The Lonely Girls Club
By
Suzanne Forster

Rowe Academy for Girls Tiburon, California Winter 1980

    The cotton camisole was too small. It acted like a binder to reduce her breasts to a tidy A cup. She slipped on a crisp white blouse and buttoned it up, leaving just a bit of milky throat exposed. Her ticking pulse could still be seen.

She could see his reflection, too, watching her, totally absorbed in her ritual before the full-length mirror. Dressing for sex had always struck her as odd, but this was the way he liked it. Was he caught yet? Ensnared by his own racing heart?

The pleats of her plaid stitch-down skirt just reached her knees. The skirt opened like a kilt, and the flap flew as she twirled on one foot. She was joyous now, childlike. Her dark French-braided hair danced with pleasure. Surely he could see that she was transformed. She didn't look in the mirror as she bent to draw knee-high cotton stockings on over her bare feet. She preferred silk, but everything had to be totally authentic. No makeup was allowed, only freshly pinched cheeks and lip gloss. No jewelry. That would be trashy.

He was no longer in the mirror. She turned, hoping to see him lying on the bed, awaiting her, fully aroused and trembling with shame. That was how she controlled him, and it had to go right today or their relationship wouldn't survive. She had something important to tell him. But hope faded as she saw him standing by the window, looking down at the courtyard three stories below her bell tower apartment, where her finishing school students took breaks between classes.

The academy, a U-shaped structure, designed in the manner of the ivy-covered Victorian castles of old England, was more than a school, it was her family home, donated through a foundation to the cause of education when her grandmother died, fifteen years ago. Right now it felt like her prison.

She joined him, but he didn't acknowledge her presence. He was transfixed by an exquisite creature with cascading red curls and the pensive smile of a Sistine Madonna. The young woman stood near the fountain in the courtyard's center, seemingly unaware of the mist from the water that hovered around her like a communion veil. Brisk weather had kept most of the students indoors today, but this one must have wanted to be alone with her thoughts.

“Is it her then?” the headmistress asked him. “One of my girls? You want a child?”

Her bitterness could have drawn blood, but he seemed oblivious. “She isn't a    more >>