Chapter 11: Feminine Hygiene Product Training

And yet, it turned out that Eveline’s luck was not entirely bad. Mr. Newhart, the school janitor, secretly sympathized with her plight. That sympathy didn’t mean any clothes were in her future, but it did mean that she was about to be spared a huge indignity the other senior female students would have to endure over the next month.

Mr. Newhart spent the morning working with county sanitation employees to shut off the water supply and the sewage drains to the school locker rooms. When all the water was shut off, he knew immediately the entire section of the gym area was a total loss. The lockers and their contents, sporting supplies, cleaning supplies, the walls, the floors, the ceilings, heating and air-conditioning units, and lighting: all of it would have to be ripped out and hauled to a landfill. The girls’ locker room would have to be demolished and re-built. A preliminary loss-estimate was around five million dollars. Mr. Newhart spent the morning mumbling to himself:

Well, that’ll jack up them insurance rates ... fuckin’ lazy rich-bitch girls ... not knowin’ what a fuckin’ trash can is for ... and I told ‘em, over and over, don’t put them damn lady products down the toilets. I told ‘em that...

Mr. Newhart took a break in the middle of the day to visit his boss and give him an update concerning the disaster in the girls’ locker room. Principal Donovan and the receptionist were ready with some stiff drinks and snacks. After what he had endured since coming to school at sunrise, the janitor was happy to have a shot, and then another.

While the receptionist served the employee and smiled with her idiotic Barbie grin, the principal and the janitor discussed how to prevent a “lady product disaster” from happening again. Mr. Donovan wanted to paddle all of the female student athletes on their bare bottoms in the gym, make them participate in the site clean-up, and then make them do fund-raisers for the rest of the year to recoup the money. Mr. Newhart liked the clean-up and fund-raising ideas, but he disagreed with the corporal punishment portion of his boss’s plan.

“Jack, I don’t think hittin’ all them girls is gonna do you no good. What you gotta do is walk ‘em through usin’ them trash cans properly, and embarrass ‘em real good so they don’t forget. If they give you any sass, then you paddle ‘em. But I have an idea, and they ain’t gonna forget about them trash cans, I guarantee ya.”

“OK, so let’s hear it.”

Mr. Newhart told the principal what he had in mind. Mr. Donovan smiled wickedly and commented:

“Ha-ha-ha! You old perv! That’s awesome! Yeah, we’ll go with that!”

“One thing though. The little naked blond ... the one on Coach Strickland’s team...”

“Eveline?”

“Yeah. I wanna keep her out of it. She’s a good kid, and I’m pretty sure she wasn’t one of them flushin’ them lady products.”

“I’m good with that. I’ll let Strickland know.”

The janitor proposed a “100% accountability system” for all feminine hygiene products brought into the school. Anyone who wanted to use the female locker room or any of the bathrooms had to turn over any such products to the school nurse upon bringing them onto the school property, who in turn put them into a large box. School policy officially stated that any hygiene items not turned over to the nurse would be considered contraband, in the same way illegal drugs were considered contraband. As with drugs, any student caught with unregistered feminine hygiene products in her possession would be expelled from the district.

The janitor and the principal then set up their plan to seek revenge for the locker room mess. Any student who needed to change a tampon or pad had to report to a table operated by the nurse at the end of an unused hallway. Before entering the hallway the student had to strip from the waist down, leave her clothing on a table, and walk down the corridor bottomless. If there were other students, she had to wait that way in line until her turn. Sometimes there were as many as 20 students standing in line.

In front of the nurse, the janitor, and at least one other faculty member, the bottomless student would be required to change her tampon. After she was called to the table, the girl received her new tampon from the staff members and signed for it. Then she had to position herself in front of an automatic camera, which was set up to record the event and pull out the used one, in full view of the staff. She had to hold it up to the camera and then deposit it into a large trash can. She then had to face the camera and recite:

“This is a trash can. This is where I always put my unmentionables, and never in the toilet. It’s simple to understand, really it is, even for me.”

The blushing culprit then had to return to the spot in front of the camera, put one of her feet on a small table, and insert the new tampon as the device continued to record. The procedure was totally humiliating, which was the intent.