Chapter 10

May 31th, 2024 — Prom Night. Bonnie Lowenthal.

Someone had spiked the mango punch. It was pretty mild, just some whiskey. People got loquacious, though, and everyone was talking about Dopey’s acceptance speech like she was some kind of headcase. That annoyed Rich Bonnie — in spite of everything, she liked Dope Bonnie. She was cool, and she wanted RB to be cool too. Well, maybe. Kinda. RB wasn’t sure. Julie Lambert and Chinese Bonnie seemed nice too, but Dopey expected her not to hang out with them — and she always felt like Chinese Bonnie was laughing at her under the politeness. People were rilly hard to figure out, sometimes.

Brett wanted to dance with other girls. He said it wasn’t just cause she stepped on his foot and kept getting tangled in the train of her own dress. He’s a stud and a stud’s got to be seen playing the field. Besides, they’re not going steady, right? RB didn’t want Brett to dance with other girls, not on the night she was gonna go all the way with him. She also didn’t want everyone to trash her best bud, though — and she didn’t know how to refute what they were saying, either. When you talked about it, some of the things Dopey had said — about Julie in her acceptance speech, and about Chinese Bonnie earlier, and at other times in general — were pretty out there. RB told people it was just hyperbole and satire, being pleased she remembered the big words from English class — but she wasn’t sure that was selling.

Brett had to go take a dump. He told her he’d be back in fifteen. This was her chance! Rich Bonnie needed to find Dopey and get her back out on the floor to do damage control stat! Fortunately, they had friended each other’s phones, so she could just use the locater app to find her. DB wanted to be able to track Rich Bonnie down at any time, so she had her install it. That was actually a bit creepy, but she put up with it. She navigated her way out of the prom area and toward the quieter eastern wing of the hotel, following the little GPS arrows on her phone-screen.

She wondered what she was doing, honestly. She should be out on the dance floor keeping her man honest! What did she owe DB, anyway? Resentment, habitual duty and the fear of being alone warred in her mind. She came to a pair of washrooms, and heard grunting sounds coming from inside. The phone said Dopey was directly in between the ladies and men’s, but that was obviously off by a bit — she’d be in the ladies. So that’s where RB went — and stopped in shock when she got inside.

The first thing her eyes fixed on was that beautiful navy prom gown cast aside haphazardly on the grimy, stained washroom floor. It was a relatively small thing, but also a massive psychological catalyst for RB. They’d bought the dresses together, after all. Dopey got the nicer one. RB felt they really bonded that day. Dopey was rilly nice to her, at least. To see it tossed aside like that...

RB ran up and tried to pick up the dress — and heard it tear as it stuck to the sticky floor. This made bile rise in her throat and rage fill her heart. The dresses were, in a way, a symbol of their friendship. Now, for the first time, she clearly understood what that friendship actually meant to Bonnie Kellerman.

She looked around. The farthest bathroom stall had its door pinned wide open. She couldn’t see inside from this angle, but she could see legs. Was Dopey having a hookup in there? Right now, RB didn’t care. “Dopey! That’s a four grand dress! My parents bought it for you! How dare you just toss it on this filthy restroom floor!”

She ran up to the open stall — and her eyes opened wide in shock. Dopey was naked and lewdly spread-eagled, hands and feet gripping the four corners where the stall door normally went. Her body was glistening with sweat, and her eyes had the glassy look of deep lust. She’d frozen the second RB entered the room in an effort at stealth. The person behind her hadn’t stopped, though. She was kneeling, and had fingers from one hand shoved deep into Dopey’s bum while fingers from the other probed into her cunny and massaged her love nub. Dopey bit down on her upper lip, struggling not to cry out in pleasure.

What really made Rich Bonnie’s eyes go wide with shock, though, was the glimpse of neon red hair. Only one person in all of MWA had hair like that. “Dopey! Omigod! I thought you wanted to spend the evening with Duke! You ... you said no one else was worth your time! And ... are you really supposed to be doing that with a teacher? And ... and ... you’re gay?! I mean, that’s rilly cool and stuff, I just didn’t know —”

Anger obscured lust on Dopey’s face. “I’m not a goddamn dyke!”

Behind her, the woke school counselor lady was understandably offended. “That language is unacceptable! Homopho—oh, god, oh, god, I’m coming, I’m coming! I’ll rape you with my fingers, you sniveling blonde bimbo!”

It was like the counselor lady went sexually berserk mid-sentence, and got a lot rougher on Dopey’s swimsuit parts. Dopey screamed, in both agony and pleasure, and lost her grip. She careened forward, faceplanting onto the sticky floor, and pulled the neon-haired counselor down with her. Said counselor proceeded to climb on top of Dopey and grind her pussy against Dopey’s upthrust bum-bum, psychotically desperate to ride out an orgasm.

Rich Bonnie’s mind whirled, trying to process what she was seeing. She knew she was often thought of as stupid. She talked like an eight-year-old, after all, and had poor grades. But she could think shrewdly when she really needed to, when she forced herself to — like right now. DB fucking the counselor lady in a bathroom stall. The door jammed all the way open. That beautiful dress on the floor by the sinks. She remembered how Dopey took pics of her, and how she used them. She glanced down at her phone. The locater arrow did not point at Dopey — it pointed at the mirrored wall.

RB ran over to the sink adjacent to the open stall. It only took a few seconds of searching before she was able to pull Dopey’s cell phone out from behind the big round mirror where it had been carefully positioned so only the tip with the camera lens would be visible. She grabbed it, happy to see that it was unlocked. That meant she could finally delete her own nudes! Dopey really didn’t seem like an off-site backup kind of person, after all.

“Dopey! You were trying to blackmail the counselor lady just like you did me!”

“Revenge porn will absolutely not be tol—gaah! Oh, god, fuck me, fuck me, FUCK ME!”

“And you, Miss Weird-German-Name-I-Can’t-Pronounce! You’re acting rilly rilly weird! You’re supposed to be our school counselor! You’re supposed to set an example! I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to make whoopie with the students! You ... you poopy-heads, both of you! I’m telling on you!”

And with that, Rich Bonnie spun on the heels of her sneakers and raced out of the restroom, dual-wielding the most powerful and indiscriminately destructive weapons of her era.

Stark horror managed to briefly penetrate the haze of cinnamon-scented lust possessing Bonnie Kellerman and Alison Dikscheide. Their gazes met as they contemplated the implications of what had just happened to their respective futures.

“Shit!” they said, in perfect unison, with feeling.

The lust-crazed duo scrambled to their feet. Dope Bonnie screamed as the sticky tiles tore free of her flesh. “We’ve got to get that phone back!”

“Yeah,” Alison agreed. “Quickly!”

They raced out after Rich Bonnie. Fortunately, the corridors were largely empty as they were both buck naked save for their heels. The chase went as well as it usually does when women in fancy heels try to chase a woman in sneakers. Rich Bonnie heard crashing, screaming and cursing in the distance behind her as the counselor lady and Dopey broke heels, knocked over potted plants, tripped each other and, apparently, collided with a vending machine hard enough to knock it fully over. Apparently, they also ended up in a somewhat amusing position...

“Omigod! Your face is in my —”

“Keep it there!”

“Allie, we don’t have time for this right now!”

Sigh. “You’re right. Sorry.”

Rich Bonnie was so tempted to stop and listen, but she knew she couldn’t. She just had to find a quiet place to lock herself away so she could hunt through Dopey’s phone and delete the nudes. She spotted what looked like an unused staff cafeteria, tried the doorknob and stepped inside when it turned. She had chosen poorly, however — it was clearly in active use; just not by the people it was meant for. After seeing her best friend fucking the school counselor, Rich Bonnie assumed nothing she could ever see would be more surreal or shocking than that.

As it turned out, she was wrong.

The cafeteria was full of terrorists clad in hamster fur-suits modified with punk regalia, bearing weapons and political banners. Rich Bonnie blinked. Did ... did that protest sign actually say “Cannibalism Empowers Women”? That ... that was a thing. Their obese leader leveled an AK-47 at RB, and she raised her hands in terrified bafflement. “Uh, um ... hi, guys! I’m Bonnie Lowenthal! I’m, uh ... pleased to meet you all?”

“Death to the Hamster Patriarchy!”

May 31th, 2024 — Prom Night. Bonnie Kellerman.

Dope Bonnie and Dikscheide came to a t-bend in the last corridor they’d seen Rich Bonnie vanish into. They’d shed their heels, at least, after the vending machine incident. A caterer handling a food cart stared wide-eyed at the two gorgeous, buck naked ladies, a goofy lecherous grin spreading across his face. Dope Bonnie screamed and ducked down, trying to cover her intimates.

“No time to worry about him,” Dikscheide hissed. “We’ve got to get that phone back, for both our sakes! You take left, I’ll take right!”

Dope Bonnie nodded, steeling herself and running past the gross caterer as quickly as she could. Eager to get out of his line of sight, she raced right through the heavy, deep crimson curtains covering an Edwardian arch — and abruptly froze, transfixed like a deer in headlights. She was standing on the third floor east balcony, overlooking the prom dance hall. The whole student body turned to stare at her — buck naked, body glistening with sweat, makeup smeared and hair tangled in a way that just screamed “I just got rode hard and put away wet.” Everyone had gone silent, staring up at her in delighted awe.

“You see?” the Nathead finally said conversationally to his date. “I told you all she was a bottle blonde, and now we’ve all got proof.”

That snapped DB out of her shock. She screamed, covering her exposed breasts and curly black bush with her hands desperately. The crowd broke out in a rousing cheer, hooting and hollering as one. Smart phones flashed hungrily. DB felt her cheeks burn with a furious blush. The dumbstruck grins of sixty-some male students confirmed that even in 2024, any prom where the newly-minted prom queen does full frontal for the whole class was still considered a mad dank W. Boys never change.

Bonnie raced back through the curtains into the corridor, furious and humiliated. The caterer was covering his mouth trying not to laugh. Dikscheide sprinted up to her — naked, terrified and wildly bouncy. Some vain part of her wished hers bounced like that. “That’s a dead end! I can’t find Lowenthal or the phone anywhere! We’re screwed!”

Now, Bonnie Kellerman’s mind worked in a very specific way, especially when she felt her dignity or station were threatened — and her prom night misadventure definitely qualified on those grounds! Everything was about her, and everything was intentional. Whenever something bad happened to her, it was clearly someone else’s doing, someone trying to undermine her. That merited retaliation. It wasn’t an especially rational way to think, but it was a depressingly common one none the less.

DB’s face twisted into a rage. “The dance hall is just through that curtain. You ... you tricked me into going out there! Like this! And they all saw me naked!”

Dikscheide giggled in spite of herself. “Never mind that; we have to find that phone!”

“I was exposed to the whole senior class and you tell me to never mind it?! You ... you ... let’s see how you like it!”

DB raced up behind Miss Dikscheide, grabbing a fistful of her neon red hair in one hand and anchoring the other firmly and roughly between her legs. Alison yelped. “My dear child, what do you think you’re doing?!”

DB may have been of a petite build, but as a trained athlete she was also strong for her size — and the Coordinator was tall, but also fairly thin. With a rather unladylike grunt, DB hefted the stark-naked Dikscheide above her head like a trophy. “Let’s see how you like it when they all see you naked!”

“Kellerman, no! Those are my students! They can’t see me naked — I’ll lose my job! It will cause all sorts of problems!”

But the furious blonde wasn’t listening. She charged back through the red satin booth curtain, holding Alison Dikscheide aloft above her head as she went. The crowd cheered her re-appearance, yet also looked truly perplexed at the sudden shift into naked pro wrestling. It was around this time that Dope Bonnie realized this was actually probably a really bad idea after all. Dikscheide screamed in fury, kicking her legs around in the air. She stumbled about haphazardly, the carpet bunching up under her sweaty, bare feet, and finally staggered into the ornate brass railing at the edge of the balcony.

It was only when she heard the crowd gasp that she realized she was on the verge of tossing Alison Dikscheide right off the balcony to an ugly death! That isn’t what she wanted to do at all, and she leaned back against the railing to try and lower the thrashing Coordinator to the ground. There was a horrible creaking sound, however, as the railing gave way and snapped under the two women’s weight. Bonnie’s world spun, and she felt Dikscheide cling to her.

The railing ended up laying flat but hideously unstable, and Dope Bonnie lay atop it. Dikscheide, conversely, dangled off it precariously, clutching at Bonnie to avoid a sickening plummet to the hard marble dance floor below. The clutching was understandable, given the situation, but it was also pinning Bonnie’s arms.

“Let go of me!”

“No! Help me up or I’ll pull you down with me!”

“I can’t do anything when you’re holding me like that! You have to let go!”

“No way! I don’t trust you! Help me first!”

The railing tore fully out of its mounting on one side and swung about, and the two terrified, naked girls dangling off it swung to and fro right along with it.

May 31th, 2024 — Prom Night. Julie Lambert.

Half an hour earlier, Julie had been trying to balance her gleeful schadenfreude at Decepticon Bonnie’s acceptance speech downfall with her more serious concern about the Coordinator’s disappearance. She had circulated the prom for the last thirty minutes. Everyone was talking about DB’s batshit acceptance speech. Some people thought the person she really was inside was finally coming out, while others thought she just needed a glass a milk, a role model and a psychiatric evaluation. People had noticed the Coordinator being weird and collapsing, but weren’t paying too much attention to it in light of the bonkers prom queen.

This actually led Julie to a fairly complex philosophical revelation. The moral of the story, she had decided, was that symbols do not define reality — they only reflect it. Euphemisms and Newspeak could conceal evil, but they couldn’t actually fight it, and a title is only as trusted as the authority that grants it. Julie’s own popularity seemed quite intact — ascendant, even — and because the DEO meddled with the prom committee, the once-golden tiara turned to worthless clay the second it settled on DB’s brow. The crazy speech had only been gravy — the Coordinator’s own arrogance, her absolute faith in the power of her own social engineering, had destroyed the value of the prize Julie and DB fought over even before the dance hall had first opened.

Only in the occult world did controlling a symbol control the reality it represented. The mundanes who echoed that activity — the woke activists trying to control reality by manipulating symbols, language and rituals — were just superstitionists instinctively imitating occult rituals. They had the magical thinking down, perceiving the microcosm-macrocosm link on some intuitive level, but lacked the centering, humility and self-discipline to actually self-initiate and perform magick.

Also, they were total dorks.

Julie knew the Vox reporter had snuck in and was out there in the crowd. She’d seen her earlier, looking not so different from any of the chaperones save for the tiny scratch marks on her shoulders and that magnificent blonde perm. Julie had dropped her an anonymous tip that there would be an example of the DEO overstepping its bounds happening at the prom. She hadn’t been sure if the lady would show up after her hamster-induced ordeal, but she had. She did seem to have a steely determination to her, under that fluffy blonde bimbo image.

Julie had no illusions about the right-wing media. They were necessary. They would report on stories that MSDNC would bury without thinking. But they were also predators in their own way — often as eager as people like Dikscheide to use others’ lives and tragedies as grist to advance their own political narrative, and just as willing to twist the truth to do so. Still, if Julie wanted to humiliate the Coordinator and destroy her power-base, Vox was definitely the outlet that needed to be on-site when it went down. Just remember she’s an ally of convenience, a pawn — not your friend and not trustworthy. Nice boobies, though. Julie had to grin at the memory.

The Coordinator. Julie wondered about her. She’d expected to have to goad her, to try to engage her in some kind of ideological debate in front of the student body. It would be a fitting downfall in her eyes, given how the woke authorities fixed debates in their favor by muzzling any opposing voices. It had surprised Julie that the Coordinator had gone up to scold Duke for groping DB when her self-control was clearly slipping. Had she not yet figured out the causal link between scolding people and her own arousal? Or was it such an ingrained instinct to her that she couldn’t stop lecturing and making accusations even if she was aware they were making her lose it?

And then she vanished. Julie feared she’d actually had the common sense to just do the logical thing when one gets too aroused to be dignified, and gone home for the evening. It would be a shame — prom was the perfect chance to humiliate her, and it needed to happen soon if expulsions were to be reversed before final exams. But Julie was also innately patient and cautious, and did not want to be publicly involved in the Coordinator’s downfall. The curse box was clearly working — everything else would take care of itself.

And then Bonnie Kellerman strode out on the balcony naked. Julie couldn’t help but grin. She had no idea what was going on, but she knew that if Decepticon Bonnie was slightly toasted before, well, she was fully cooked now! She was just savoring her victory when DB came back holding a naked Coordinator above her like she was a WWE star. Julie watched the two caper about, cautious now, aware of the danger in the situation long before DB herself was. Her hand probed into her purse until it found a very familiar knotted cord, and she focused on Kether to channel and evoke her mystic energies.

The railing broke. Decepticon Bonnie and the Coordinator dangled, bitching at each other. They were going to fall to the ground — it seemed certain. The fall might kill them. DB, as mean as she was, didn’t deserve to die. Julie had already decided not to murder the Coordinator — and she wasn’t weak-minded enough to engage in Batman Begins style moral semantics either. She pulled the cord in her purse, undoing the knots, and whispered an incantation. “Magna Zephyri, cape lapsos et defer in salutem!”