Chapter 8

May 27th, 2024. Alison Dikscheide.

Alison felt like the walls were closing in on her. The DEO may have over-reached its authority. There were ... irregularities in financing, and some of them could implicate her. Nobody would dare to care about that if she could produce a strong, new woke crusade for them to rally behind — but all her plans to do that were failing, and this AFHU dipshittery wasn’t helping. The school was swarming with feral hamsters and bizarre meme-posters, and she had to make sure the journalists never got the full story on that — she didn’t want to even try to explain the whole AFHU situation to the media. It had the potential to become memetic and seriously embarrass the left overall, and blame would fall on her head if it happened.

They couldn’t expel that Stockman brat without looking censorial, but Mr. Garris could make sure he failed the course regardless to send a message — and he would. Alison had made sure of that. She shouldn’t have rewarded that Fendermann girl with credits for her protest action. Sure, it was brave and creative, promoting both climate consciousness and body positivity, but it also incentivized the bad, un-telegenic kind of radicalism among the activist cliques and seemed to energize the AFHU. They responded not just to Fendermann but to Alison’s own radicalism, following the unstated but universal theorem of modern leftist activists: adopt the most radical position possible to increase your view count. Unfortunately, as the AFHU had so aptly proven, inanity wasn’t a disqualifier.

The locker room tape had initially seemed like a godsend. She’d expected it to generate a feeling of deep and visceral outrage. It certainly had in her, when she forced herself to listen to it. But there was only one victim at the center of it, that Lambert cunt, and she’d consistently rejected her innate obligation to feminist solidarity by refusing call out the evil of her own victimizers. Dumb bitch was probably afraid as a cheerleader, it would cost her popularity with the jocks. That was how it always went, wasn’t it? Women cutting down other women to appeal to the mores of men.

But everything had still been manageable at that point. Then that ingrate Köhler had back-talked her, right on camera! Sure, the ambush interview was a bit sketch, but as far as Köhler knew she really ought to be grateful to Alison — she’d devoted her career to fighting for a better world for trans-people, after all. Hell, she deserved to be seen as just short of a Messiah by them! And now her media contacts were all being distant with her, all because MSDNC failed to ‘get’ a snarky pop culture reference and Gutfeld laughed at them — as if that was somehow her fault! If the journalist had been some dipshit boomer, she could see it — but she shouldn’t have to explain snark to a fellow Millennial!

Did Köhler suspect something? It was such a shame that she was such a recluse. If Alison had been able to talk her into running for prom queen, it would have been perfect. She could get her elected easily, even if it meant leaning on the prom committee. Then she would have used her menagerie of social media sock puppets to gin up resentment against Köhler among MWA’s Neanderthal population. Axing the Stallions would have been the perfect flashpoint — people would be furious, and blood would inevitably flow.

A really juicy trans-bashing would have been the perfect thing to push her activist career into its next natural stage — especially if she could have finagled managing the official GoFundMe to support the victim again. She owed her current position in large part to the resources from the last one, after all! Given her friendship with an up-and-coming WaPo reporter, it might have even rocketed her to national attention and gotten her a sweet book deal. But that self-righteous cunt Lambert had warned Köhler about the kind of attention she’d attract by running. Still, they were all seniors, so they’d be gone in just over a month — and stomping on Lambert’s prom dreams had been fun.

It’s not like Köhler had any social merit compared to Alison. She was destined to be a thought leader in the progressive movement, and that brat was just a fashionista that hadn’t got the whole “silence is violence” memo. Dikscheide did not question the selfishness of her plans — as a thought leader, what was good for her would inevitably also be good for the movement. Sacrificing Köhler to advance the cause would have been both rational and moral. It had been a difficult decision, but utilitarianism was a core pillar of Alison’s brand of progressivism.

Indeed, she congratulated herself for having the moral courage to plan it out, even if the pieces hadn’t come into alignment to actually pull it off. The ends justified the means, and flashy events were necessary to advance the cause of social justice. It’s not like she wouldn’t have been walking on well-trod ground — her plan was in the same fundamental spirit as Harvey Milk outing gay men, and he was lionized to this very day!

Her plan to get one of the Stallions’ troglodytes to shit-kick an eight-year-old on film had also failed. Admittedly, it was a moonshot, but if it had gone off it would have been legendary! Sure, they showed the agitation film, and Havelock had sent the kids out on their ‘treasure hunt’, and she’d unlocked the big fire doors, and the cafeteria CCTV was running — but the spark hadn’t lit, and her cinematically perfect teachable moment about the omnipresent danger of white rage failed to materialize. Not even an older teen shouting at an elementary student in fury (which was, honestly, the more realistic expectation). It was still a great plan to really peel away the facade and show the true evils at work in society, though; it just hadn’t hit paydirt — this time.

And then, just two days ago, her emergency backup scandal imploded. She’d quietly helped cover up Harold Lansing’s crimes. A single rape wasn’t enough to be a scandal, after all. There needed to be a pattern there, to demonstrate social complicity. And, in time, there was. Then he just stopped doing it! She had no idea why. And what was worse still, he had gone from cocky sullen loner to an apparent total headcase!

He was never her ideal scandal, mind you. He was a social outcast, a weirdo with a broken family life, time in foster care and some mental problems. That wasn’t the narrative she needed at all! Trying to persecute anyone with mental illness would get passed over for progressive media focus, and raised-in-poverty kids with broken families? Not the right optics at all! What was even the point of caring about rape if you couldn’t tie it back to rape culture, capitalism, inequity or privilege?

What she really needed was a popular white jock-hero rapist with affluenza, the pupal version of the entitled frat boys that clogged up the world. The closest she’d gotten was the knife-freak from the tape, Jim Peterson. He was at least white, clean-cut and upper middle class. The problem was, with the lack of outrage over the tape, she wasn’t sure she could convince the media he was a precrime rapist. Could she try to pull a Sabrina Erdley? Too risky — conservative media was on the lookout for that kind of thing these days, and she knew that bimbo from Vox was nosing around. There were no good knife crimes around Bentonville recently anyway — she’d checked.

So Harold Lansing had been her last-ditch emergency scandal. Not ideal, not likely to advance her career, but maybe just enough to justify the DEO’s existence and authority for another year to give her time to find something better. And then the little fucker went and confessed to the police! Seriously, who even does that?!

And yet, she felt, things might still be salvageable. Her Hail Mary was that Kellerman kid that brought the tape in to begin with. She said being a lesbian wasn’t viable given her dating history, but she’d agreed that if she made prom queen she’d come out as bi during her acceptance speech, detail a long list of grievances against homophobia in the MWA athletics department and talk about the emotional support the DEO had provided her — how it had been her lamp in the darkness when she thought about suicide or self-harm. So, of course, Alison nudged the prom committee to fix the vote. She was pretty sure they’d fall in line. As long as Kellerman proved a credible witness, she’d be able to justify the continued operation of the DEO to the school board — and, more importantly, to the prevailing semi-woke corporate overlords of the town.

The AFHU was still a problem. She was responsible for wrangling them, but she had no actual power over them. Flair Garret was an anarchist, and was profiting by being even more radical than she was. He worshipped her, she thought, but that didn’t mean she could get him to tone it down. She’d tried. Odyssey Olusange was black, and in with the Arkansas BLM chapter — there was no way she was going to tolerate a white authority figure ‘tone policing’ her.

MWA wasn’t normally like big coastal schools; wokeness wasn’t enforced by gangs of left-anarchists shouting down instructors, blockading classrooms, disrupting conservative speakers and beating offenders with bike locks. The people that ran MWA also ran Bentonville, and while they very much wanted to appear woke, they also weren’t especially favorable to violent anti-capitalist movements growing up in town — for obvious reasons. The culture of campus radicalism wasn’t as natural to Arkansas as it was to California even without interference, honestly.

It would all come down to Twitter — Alison’s followers against Flair’s and Odyssey’s. They had about 30k between them, but some of those were likely duplicates. She had 75,000, but that was probably a hollow number — she’d pulled off an especially sick burn on Lauren Boebert and got retweeted by AOC. That was great for her long-term activist visibility, but she knew most of her followers were only interested in her sniping at Republican jackasses, not anything actually happening at MWA. The AFHU could say as much radical and provocative stuff as they wanted on Twitter; Alison, being faculty, was decidedly more limited in how she could fire up her own base.

It was entirely possible that the AFHU would just decide to storm her office one day, take her hostage and start making demands. Campus police would do nothing, of course, even if she told them to — not messing with ‘peaceful’ radical leftist protests was an unwritten rule these days, at least at any but the most conservative schools. If they did, the Twitterverse would take it as police brutality and end them, and they knew that. She understood all the dynamics of this — she’d helped with similar intimidation campaigns against faculty back during her days as a student activist at Oberlin.

If it went badly, the town’s corporate overlords would make a scapegoat out of her. She knew that — it was simply logical. But if her followers won the ensuring Twitter war, the AFHU would fold. She felt sure of that. She thought Flair and Odyssey knew it as well. But her followers wouldn’t win that war. The question was, did Flair and Odyssey know that? She had no idea. She’d at least managed to intimidate them enough that they were avoiding the reporters — for now. She felt certain they were going to try something big and stupid, though. After prom, she’d have more political currency to try and de-escalate this inane mess.

Alison desperately needed some stress relief. She pulled out a vibe and a lesbian BDSM anthology and went to work. Back in college she’d led a pretty wild and kinky life. It was never public, though, so she could cut it off and pretend it never happened. Even if it got found out, she’d just claim it was all just done out of social pressures to fit into a hypersexualized, objectifying society. Still, though, she really missed those kinky anonymous hookups and wild nightclub nights as a source of stress relief.

Asexuality was inarguably the best identity to claim, Alison had decided early on. It really had been a stroke of genius. She needed some kind of sexual minority status to be credible in her role, but doing anything sexual in the woke subculture was a chump’s game. Yet, if she claimed anything else, people would eventually expect her to back it up. It would only open her to accusations from some ambitious underling eager to seize her position — she didn’t want to end up the next Asia Argento. She knew she wasn’t the type to keep her hands to herself when she got really worked up, after all. So it was best to cut that part out of her life entirely — even if she could really, really use a good rough fuck right now.

Alison had a lot to worry about, obviously. If there was one thing she could genuinely take satisfaction in, though, it was the cake. Coach Larkin and a bunch of the wealthier Stallions dads had pitched in money to get a big, fancy graduation cake for the prom. It was a huge, six foot tall tiered thing, like a wedding cake — wasteful and consumerist. They’d hired some elite professional cake decorator at their own expense to paint the cake in the school’s crimson-and-gold colors, and to add a detailed replica of the school crest in icing and a sculpted black graduation cap ornament at the very top.

At their request, he’d apparently added something a fair bit less wholesome as well: a cutesy, playful image of two well-endowed young girls holding up the giant graduation cap, their graduation robes falling slightly open down the center to show they weren’t wearing anything underneath them. It didn’t show any private parts, or even anything that risqué, but that wasn’t the point. It sexualized the female graduates. It was a microaggression. It reminded young women that no matter what they achieved, they were ultimately still just something to be consumed.

Thankfully, one of the woke students saw the cake while it was still in the cafeteria freezer-room and took a photo of it to report to the DEO. Alison Dikscheide would never allow the next generation of proud female graduates to be represented like that, though. Women were excelling in education in ways undreamed-of by previous generations, exceeding men in both college graduation and honor-roll achievement rates. There’d be no half-naked girls on their prom cake — not on her watch!

She’d spent three hours going through the school yearbook looking for the students those caricatures most closely resembled so she could credibly accuse the Stallions of stealth revenge porn. The students she found took some convincing to fall in line with the controversy, but in the end they bent the knee. Larkin and the team dads had to either dispose of the cake or pay even more to get the decorator in again to cover up their demeaning little doodles with plain icing. Once the decorator had left, she called up Larkin and explained that she’d be willing to forget the whole revenge porn thing — provided the cake boasted her office’s “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” motto prominently. At his expense, of course. He had little choice but to comply, so the decorator came in a third time to redo the cake.

The cherry on top of the whole cake affair? Two hours after Larkin called her to confirm the cake was fixed and sent the required picture, she made the call that got MWA pulled out of the NFHS for the year, castrating the Stallions’ athletic dreams and reminding all the world’s douchebros who was really in charge in 2024. The timing of it all made Alison feel deeply satisfied and oddly triumphal. Most of all, though, it felt empowering — both to her personally and to the oppressed communities she had been anointed avatar of. It was her hope spot, a ray of sunshine in her otherwise stressful and challenging future.

May 28th, 2024. Alison Dikscheide.

The morning assembly wasn’t going well. Alison couldn’t very well cancel, since she called it to begin with. She’d planned to use it to silence the PTA complaints about the Stallions with a shocking new offense. Sadly, she didn’t have a shocking new offense ready, so she’d have to tread water until Kellerman came out and made her allegations of toxic masculinity at the prom. As such, she’d fallen back on one of her trademark techniques: the bombastic but vague speech full of personal anecdotes of oppression, misogyny and inequity. It was tied back to the Stallions and Angels, albeit loosely — she needed a lot of “you’ve all experienced” and “I’m sure you see it, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself.” Okay, honestly, it was weak — she knew that — but it would be fine in context. PTA members tried to cut her off, but she just steamrolled them with force of personality. She finally finished, and asked if there were any questions.

And then that little blonde twit raised her hand. “Miss Dikscheide, I’m Laura Cannigan from Vox News. I’m wondering if you can clarify the exact offense that led to Jim Peterson’s expulsion. As far as I can tell, he talked about a sexual fantasy in what he believed was a private environment, and has no other charges against him.”

Okay, change in direction. This assembly was now going to be a roast of a fascist collaborator. Alison got the girl up on stage. Well, twenty-something, but she looked like a girl — or a model. Hah — their standard factory model news bimbo; they might as well be clones! Long platinum blonde hair in perfectly coiffed waves, tight blue blouse with the top three buttons undone, vacuously pleasant smile, dangling earrings, short skirt, long toned legs. Very long, silky smooth bare legs. Yum. Wait, what? Alison blinked. That ... isn’t what she wanted to be thinking.

For all the aura the newscaster put on of being a submissive little bimbo, though, she wasn’t easily flustered. Alison really laced into her, accusing her of complicity with patriarchal aggression and ignoring the warning signs that presage sex crimes. She just smiled prettily back. “Now, Miss. You don’t need to be that rude to dodge my question. Can I get a clear and topical answer please?”

They went back and forth. Alison only became aware midway through that she was losing. The Vox camera crew was focused on her, personally. Her own heart was hammering, while Fascist Barbie was keeping her cool. God damn it! She had a reason to be calm, after all. Unlike most people Alison dealt with, the bimbo reporter spoke to a different audience — one that didn’t care about her mores and were wholly outside the ideological space that gave Alison her power. She knew Vox news. They’d find a way to cut this manipulatively, make it look like she was bullying their reporter. She had to back up, stay disciplined, not let the little tart tease her with that deep creamy cleavage and glossy lips...

At some point things got physical. She’d walked right up into the reporter’s personal space. Her perfume — some floral, hyper-feminine Dolce & Gabbana thing — seemed to intoxicate Alison. She felt like she wanted to kiss her and kill her at the same time, and had settled on shoving her back. Students hooted and laughed. Some wiseass middle schooler shouted out, “catfight! catfight!”

There was a brief tussle before all hell broke loose. Alison shoved the Vox bitch away from her and she staggered back, knocking over the podium. A screech of very loud white noise flared over the sound system, and everyone covered their ears. And then half a dozen panicked hamsters leapt out of a vent shaft and landed on the Vox newscaster, skittering with absolutely striking speed all over her body until they found the nearest available burrow — right down her cleavage.

The Vox bimbo screamed. It was an incredibly girly scream; it suited her. She grabbed her blouse with both hands and tore it off like she was auditioning to be the Hulk. She actually had really nice, really jiggly C-cups under it, too, packed into a powder blue lingerie bra with yellow lace flowers all over it. The bra was somewhat see-through, and everyone could clearly make out her full brown nipples inside it — as well as the tiny hamster dangling from the front clasp. Alison couldn’t help but smirk in glee at her misfortune.

The reporter danced about the stage in a mad panic, her kicks driving her skirt to bunch up around her legs. She had matching sheer panties, the sly little seductress! Her flailing only made her bouncier, too. The whose school was laughing and cheering at her predicament; she swatted at the hamster clinging to her bra-strap like she was trying to put out a fire before finally reaching up and tearing off her bra, tossing it aside in a mad panic. The whole student body let out an enormous cheer. The denuded newscaster clutched her arms around her breasts, struggling to catch her breath. “What the fuck! What in the unholy fuck even was that! Rats? Why are there suddenly rats out of nowhere?! What is wrong with this entire goddamn school?! Somebody help me! Get me a jacket!”