Chapter 8: Punishment, Sort Of

School on Monday proved an unmitigated disaster! I was surprised by the snubs I got from some people, and Bobby was missing from my locker. (No, he doesn’t stay in my locker, but he always meets me there - you know what I mean!) In fact, I didn’t see him until lunch. He was standing against the wall of the cafeteria talking to some of his friends with an arm around Jackie Fortier!

Jackie Fortier is just like the biggest slut in school! She’s very pretty, if you like girls who dress like cheap hookers. When she’s not giving head, she’s a cheerleader. I heard from a reliable source that once after a winning game she sucked off the entire varsity team, one after the other! She is such a slut! She’s not really all that big, maybe five-three if she’s thinking tall, with these perky little tits and this little ass I just hate her for, and she dresses like a real slut, always showing her belly button ring and her thong above her jeans. She was rubbing against Bobby like a bitch in heat!

I stormed up, and Bobby smirked as he saw me coming. “What do you want?” he snarled.

“What do I want? What is this?” I demanded.

“After Saturday, you don’t get to say shit to anybody. Piss off!” he replied with a laugh.

“Go fuck yourself, too, Bobby. I never told you to bring your loser friends over.”

“It was just a party, bitch, so you fucked up calling the cops. You don’t send guys to jail and think you are getting away with it, do you?”

Several of his friends, including Jake Torrance grumbled and cussed me out, though nobody touched me.

“And this is your new girlfriend? This is the best you could do?”

“Fuck you, bitch!” Jackie yelled at me.

“Kennel closed today, Jackie?” I said sweetly. She started squawking as I turned back to Bobby. “You can kiss my ass, asshole.” I turned back at his red-faced slut. “You know Jackie, you really can do better. He has a very small dick, and never lasts more than a minute or two.”

Bobby roared as his friends started laughing at him. I simply hit him, which was the biggest mistake I made over the entire event. Now, I just slapped him. My hand was open, not clenched, and I hit him with the palm of my hand. An official slap. However, I was really pissed, and I got him good with a real roundhouse swing that caught him on the side of the cheek and could be heard over the noise of the cafeteria and knocked him back against the wall.

It was also seen by two teachers and about two seconds later I was in the Vice-Principal’s office. Half an hour later Mom was next to me as I was informed I was being given an ‘in-school’ suspension for three days for ‘assault’. The VP was a real jerk, stating that this was all my fault, since two students had already been cut from graduation, since they had felony charges against them. It seems that when the cops searched the three guys who had been busted at my house, two of them had dope in their pockets. How stupid was that? And it’s my fault? So, he was punishing a bad influence on the school.

I felt like exploding, but my mother kept a tight hold on my hand. In-school suspension means you have all day detention, not going to class and still responsible for homework and tests and it goes on your record. It’s a fucking joke and a real pain in the butt. Still, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and as we were leaving, I muttered to Mom, “What a fucking prick.”

I didn’t mutter quietly enough. “That cuts it, young lady, and you are out of graduation as well, and if I have my way, you won’t even receive your diploma. You’ll be expelled!”

I stared at him in disbelief as Mom hustled me out and home. Dad ended up coming home early and stewed for a while, then left again. I sat down on the couch, exhausted, too tired and worn out to even cry about the injustice of it all. Mom sat down next to me and handed me the newspaper, opened to the ‘Local’ section. Our home played a prominent part of several descriptions from the weekend’s Police Blotter. Oh, fucking joy! I looked up at her bleakly. “So, am I expelled or something?”

“I think it’s more the ‘or something’ than anything else,” she replied.

“I guess Daddy’s really pis ... angry with me.”

Mom put an arm around my shoulder. “He’s just a bit disappointed, honey. He hasn’t stopped loving you. I think he’s angrier about your boyfriend...”

“Ex-boyfriend!”

“ ... than anything else. He told me he never did like him, but he wasn’t going to tell you that.” I just rolled my eyes at the thought. “He’s just going to be grumpy for a few days. He gets that way at times.” She smiled at me. “He’ll take care of this.” She tightened her arm and hugged me.

I hugged her back. “I never did ask; did you and Daddy have fun Saturday night? I mean, you were dressed for it.”

Mom’s eyes opened at that. “Oh, my, I almost forgot about that! Yes, we did, a lot of fun!” I looked at her curiously. “Well, after dinner, we went parking, just like you suggested, to give you and Bobby a chance to be alone. We got in the back seat and started fooling around - that outfit of mine really had him turned on, and it was so easy for him to well, you know - and I gave him a hummer. Then he played with me some more and I climbed on top, with my skirt pulled up, and we did it right there in the back seat. It was pretty good. It reminded me of when I was in high school!” she said with a giggle.

“Did the alarm interrupt anything?” I knew that after calling the cops, the security company would have called them on the cell phone.

Mom laughed at that. “Well, no, but the cell phone rang just after we finished. I had already asked your father if he felt like he would be able to go again in a bit, and I never did get an answer!”

“Sorry I screwed that up too, Mom.” She just laughed and hugged me again.

I ended up in school the next day, with Daddy and his lawyer. The school secretary didn’t want to let us in to see the Vice Principal at all, right up until the lawyer pulled a folded blue file from his briefcase and asked if she would accept service. Her eyes opened wide, and she shuffled us right in to see the Principal immediately. The Principal accepted service with a raised eyebrow and called in the Vice Principal. It was interesting in a way, or at least it would have been if it hadn’t been about me. I just kept my mouth shut! I had gotten in enough trouble lately, and Daddy was still using my middle name. The blue paper was a Temporary Restraining Order to keep me from getting thrown out of school. The Principal and the lawyer negotiated it back down to the three-day in-school suspension, and I had to make a formal apology to the Vice Principal. The lawyer handed me a page out of his briefcase, and I read aloud, “I apologize for my thoughtless and abusive language, and promise never to behave so again.”

The Vice Principal was smirking as I read this, stone-faced. He had a very unctuous and oily tone as he said, “Thank you. Now, if you were to make a similar apology in the cafeteria to Mister Smith, we might be able to do something about the suspension.”

I had a vision of myself standing in the cafeteria at lunch making an apology to that asshole. “I think I’ll stick with the suspension,” I replied dryly.

The Vice Principal’s face turned beet red, and he looked like he was about to explode, though the Principal eyed me curiously and tried not to laugh. Before the Vice Principal could say anything more, she said, “Thank you. That will be all, won’t it?” We all stood and left.

Daddy was over the grumpies, mostly, by Friday afternoon. By then he’d had a landscape company out to repair and resod the front lawn and a carpet company had put in a new living room carpet. Mom had taken me shopping for a new coffee and end table set, and Daddy had ordered a new stereo. The old one had been quickly recovered from a local pawn shop, but it had been really trashed. Anyway, by Friday, Daddy wasn’t using my middle name anymore, though I was still grounded, and I had moved from suspension to permanent detention in school.

Detention wasn’t that big a deal, at least from a time standpoint. It wasn’t like I took the bus to school. Normally Daddy drove me and dropped me off in the morning on the way to his office, and Mom would pick me up after school. A lot of times I ended up in the library anyway waiting for her, or going home with friends, or something.

He sat down next to me on the couch Friday night and asked, “How’s it going, sweetheart?”

I shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“Just okay?”

I shrugged some more. Here it was, barely two weeks before graduation and I was a pariah at school. Almost nobody wanted anything to do with me. Bobby had all the boys and half the girls trying to make trouble, and the ones who weren’t giving me grief were ignoring me. I just dumped it all on Daddy in one big chunk. By the end, I was crying, and he had his arm around my shoulders.

He kissed me on the top of my head. “There’s an old saying, something about that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but that’s probably a load of bull. I think it’s truer that the only thing you need to do in high school is survive it. Nobody really enjoys it, honey.”

“It’s so unfair!” I cried. “I thought they were my friends.”

“What about Becky?” he asked.

“Well, she’s okay. I mean, she still hangs with me,” I relented.

“Anybody else?”

“Hailey Mills and Teri Fisher are still being pretty good.”

“Well, you see, it’s not everybody, is it?” he asked with a smile.

“No,” I agreed.

“Honey, these are the sorts of things that prove who your friends really are. If they stick with you through the crappy parts, you stick with them. You’ll go through life with an awful lot of friendly people when times are good, but you want to treasure the real friends, the ones who stick no matter how bad it is. Never lose them, baby.” He hugged me some more, and I snuggled up against him to watch television.

I must have fallen asleep that way because the next thing I knew, Mom was tapping me on the shoulder. She was wearing a long satin robe and stockings and heels. “Off to bed, sleepyhead. It’s my turn to snuggle with your father.” She smiled and helped me to my feet. I started up the stairs, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and turned to watch them briefly from near the top. Mom had stretched out on the couch with Daddy, who had slipped a hand inside her robe. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it and he was gently cupping and fondling one of her tits. Well, I hadn’t been invited, so I went on upstairs and went to bed, pulling out my battery powered boyfriend.