Chapter 31: Grounded

“Christ, Heifer, you really are such a slut!”

Heather tried to ignore the comment, but it was too crude to pass up. She turned to face the girl who had said it. It was Cynthia Babbish, ‘Cindy’ to all the boys slobbering after her. They were in the locker room after fourth period gym class, fresh from the showers and dressing, and Cynthia was trying to cause trouble.

Truth be told, neither girl was a favorite of the other. They had known each other since junior high and cordially disliked each other almost as long. Heather considered the other girl a snooty stuck up bitch, and Cynthia thought Heather was a flirty, man-hungry bitch. Cynthia was a tall and slim blonde, with a heart shaped face and the high cheek bones of a model. She moved like the ballet dancer she had once trained to be and was very popular with the boys.

Their dislike had intensified earlier in the semester when Cynthia’s boyfriend, Chad Pennington, had hit on Heather several times. Heather secretly considered him a perfect match for Cynthia. Tall and devastatingly handsome, he was also incredibly shallow and superficial, thinking his father’s money and the sports car it had bought him made up for his slick and facile charm. When he had asked her out, she had asked him if Cynthia wasn’t taking care of business properly. With an easy grin, he had replied that business was good, but that he was looking to ‘upgrade.’ Heather had laughed him off, but only after waving to Cynthia, who had overheard everything from behind his back and was approaching with a full head of steam! The pair had broken up within minutes.

Cynthia blamed Heather for leading her boyfriend astray, and Heather couldn’t care enough to even bother trying to set the blonde straight and didn’t believe it would work anyway. Since then, Cynthia had been sniping at the buxom brunette whenever possible, and Heather had happily returned insult with insult.

“You got a problem?” Heather asked, turning to face her tormentor. She had dropped her towel and was standing naked in front of her locker, stepping into a pair of black thong panties.

“I said, only a slut shaves her cunt, but that’s you, isn’t it?”

Heather grinned and pulled her thong up, snugging it and adjusting the fit. “Robby doesn’t like to get hair in his teeth.” Several girls around her giggled at this. “What about you, Cynthia? Do you mind getting pussy hair in your teeth?”

“You fucking bitch!”

“Hey, you’re the one staring at my pussy.” Heather picked her bra from the hook in the locker; it was a lacy black demi-bra that matched the thong.

“Heifer’s the right name for you. You’ve really got a pair of udders,” replied the incensed blonde.

“Jealousy is so beneath you; don’t you think?” answered a smirking Heather. Cynthia really wasn’t up to exchanging barbs with her, she thought.

“You really are a fucking slut. Planning on bragging about that dork of a boyfriend again?”

“Not getting enough, Cynthia, now that Chad went for an upgrade?”

“I get plenty!” yelled Cynthia.

“New shipment of batteries come in?” said Heather sweetly. She stepped into her jeans and pulled them up, then adjusted the thong so the straps could be seen. She pulled a sweater from the locker. When pulled down, it covered her waist completely, but almost any activity would cause it to rise up, exposing an inch of waist and her thong.

“YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

“DYKE!” screamed Heather.

Cynthia was swinging an arm back to slap Heather when Mrs. Boyce, the gym teacher rounded the corner and stepped in between them. “All right, settle down! Knock it off, KNOCK IT OFF!” She glared at the two girls. “I’ve had about enough crap from the pair of you. I think a detention would do you both a world of good!”

“Detention! What did I do? That’s not right!” protested Heather.

“You’re right, it isn’t. Make that three detentions!” said Mrs. Boyce, whirling to face Heather.

“This is so unfair!” protested Cynthia.

“The next step is an in-school suspension? Feeling lucky?” Cynthia was on the verge of an answer, but her mouth snapped shut in time. She spun away and finished dressing. “I’ll see you two girls in my office after school for the next three days.” Since it was Friday afternoon, that meant the following Monday and Tuesday were detention days as well.

Cynthia managed to dress first and headed out the door to the hallway. Heather followed a minute later, but the gym teacher stopped her. Not wanting a probable confrontation in the hallway, she directed Heather out the other door, through the gym. “This sucks!” muttered Heather under her breath as she moved through the gym to the double doors leading to the other main hallway of the school. “Shit!”

At 5:30, when Heather left the school grounds, she dejectedly began walking home. It was almost a two mile walk in the late February bluster, but she was spared when she saw someone she knew. Groaning, she rolled her eyes and walked over to where Lauren had parked her car and was standing in front of the school waiting for her. “What? You thought I wouldn’t find out?” Lauren asked.

“Who told you?” said Heather evasively.

“I got a call from the school, and then I called my mother. She was at the house when the kids got home, and she told me you had called her and said not to tell me. Don’t worry, she didn’t. I simply told her I knew, and she agreed with me.” Lauren got in the car, and a few seconds later, Heather climbed in her side. “So, what happened?”

During the drive home, Heather told her side of the story. “It was so unfair!” she protested.

“Yes, I’m sure it was. It’s just too bad, I mean, what with the rule and all.”

“What rule?” asked Heather.

“Oh, you know the rule, the one about detention grounding you.”

“WHAT?”

“Yeah, grounding you until the end of detention, remember that rule?” Lauren was making it up as she went, but it seemed like a good idea.

“That is so not right!” protested the teen.

Lauren pulled the minivan into her driveway and turned off the engine but didn’t get out. Turning to face her young friend, she waved a pointed index finger under the girl’s nose. “Listen here, missy, I let you get away with quite a bit around here, but enough is enough. The school needs to set you down, then I need to set you down. You are in my detention until Wednesday.”

‘But Robby and I are going out tonight!” wailed Heather. Lauren simply shook her head in the negative. “Tomorrow?” asked the girl weakly. Again, Lauren shook her head. “Shit!” she muttered.

“What was that?” asked Lauren, knowing perfectly well what it was.

“Nothing,” answered Heather, averting her eyes. Lauren got out of the car and Heather followed, but only after muttering, “Shit!” to herself again.

Shirley smiled at both Lauren and Heather when they came in the house. Heather returned a significantly frostier smile. “Traitor!” she whispered, which only caused Lauren’s mother to laugh loudly. Shirley pulled her coat on and left after kissing her grandchildren goodbye.

Shortly thereafter, just after six, both Peter and Robby showed up, Peter following Robby up the driveway. “Hold up, buster. Give me a hand here.” Peter handed Robby a large and warm bag, then took a second himself and led the way to the front door. He knocked and entered. “Dinner’s here!”

The thunder of little feet presaged the arrival of Jimmy and Holly. “What’s for dinner?” asked an excited Holly.

Jimmy simply ran straight into the kitchen and looked at the bags on the counter. “Chinese?”

“You like egg rolls,” replied Lauren. She pulled some plates out of the cupboard and began pulling white cardboard containers from the bags. “What’d you get?” she asked her fiancé.

“What didn’t I get! I think I got one of everything.” He washed his hands at the kitchen sink, then pulled a chair out from the kitchen table for Lauren. Holly promptly sat down in it, much to her mother’s annoyance. She pulled a second one out, and this one was stolen by Heather.

“Don’t push your luck.” Heather stuck her tongue out, sucking it back in before Lauren could grab it. “We can go double or nothing, you know.”

“What’s going on?” asked Peter, confused.

“She’s grounded until Wednesday,” explained Lauren.

Robby hooted in laughter. “Detention at home, too? I should have known.”

“Don’t start with me,” hissed Heather.

“What are you going to do, go for the upgrade?” Robby laughed loudly. “It was all over the school!” He had to explain to Peter what he heard had happened.

Peter almost choked on his moo goo gai pan but swallowed before laughing at the glaring teen. “An upgrade? Her boyfriend called you an upgrade?”

Lauren began laughing, too. “What a loser!”

Heather refused to elaborate on what had occurred that had caused the detentions to be given, and Lauren let it slide. Peter changed the subject by asking, “So, Heather, when do you take your college boards, the SATs?”

“Not for another month or so.”

“Any idea what you want to take in college?”

Heather nodded tentatively. “I was thinking of math.”

“Math!” exclaimed Lauren. She hated math.

Heather ignored the outburst. “I was thinking of becoming a teacher, maybe a math teacher.”

Much to Lauren’s consternation, Peter nodded in agreement. She couldn’t imagine the girl going to school for math. “What in the world would you do with a math degree?”

Heather gave her a confused look and began to speak, but Peter rescued her. “What couldn’t she do? Math is the fundamental language for all the sciences. You can’t learn science without math.” He looked at the girl and said, “My grad degrees are in math.”

Lauren gaped at him. “Degrees? Multiple?”

He nodded. “A master’s in operations research and another in applied math.”

“I thought you worked in computers,” said Robby curiously.

“I do. At anything above the junior college level, it’s all math anyway. We simply use computers to model mathematics in the real world.” He explained several applications that Heather picked up on eagerly, though Robby and Lauren were totally mystified. “So, where do you plan on going to school?”

Now the teen was totally lost. “Uh, where’s a good place for math?”

“I liked MIT.”

“You went to MIT?” she asked excitedly.

“Yeah, but it’s what you want to do, not me.”

“I was planning on talking to the guidance counselor at school during the college night at the end of school,” said Lauren.

It was Peter’s turn to stare curiously. “Why in the world would you do that?”

“Well, it’s her job, isn’t it?”

Peter made a wry expression. “Well, no, not really.” He held up a hand to forestall any questions. “Hold on, hold on. You want her to go to a good school, right? And get some scholarships, right? And have some fun, too, right?”

“Of course! What a silly question!”

“Okay then, here’s the god’s honest truth. You cannot leave it up to the guidance counselor. If you do, Heather’s going to be studying English lit at UVCC or Blaine State. You need to do this on your own.”

“I don’t understand.” Lauren stared across the table at her fiancé, seeing him with a deadly serious expression.

“Uh, have you met the guidance counselor? What did you think of him or her?”

Lauren opened her mouth to answer, then gave the question some thought. She had met the woman only once, after Heather’s parents had died. She had been called in, made to wait forty-five minutes, then been given a pamphlet on the warning signs for teen suicide. “Maybe not much,” she admitted.

“She’s an idiot,” agreed Robby. “She’s like a bad joke.”

This was all news to Lauren, so she listened closely as Peter continued. “I’m not saying that all guidance counselors are lousy, but an awful lot of them are psychologist wannabes. They get graded on how many kids get into colleges and how many get scholarships, and that’s it. For the average guidance counselor, it’s better to get 100 percent of the students into a community college than it is to get 90 percent into Harvard.”

Lauren stared. “That’s not right!”

Peter shrugged. “That’s the way it is. The same applies to scholarships. It’s better to get all the kids at UVCC a $500 scholarship than that 90 percent of them get a free ride at Harvard.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Surprisingly, it was Robby who spoke up. “No, that’s what my parents said last year when my sister Ginny was picking out colleges. She had really good grades and SATs, and Mrs. Beresford was pushing her to go to Blaine State. Now she’s at Northwestern!”

Lauren shook her head in despair. “You make it sound impossible.”

Peter shook his head. “No, it’s just not easy, but if you want Heather to go to a decent school, you’re going to do the work, not let the school do it. Hey, after we’re married, I’ll have to help, won’t I? It’ll be my job, right?” He grinned at this. Turning to Robby, he asked, “So what do you want to study in school.”

“I have no freaking idea!”

Robby stayed until almost ten, at which time Heather walked him out to his truck to see him off. Lauren looked ominously at her watch, reminding the teen that she was grounded, and wasn’t going anywhere with him. Heather gave her a dirty look, then walked Robby to the truck. “Sorry about this,” she commented.

Robby laughed. “So, you can make it up to me next week!” He opened the door to his truck and climbed up into the seat, turning the key in the ignition as he settled into place.

Heather came closer, nestling up against him to kiss him. Laying her hands on his left thigh, she brought her lips to his ear. “I was planning on being nice to you tonight.”

“Oh really?”

“Mmm, hmmm.” She seductively moved her hands along his leg, knowing the torment she was inflicting on him. “I was going to invite you downstairs once the kids went to sleep. I wanted to keep the lights on. You know I like that, don’t you?”

Robby suddenly found his throat getting dry. He rasped out a weak, “Yes.”

Heather rubbed his thigh suggestively, causing her boyfriend’s growing erection to stiffen further. “Would you like to know what I was going to do? I was going to take off my clothing first, well maybe not everything, just my shirt and pants. Underneath, I’m wearing this tiny little bra. It’s very low cut and lacy, black and transparent. Did you know I can see my nipples right through it? At least the part of my nipples that don’t show at the top.” Robby swallowed and stared at her hungrily, his eyes gravitating to her chest, as if he could will himself to X-ray vision.

“My panties are part of a matching set, black and lacy and see-through. Only they’re not really panties, they’re more of a thong, very small. So small, in fact, that I can feel them riding up between my pussy lips,” she continued. By now she was openly fondling his cock through the front of his jeans. Robby moaned in delight.

“I think after I got undressed, I was going to take your clothes off. I wanted the lights on, so I could see it, stiff and hard. It would be stiff and hard, right?” Robby nodded weakly. “Well, I’m sure it would be because I’d be on my knees, sucking it. You like when I suck your cock, don’t you? I’d take a long, long time sucking it, licking your cockhead and stroking it, licking your balls. That would feel good, wouldn’t it? Then, just as I had you on the verge, I’d reach between your legs and tickle your asshole.” Heather was breathing hotly into his ear even as she stroked him through his pants. “You like it when I tickle your asshole.”