The Oak Street Method_Heather Read online

  “Holly, get ready,” Jane said over the comm link that sent her voice directly to the audio implant in ‘Mrs. Giuliani’s’ ear, as Tricia put the box on her mommy and daddy’s bed. Holly, downstairs in the kitchen with Luisa, packing the girls’ snacks for school at the Kimballs’ across the street, gave the tap at her jaw that meant copy and sounded with a boom in Jane’s headset.

  In the bedroom, Tricia opened the lid, and saw the cover of Jane’s absolute favorite issue: April 1996, the ‘working man’ Danny Gaveston, out in the woods with his Jeep. Jane’s own heart skipped a beat, while Tricia’s tiny perineal sensor went wild, five separate metrics spiking or bottoming out at once.

  A red warning flashed at the bottom of the screen, one of six on the front wall of the control room.

  “Whoops,” said Paul Farmer, observing from one seat over at the console. “She’s going down.”

  “Shit,” Jane said, reading the fainting alert at the same time she heard Paul’s comment. “No, she won’t.”

  Tricia wobbled a little, but she didn’t faint, and her graphs smoothed, her blood flow actually reversing itself so that all the blood that had drained from her face at the sight of what the box contained rushed back in a blush that Jane could actually see over the camera in the molding of the Giulianis’ master bedroom. Her arousal jumped to eight, and the humidity sensor showed she had just gushed into her white school panties.

  “And that was just the cover,” Paul said a little ominously, but Jane could tell he was—mostly—only teasing her. Paul had maintained at the long meeting that the Playgirls might be overkill.

  The original plan called for letting Tricia open at least one magazine, but though she didn’t fear Tricia might faint, Jane knew that Paul’s concern had validity. She had a slightly panicked impulse to run to Charlotte, but she had no time, and she didn’t want to look indecisive. A flash of insight told her that the strength of Tricia’s initial reaction had gotten the girl where Jane needed her to go, at least for the next few hours.

  “Holly, go,” she said over the comm link.

  Instantly, Holly, who had been futzing with bags of pretzels for the last two minutes, took two steps into the hallway and yelled in a proper Sicilian-mama way, “Tricia, get your backside down here with those curlers this instant if you don’t want it tanned. You girls are late for school.”

  Tricia froze for a moment, and the red fainting warning flashed again. Damn, if Paul is right and this all falls apart…

  But an instant later the willowy olive-skinned girl slammed down the cover of the box as if it were filled with adders. Paul chuckled at that, and Jane allowed herself a little smile. Ten seconds later the box had returned to the shelf and the curlers had come down from it, and Tricia was scooting down the stairs.

  “Nice, Holly,” Jane said. A spanking reference at such moments was almost de rigueur, but Jane couldn’t help feeling thankful for it anyway: Tricia’s arousal, now at seven, could be sustained with the help of Wilma Kimball for the next few hours, until the all-important moment when Heather went home with the Giuliani girls and the curvy blonde girl’s awakening could begin.

  The Giulianis’ household dynamic had been designed as a kind of backstop to a runaway erotic and disciplinary current that might interfere with the orderly sale of the girls at auction, one girl per month. Holly and Marco didn’t discipline harshly, but they intentionally meted out punishments with much more consistency than any of the other mommies and daddies—that aspect of being a Giuliani girl had just manifested itself in Tricia’s reaction to hearing her mommy’s threat. In most houses on Oak Street, such a hint at a spanking wouldn’t have been fulfilled even if the girl had taken five more minutes to come down. At Number 9, however, if Tricia hadn’t appeared within a minute her panties would have come down and Mrs. Giuliani’s biggest wooden spoon would have made school a very uncomfortable experience for her while Luisa had to watch, worried that Mrs. Kimball might paddle both of them for being late, as sometimes happened, one swat for every minute of lateness.

  The consistency in discipline meant that Tricia’s awakening could be safely delayed for as much as three months—according to the best model the assessors could produce—without adverse effect either to herself or to Luisa, or to any of the other Oak Street girls. Extra spankings for masturbation attempts would only add to the girl’s value, as prospective owners, interested in the Mediterranean look and the old-world family narrative, looked on via the exclusive reality channel, Oak Street TV, that provided an enormous additional revenue stream to the project’s bottom line.

  Holly and Marco would keep Tricia in line, and Luisa from catching any more than the faintest rumor of the true nature of her neighborhood. Jane could concentrate on the girl whose buxom beauty and dreamy imagination had endeared her to all the assessors so very much, Heather London.

  As Tricia and Luisa headed out the door in the skirts and blouses that constituted the de facto schoolgirl uniform of Mrs. Kimball’s little school, Jane turned her attention to the next screen over. This one showed the schoolroom, where the other seven Oak Street girls already sat at their desks. The cozy room in the finished basement of Number 6 had been arranged to give an authentic one-room schoolhouse feel: the only thing missing, really, was a pot-belly stove by the teacher’s desk.

  As befit the place where all the Oak Street girls spent a good deal of every weekday, the Institute techs had fitted it out with more sensors, microphones, and cameras than Jane thought the assessors could ever actually use. That impression of excess, though, didn’t stop her from feeling grateful that at the click of her mouse she could get a very good close-up of Heather’s frowning face, as she looked at Tricia’s empty desk right in front of her.

  The Giulianis were never late. Delia Chichester was late two days out of three, though she had only actually been punished for it twice. Renee Dalton had been half an hour late once, and been made a very sorry girl for it, but Renee was the brattiest girl on the street. Heather had been five minutes late, once, and Jane thought that the sweet girl’s face now reflected the fear that had registered all over her body on that occasion, at the thought of being bent over for the paddle in front of all the other girls.

  The assessors had designed school punishment on Oak Street to provide a sort of counterpoint to the bare-bottom spankings all the girls got at home. Wilma Kimball gave them with an old-fashioned wooden spanking paddle over the girls’ skirts, as the offender bent over the teacher’s desk at the front of the schoolroom. The ritual, and the presence of the paddle on a hook affixed to Wilma’s desk, ensured that her very special pupils never forgot about the role of corporal punishment in their lives—though of course these girls in general stood in no need of the reminder. It also, and more vitally, led to the natural conclusion for each girl that her Oak Street friends must not get spanked at home, that she must be the only one. For how could any other caring mommy or daddy—and all the Oak Street mommies and daddies were doting parents—think of adding more domestic discipline on top of what the girl got at school? Surely only her guardians found it necessary to bare her bottom for further punishment.

  Chapter Three

  Mrs. Kimball had the bell in her hand now. Where were Tricia and Luisa? They were going to get paddled. Heather bit her lower lip, trying to press down the conflicting emotions the thought stirred in her. When Mrs. Kimball paddled a girl, or—so much worse—that one time when Heather had overslept her alarm on a morning when both her mommy and her daddy had to go in to work early and she had ended up five minutes late to school, sure she would have to bend over the teacher’s desk—the feeling in Heather’s tummy should just have been fear, shouldn’t it?

  Instead, just as seemed to be the case now, as she watched Mrs. Kimball raise the bell to her shoulder and heard the decisive clang that meant their little school had begun another day, an excitement gripped her that made Heather shift in the wooden seat of the old-fashioned school desk. Trying to distract herself, she cast her
eyes around the room, to notice for the first time a puzzling deepening of the usual quite shallow division between the two sides of Oak Street.

  Mrs. Kimball had arranged the nine desks in her schoolroom in three rows, seating her pupils much as they dwelt on the road itself. Heather and Tricia (though her desk stood empty now), sat in the middle row, with Wendy in front of them. Frankie and Mary Wood sat on the right with Ginnie Samuels behind them. To Heather’s left were Renee Dalton and Delia Chichester. Luisa’s empty desk stood at the head of that row.

  Generally the odd side of Oak Street—Renee, Delia, and the Giulianis—hung out with one another and the even side—Ginnie, Wendy, Frankie, and Mary—did the same. It just kind of made sense that way because their backyards connected. That left Heather in the middle figuratively as well as literally, but she had never felt it as something uncomfortable until this morning in school. Really she usually enjoyed it because it meant she had two different ‘gangs’ from whom to choose on the weekends, though on weekdays because Mommy and Daddy were so strict she had to spend her afternoons with Tricia and Luisa, with regular visits from Delia and—if she wasn’t grounded, which she mostly was—Renee.

  But in the past two months, as first Wendy, then Frankie and Mary, and finally Ginnie, had all for some reason been absent in succession from the right side of the schoolroom, Heather realized now for the first time that the very casual social division had taken on some more serious dimension that mystified her. She hadn’t noticed it growing, she supposed, because the side of the room that she tended to think of as her side—the odd-numbered Oak Street households—had kept its full numbers while the even-numbered side went a girl (or two) down for a few days in each of three weeks, without any explanation from Mrs. Kimball or the girls themselves.

  Nor, Heather realized now, had the grownups of the street to her knowledge gotten together recently, even side with odd. That hadn’t struck her as strange of course, until now, since it was the kind of drawn-out change that you never noticed as it happened.

  Hadn’t she overheard a conversation between Renee and Delia, too, about Ginnie’s absence earlier this week? About seeing a van pull up in front of the Samuels’ on Sunday and then Ginnie not being in school Monday? That memory came to Heather in addition to the one of having noted, to Tricia, the very unusual presence of a limousine in front of the Kimballs’ house one Saturday a few weeks back. Ginnie had come back on Wednesday, though, and…

  And she didn’t say more than hi to me, or any other girl on the odd side of the street, Heather recollected now, feeling a frown come onto her face. Just then, too, as Tricia and Luisa finally burst into the schoolroom to the sound of the last clang of Mrs. Kimball’s bell, Heather saw a look pass among Wendy, Ginnie, Frankie, and Mary that made her eyes go wide and her heart race even faster than it had been doing at the thought that her best friends might get the paddle.

  Heather couldn’t have said at that moment what she had seen in her friends’ eyes, or why it affected her so strongly. She might have theorized that part of the effect at least arose from it being shared among them and them alone—the Oak Street girls who since that day when something strange had happened in the Woods’ pool house had, well, kept to themselves, an older sort of book might have said.

  Heather remembered the fluttery feeling she had gotten when Mr. Kimball had come over to find Wendy, after Frankie and Mary had gone into the pool house with his little girl. All three of them had clearly gotten into trouble, and hadn’t that been just before Wendy had been absent from school? And then Frankie and Mary had gone next?

  If Heather had to put a name to it, she might have said that the four girls of the even-numbered side of Oak Street had shared a knowing look. For some reason the knowledge involved, implied perhaps in the way Mary’s mouth curved ever so slightly into a smile that she seemed to be trying to suppress, and in the way Frankie, Heather now noticed, had blushed rather deeply, made Heather’s heartrate go up and an echoing blush to come to her own cheeks.

  “Alright, girls,” said Mrs. Kimball as Tricia and Luisa slid quickly and quietly into their seats—Tricia with an odd sort of smile at Heather in answer to the relieved, happy look Heather put on her face. “Take out your economics textbooks, please.”

  Heather reached into her desk for the big book from which the Oak Street girls were learning the underpinnings of capitalism. As she hauled it out she tried to figure out what Tricia’s smile could have meant: it had seemed to have some troubled emotion in it that made Heather’s forehead crinkle, now, as she remembered it.

  * * *

  Heather wanted to question Tricia about why she and Luisa had been late, and what the expression on her best friend’s face had meant, at lunchtime, but the impression of the look she had caught among Ginnie, Wendy, and the Wood girls made her shy to mention the subject as the girls cooked chicken and rice under Mrs. Kimball’s supervision. The expression on impish Mary’s face lingered in Heather’s mind: the golden-haired younger Wood girl had looked right at Tricia’s seat, and had seemed to manifest a definite idea about what its emptiness of Tricia’s backside must mean.

  More—and this thought made Heather’s face feel much hotter than the steam from the stew pot really warranted—Mary had seemed to think that whatever had befallen Tricia and Luisa must have something… well, shameful about it. As if whatever was going on at Number 9 would get someone in much worse trouble than a few embarrassing swats of Mrs. Kimball’s school paddle. At the humiliating thought of what getting in trouble meant for her—her daddy’s firm hand teaching her bare bottom a painful lesson—Heather swallowed hard and tried to concentrate on cutting up the chicken according to Mrs. Kimball’s directions.

  At 2:15 they had a quiz on David Copperfield, the novel they had been reading for what seemed like forever. Before handing it out, Mrs. Kimball said, “You girls may go when you finish your quiz.”

  Then, to Heather’s abject embarrassment, Wendy’s mommy looked straight at Heather and said, “Heather, dear, remember that if you finish early you must wait for Tricia or Luisa. Mrs. Giuliani has some errands to run today and she asked me to make sure you don’t go over there alone since she won’t be back until three.”

  Heather felt the blood rush hot all over her body. She might be dreamy, like her mommy always said, but she never forgot about needing to wait for Tricia and Luisa. How could she, since the reason she couldn’t go across the street to Number 9 unaccompanied lay in what had happened with the boy in the hostel dormitory? Didn’t Mrs. Kimball understand that every time she mentioned this restriction on Heather, and on Heather alone of all the Oak Street girls, it was as if she were making the curvy ash-blonde girl pull down her panties in front of all her friends to show the place where the boy had touched her?

  “Yes, ma’am,” Heather mumbled. At least her daddy couldn’t ever fault her on her manners, the way Renee and Mary got held to account so very often.

  Heather finished the quiz first, of course—she always finished every test first. She sat looking down at her paper and from time to time glancing up at Tricia’s back to see if her dark-haired best friend might be laying down her own pencil. Once, turning a little to the side, she noticed Mary looking boldly right at her, the same knowing smile on Mary’s pretty blue-eyed face. Heather felt the blood rush once again to her own face, and she even felt tears prickle in her nose because she understood in that instant that the girls from the even side of the street must truly have experienced something about which Heather, the Giulianis, Renee, and Delia simply didn’t have the first idea. She looked down at her quiz.

  Finally Tricia put down her pencil and turned to look at Heather. If anything, the smile on her best friend’s face seemed even weaker than it had been that morning. Tricia usually beamed when the time had finally come to go home to her house and read magazines, play board games, watch a little TV, and do homework—in that order of priority. Now Heather wanted to blurt out right there in the schoolroom that Tricia had to tell he
r what was going on, and only barely managed to contain herself.

  Luisa had just finished, too, and then so did everyone else, so Heather had no chance to have even a moment alone with her best friend, until they had almost crossed Oak Street, Luisa a little ahead of them as the three made their way toward the Giulianis’ driveway. Then Heather said, “Trish…”

  But Tricia only gave her an ambiguous look, with no hint of a smile, and kept walking.

  The prickle became moisture at the corners of Heather’s eyes.

  “Trish!” she said desperately.

  Tricia turned to her again, her mouth set in a thin line. “Inside,” she hissed.

  Heather felt her eyes go very wide and her heart race. At least she knew her best friend didn’t mean to leave her out of whatever it was, but what could it possibly be that Tricia didn’t want to talk about outdoors?

  Mutely she followed Tricia through the Giulianis’ front door. Luisa had gone straight up to her own room—Heather could see the bedroom door ajar, on the landing at the top of the stairs, the way all Oak Street girls’ doors must remain while they were in there, until bedtime when their mommies and daddies closed them after saying goodnight.

  “Trish,” she said for the third time, “what is it?”

  Tricia looked down at the floor, at her penny loafers. Heather could see that her best friend had caught her bottom lip between her teeth. Heather was about to plead one more time for information, but at last Tricia lifted her head and turned to her. She whispered, “Promise you won’t tell?”