genitals.

“You did take your pills?” she asked again, pushing a finger up his anus.

He groaned under his breath.

His cock started to glow, but it didn’t swell – it retracted, shying away from the squeezing fingers. But then it twitched inside the warm latex hollow of her hand, responding to the probing of his ass.

From a distance he heard Dr. Kurtz hum contentedly.

The next day there were two new pills with breakfast. They were blue and rather small.

BE of course stood for Beauty, and it was given by the petite Mamselle he’d ran away from on the day the girl Mackenzie cut his hair and exposed his penis.

Mamselle nodded at him when he and the other Bobs entered for his first class, freshly showered and dressed in satin robes. The washing and changing had been a riot. The boys pushed and fought, but when the group entered class a hush fell over them.

Mamselle obviously filled the little hearts of rebellious boys with a natural awe.

The tiny French woman welcomed Lucian with the mere shadow of a smile. She asked him to take a stool at the back of the room – and just watch.

He shirked until he sat comfortable, pulling the short robe tightly over his naked thighs.

It was obvious that the boys knew what was expected from them. They sat down in pairs on the pink-clad stools in front of the vanity mirrors.

“Today we once more do the eyes,” Mamselle said, clapping her tiny hands. “No fake lashes, just the smoke and the pink and the mascara.”

He saw Harper pull a wide elastic band down Kelly’s head; then pulling it up to push the red bangs from his brow. He picked up a cotton ball, dipping it into some liquid, and using it to cleanse Kelly’s left eye.

It made the pale skin shine.

Further down the row he saw Jo do the same to Mu. Taylor had already picked up a brush, and was dabbing some pinkish powder on the eyelids of delicate little Charlie.

There was no giggling or even whispering.

The boys were dead serious and not at all clumsy or inept. Lucian saw Kelly’s left eye start to sparkle inside a deep cloud of smoky make up. In just a few minutes the boy transformed into an oddly adult and sensuous creature. His green eyes seemed to project a deep, decadent knowledge way beyond his age. There was a hint of perversion that contrasted shockingly with his pale freckled skin and the skinny boy’s body in its white silk wrapping.

It made Lucian’s crotch throb with alarming sensations.

Looking down the line of mirrors he met other faces he thought he knew, transformed into disturbing masks of sensuality. Whenever they looked his way, the painted eyes probed his core, robbing it of certainties, making him feel at once confused and sickly excited.

What he felt was not just caused by the decadence of what he saw – what he felt was a sickening return of suppressed memories. He recalled seeing his own young face change into that of a clumsily painted whore while his little boy’s sperm oozed into his mother’s silk panties.

Shaking his head, he tried to escape the staring rows of smoky eyes – and the related specters of his memories.

“Merveilleux, n’est ce pas?” a voice behind him said. “Aren’t they amazing?”

It was Mamselle, and her whispered words startled him. The exotic voice swam right into the daze of his conflicted mind, and he knew he’d nodded in agreement before realizing he did.

Her hand touched his shoulder.

“You’d be even more beautiful,” she said, her warm breath touching his ear, making him shiver.

Fear entered his mind.

He looked around. Sensuous eyes were everywhere, watching him as if they knew things about him – deep things from the past he didn’t want to know himself anymore; truths that everyone but he seemed to understand.

The eyes invited him. They were like dark, widening pools begging him to take the plunge.

“Allez,” the voice said, and the hand softly squeezed his upper arm. “Come, ma belle, and let’s show them how it’s really done.”

He’d followed the urging hand hesitantly, at once wanting to refuse and to obey. He slid off the stool and walked to a free mirror. Sitting down he saw a ghost reflected in the glass, a pale face under a cloud of paler hair.

A face like a sheet of paper, he thought, blank, pristine.

When the wet cotton ball touched his eyelid, Lucian felt something withdraw inside him – some essential part of himself, scaring away from a cruel, confusing world.

Mamselle’s face was close, her dark, round eyes intent as her tiny hand deftly cleaned his skin. She was talking to him, but he didn’t hear.

Maybe if he didn’t listen he wasn’t there?

He sat through minutes of swirling movements. Hands were busy, brushes tickled, pencils and powders spread clouds of sweetness.

“Et voilà,” the voice finally said, tearing him out of his dream.

He was surrounded by painted faces – made up eyes and lipsticked mouths. He heard sighs and murmurs. Then he felt fingertips urging him to turn his head.

The face in the mirror belonged to a stranger – a grown up woman with eyes that had seen the world, knowing how to live in it. The sapphire of her irises was like a clear sky framed in threatening clouds. Her mouth was wide and red and moist.

A tear leaked from the lower lashes, taking a trace of mascara with it.

Someone must have turned the sound on again, as he was suddenly engulfed in words and cries. Hands touched him, mouths kissed him. He was pulled up and taken into a group hug of soft, silk clad bodies, smelling of powder and perfume.

Thank God there was running.

Of all the new sensations Norton had brought him, this was maybe the only one that didn’t muddle his mind with confusion. Whether it was warm or cold, wet or dry, the wind seemed to go straight though him, taking all dust and cobwebs with it, all fear and humiliation – leaving him gloriously empty.

It helped him find the courage to get up each day, and sleep at night.

A path circled the grounds, allowing a run of about three miles. It went through cops of trees, over small bridges, skirting a lake and passing through fields and along the outside walls. He ran it every morning before breakfast, and every evening before supper, most of the time doubling the distance.

In the dark early mornings he was often alone, but in the evening he ran with a group of both Bobs and Barbs, although most of them stopped after the first round. Harper usually ran a second one with him, so did the boy Taylor, and sometimes Kelly.

A few times a week Drew was there too.

She had a wonderfully relaxed running style, gliding on her long legs, her feet hardly audible and her blond ponytail floating behind.

He couldn’t take his eyes off of her, but when she looked at him he looked away. She was a traitor after all, wasn’t she? She’d been Kurtz’s go-between; maybe she’d only gone to bed with him to report on it – on what he did and said. Maybe she’d even helped getting him drugged in the restaurant.

She couldn’t be trusted, could she?

Once, when he was alone with her, doing a second lap, he tried to lose her by speeding up. But she just followed him, hardly breathing quicker.

“Lucian,” she said, when they at last stood stretching at the finish. “I’m sorry about what happened. I really didn’t do it for Kurtz. I like you, Luce, I really do. Please let’s be friends again.”

He looked the other way, leaning forward, hands resting on his bent knees.

“Don’t call me Luce.”

“Sorry.”

His mind raced. He stood straight, stretching his body.

“Okay,” he then said, holding out a hand.

The next moment she was all over him, ignoring his hand. She pushed her sweaty body into his, kissing his face.

She smelled lovely.

That same night she knocked on his door, as he lay naked on the bed, reading.

“Wait!” he yelled, but she already opened the door. Why were there no fucking locks in here?

Drew stood silhouetted against the light, hands over her face, faking embarrassment.

“Oops!”

Lucian covered his crotch with the book he was reading.

“Can I stay with you, just for a while?” she asked, looking through spread fingers.

“Harper said Barbs are not allowed in Bobs’ rooms,” he said, already shirking a bit to the side.

Drew smiled.

She didn’t fall on the bed at once, but first peeled off her top and shorts. Lucian had seen her naked, but never as relaxed like now. The soft light of his bedside lamp played along her slender body. She was skinny, but in a soft way, with a straight, narrow frame. There was hardly a hint of breasts, but she had poking nipples in small, puffed areolas.

As she moved and turned, he saw her tight round ass cheeks, blending into long thighs and strong runners’ calves.

Then she was next to him, making the mattress bounce.

She chuckled, cuddling into his body, her warm breath touching his face before they kissed.

It felt natural and scary, easy and overwhelming at once. Her soft flesh engulfed him, making his worries and anguishes fade into a new and unknown nirvana.

He was held; someone held him – he was not alone.

Her tongue felt like a warm, wet creature from a tropical sea, tasting salty, dancing and swimming around his tongue, darting and challenging, mocking and teasing. Her soft, sucking lips sealed his mouth, muffling his moans and making them echo inside his head.

Wherever his fingers touched her skin felt soft and supple over firm flesh.

It was impossible not to think of her as a girl, even when their slippery penises met, sliding over and under. They just felt like two extra tongues, he thought, as he churned his hips into hers. Her hard little knob poked into the softness of his scrotum – his own swollen cock pushed back into her belly.

‘How clumsy I am,’ he mused, the thought hitting him from nowhere. He felt gauche and uncouth in her embrace, all knees and elbows, his knuckles poking – his cock too large and too hard.

But then a new wave of perfumed closeness overwhelmed him, and he melted.

“Turn,” she hissed in his ear. “Let’s eat each other.”

They squirmed on the bed until his face slid down her slick, soft belly and his tongue found the little fat button on its bare, hairless mound. It tasted salty and was searing hot. Closing his lips around it, he felt her mouth taking in his twitching penis at the same moment, sealing it in a velvet lock.

His mind drifted off as he lay in a bubble of bliss, their skin sliding on a film of sweat. All thoughts dissipated – he was no longer Lucian, no longer straight or queer or scared. He was no longer anyone, just a body, and even that seemed to dissolve. He felt himself being stretched into a thin smear of pulsing plasma – a ghost floating into an unknown universe.

“My ass, my asshole. It’s clean. Put your tongue in.”

The voice was just a breath, coming from nowhere, anywhere. Flesh pushed against his face, sliding, opening. Soft creamy thighs closed around his head as his tongue found her entrance. It was like another mouth, gasping – opening, closing. He speared it, and felt her muscles strangle his tongue.

“Fuck me.”

The last word was a stretched sigh.

He pulled his tongue out and dashed it in again, lancing her. He hardly knew what he did, but he did it again and again.

The creature in his arms panted and shivered. A voice surrounded him, muffled by the fleshy vice around his head. It was a distant keening, following the rhythm of his fucking.

Then something wet invaded his anus.

It was stiff and insistent; he relaxed, yielding to it. Soon their rhythms started to find a common beat, the beat of their hearts. Fingers squeezed his balls and his penis; a thumb rubbed its head.

He took her lead and started touching the little slimy knob.

Even his simplest thoughts dissolved now into the sweaty, throbbing grotto their embrace had become.

And then he came.

Or he thought he came. Had he already come, was he still coming, coming again?

How could there be a fixed moment in time in this satin-silk machine of churning flesh? How could he ever find a climax in this rolling eternity of intoxicating clouds, perfumed and misty, going on and on?

Their entwined bodies radiated pure heat as they came and came. Waves of energy escaped into the vacuum surrounding them, until a last spasm rode their bodies and they gasped in final exhaustion.

Lying entangled, they were lost to the world.

“Lucian?”

The voice called him back from a place he didn’t want to leave. His mind was as spent as his body. He hated to stir it into life, and return to a world of choices and duties.

“Lucian, honey?”

A hand shook his shoulder. He tried to ignore it, not wanting to leave the pink limbo behind his closed eyelids.

“Was it good for you?” the voice asked. “As wonderful as for me?”

He opened his eyes.

Drew’s face floated before them, flushed and darkened by the backlight. But her eyes sparkled.

Then the face came closer, and two hot, weak lips drowned his mouth with a kiss.

He tried to rise on his elbows.

“Hrrm,” he said. He had to clear his throat to make words.

“It was,” he then said. “Can’t find the words. It was...”

The lips once more sealed his mouth, sucking away whatever he might have wanted to say.

She let go and grinned. It made him smile too.

Pulling him down on the ruined bed, she once more engulfed him with her glowing body.

Time’s pestle has this penchant for bizarre repetition, grinding sheer lunacy into a semblance of everyday routine.

October went and November came. Lucian remembered Halloween, though he’d rather not.

It had been an excuse to dress up extravagantly, and fill the hallways and corridors with dead whores and naked skeletons. There were clanging chains; there was skintight black latex and fake blood everywhere.

The desks in Beauty Class were robbed empty, and so were the closets in Fashion.

Barbs turned into sex oozing vampires and tall-heeled sluts. Masked and anonymous they moved to the central hall, where they brazenly kissed and dry fucked in corners and niches under the excuse of dancing.

Lucian understood that it was a tradition for Bobs to crash the party under cover of their elaborate disguises, snatching punch and cigarettes. The blood red drink must have been spiked, as a soothing buzz hummed in his skull after only two glasses.

Harper had done his make up, painting a bloody gash from his left eye down his cheek and throat – like a red arrow pointing at his rouged left nipple. His blue eyes lived in grottoes of black; teeth were painted on his cheek where the gash opened. White powder enhanced his natural pallor.

His hair was a purple flame.

When he hit the ballroom, loosing himself into the masquerade and the other Bobs’ general excitement, Lucian was a half naked ghost in shards of floating latex. His arms and legs showed painted knuckles, his ribs seemed a cage of bones.

He’d looked for Drew, but hadn’t found her.

He hadn’t seen her for days, ever since they’d made love – neither in the building nor on the track. He’d asked around, but none of the Barbs could exactly tell him. She was ‘out’ doing ‘chores,’ they said, waving him away like the lowly Bob he was.

“Hey, boo, bloody stranger!” an excited voice yelled at him over the booming music.

He turned and saw a whore.

Her entire body was painted golden bronze and clad in a see-through body stocking with torn holes that showed off her nipples and the bare skin of her thighs. She wore towering heels, and her face was covered in black leather, only showing her eyes through slits, and blood red lips that held a cigarette.

She’d covered her crotch with a harness, he saw; from its triangular front poked a black, curved dildo, swaying with the music.

Lucian had no idea who she might be.

He took a step back, but her red-clawed hand grabbed him and pulled him closer. A cloud of smoke made him cough.

“You’re a Bob, eh? Here to crash paradise?” she screamed. “Okay then, boy, welcome to hell. Why not fuck a Barb while you can. Trick and treat – it’s Halloween!” And she pulled him even closer, her fake phallus nudging into his belly.

He’d heard the voice before, but it was hard to be sure with all the music and the screaming going on.

They danced, in a way.

She’d gotten rid of the cigarette and thrown both arms around his neck – pushing her hot, steamy body against his. The cock kept getting in the way until she pulled it up and pressed it tightly between them.

It poked into his navel.

Lucian wasn’t much of a dancer; too shy to have gained much experience. But it didn’t matter. All they did was rub their bodies together, hardly moving their feet.

“Don’t be shy, Luci-boy” she yelled into his ear. “I know you fuck Drew. She’s all over the moon!”

So the girl recognized him. She also knew about him and Drew. Drew must have told her. Did she tell everybody?

“Come on!” the masked girl cried. “I know a better place.”

She stepped back and grabbed his hand, pulling him with her as she sashayed on her tall heels to one of the dark corridors leading away from the hall. Painted faces floated by – ghosts and monsters, half-naked, half-drunk, yelling, dancing, kissing.

He pulled free and turned around to get away, but he bumped into two tall creatures, painted and clad as outrageous as the first girl, wearing the same masks and net stockings and heels. But they lacked the swinging dildo.

Their wide red mouths grinned. Long, painted fingernails reached for him. With a click a thing closed around his throat from behind – something wide and tight.

Turning, he saw a chain that led to the first girl’s hands. She pulled at it as hands pushed his back. Voices hissed ‘go.’

He felt nauseous.

Doors opened and closed; there were narrow corridors and spiraling stairs. He didn’t think he’d ever been where they led him. Then the girl opened one more door and flipped on a light that poorly lit a small room, a closet, really, filled with stuff.

On the floor was a mattress.

The music still boomed from a distance. He smelled the girl’s scent, mixed with perfume, sweat and smoke – alcohol too. She pulled at him to get him into the closet. He resisted, but hands pushed him from behind.

“No,” he said.

“Nonsense,” she answered. A girl behind him giggled.

The girl with the leash pushed him against the wall. Her kiss was greedy, tasting of punch and tobacco. He held his arms stiff, trying to push her away, but she was strong, and very focused. The other two girls were close behind her, their eyes fixed on him from within their masks.

The girl handed the chain to one of her friends and let her mouth travel down his body, her claws scratching his skin. She bit the painted nipple and tore at the flaps of dark latex to expose his crotch.

Maybe he said ‘no’ a few more times. He certainly pushed at her leather-covered skull, but all he got were grins and chuckles. When he really tried to get free, the girl with the chain pulled him tighter, slapping his face. Falling back against the wall, he felt the kneeling girl’s hot mouth around his penis. It twitched and swelled inside her until it became hard.

He felt betrayed.

Her eyes looked up at him, dark inside the slits of her mask.

“Yummy,” she said, smacking her lips exaggeratedly. “It works.”

It worked.

To his growing horror it worked. But not at all as it had with Drew. It worked like it once used to, when he was alone in a shower, his hand around it, building it up to a fast, short-lived spasm, a sudden spitting of goo – and then a stretch of lingering frustration.

After two more pulls and a hard suck he felt himself come into her mouth. He arched and stiffened as the energy oozed away, sucking all power from his limbs.

The girl opened her red mouth, showing a small pool of white on her tongue. Then she swallowed.

“Mmmmm. Good boy,” she said, grinning. “Next chapter.”

A sudden jerk on the leash made him stumble and fall onto the mattress, face down. Hands grabbed his wrists, twisting them on his back, and clicking cuffs around them.

His face was pressed into the moldy-smelling mattress. Hands pushed and pulled until his ass pointed up. He cried out, protesting. Someone slapped his ass cheeks hard.

Then he felt a cold, slippery thing enter his anus.

At first it just rubbed and pushed against his sphincter, but soon it started sliding deeper, causing sharp stabs of pain with every thrust. He cried out and bucked, only to feel hands on his hips and back pushing him down. Voices hummed a monotonous chant, setting the rhythm for the fat pole to deflower his asshole.

He resisted.

He groaned and pulled, fighting the hands that held him down, just to receive more slaps, blows and kicks to his naked body.

“Good boy,” a voice hissed and the others took it up, turning it into yet another shanty – ‘good boy, good boy... ‘

He knew he’d started crying, sobbing into the mattress. A hand lifted his face. He saw a mask and eyes, a smiling mouth.

“Poor boy,” the mouth said. “But it will get better. Muuuuch better.”

And she chuckled.

The thing inside him – no doubt the girl’s strap on dildo – began a true pounding, and the pain dulled into a throb.

“That’s my girl,” the leading voice chanted, followed by the others. “That’s my girly-girl.”

Lucian stopped resisting.

Bathing in sweat he became a rag doll, pulled up and down on the dildo. The pain dissipated, but the slippery friction went on. With new and deeper pounding he felt a glow starting to spread. Every ending of his nerves seemed to sparkle, causing a tremble. It made his fingers claw and his toes curl.

Then the true horror started.

His body separated itself from his screaming mind, becoming a senseless machine that acted on its own – gathering energy from the mechanical assault of the piston that pounded and pounded.

It was a pestle in a mortar, grounding his resistance to a pulp.

Lucian’s body relaxed; his mind – watching from a distance – noticed the change. The ball of heat inside him started spreading, making him tremble on his knees and shoulders. His mind might still try to close doors on the spreading wildfire, but he felt the gorgeous heat jump from artery to artery, reaching for his chest, his throat, his brain.

He started sobbing again, and moaning, but the girls noticed the change too.