✅ A Dose of Humiliation

1. Preparation

This chapter is dedicated to babysofia1234, with lots of thanks for your support. Thank you!

I sat in the pharmacy feeling like a prisoner. It was weird; there was a door only a couple of feet away that would take me out into the mall, where hundreds of people were shopping, and hundreds of kids were killing time in the absence of anything better to do in this little rural town. I could just stand up and walk to the door, and there was nothing they could do to stop me. But then I looked to my left and to my right, and saw the stony glares of my parents. They wouldn't let me run so easily.

"Starting to have second thoughts, Lorna?" Mum asked pointedly. She was probably trying to make some point, but I wasn't really sure what it was supposed to be. That she was in charge, and that I should always do what my parents wanted even if it made no sense given what they'd already taught me? That was the thing that bugged me. They had always told me that someone had to stand up to a bully, that someone had to protect the innocent, that someone needed to speak truth to power and ensure that justice was valued above the rules. But as soon as someone was me, those rules no longer applied. I'd be back home from a party at the time they said I needed to be, and they would yell at me for not being there at the time they wanted. I would report a bully in school to the teachers, and my parents would be angry that I dared to accuse a supposed social superior. They had taught me well, I guessed, and given me good morals. But they didn't live by what they claimed to believe, and they were angry that I did what they had taught me.

"What can I do?" I answered. Sarcastic as always. But what other option did I have, when the options were all so ludicrous?

"You're transitional," Dad was the one to answer, so I turned my head to the left. The three of us were on cheap plastic seats where people might sit while waiting for their medication to be dispensed, but the atmosphere was more like I was sitting outside the principal's office, dreading the punishment ahead. Of course, that wasn't something I had much experience of. I'd never misbehaved, never broken a rule. Between the school rules, the unspoken laws that my parents had taught me, and society's more pragmatic mores, I had gotten all the way through high school without doing anything wrong. Everything I did was both legally and morally justifiable. All I knew about school discipline was taken from cheap coming-of-age novels and what I'd heard from my friends. And, of course, a handful of times when the school disciplinary council or the principal had called me in to tell them the truth on behalf of some victim who was too scared to do it himself.

"So?" I answered, realising after a few second that the silence wasn't just a pause for effect.

"Five years ago, a kid like you would be in juvenile detention. A criminal, even if you're not an adult yet."

I snorted at that. I was an adult. I was eighteen; Dad seemed to have forgotten that the same laws he so enjoyed praising as the solution to disrespectful children were the same ones that would make me stay with them and abide by their rules from my birthday until the day I graduated from school.

"Five years ago, a juvenile delinquent like you would have been incarcerated. You didn't listen to your parents, you didn't listen to your teachers, you just did what you wanted. And you could have been punished for that. So yeah, you have the option. But so long as you're still living with your parents and attending school, we can save you from jail. We can give you the chance of an almost normal life. We can sign you up for a Special Juvenile Discipline programme, making you exempt from the authority of the courts and the legal system for this particular problem. Can't you see that this is the better option for you? Can't you even pretend to be grateful?"

I sighed. "Special Juvenile Discipline" was a term that only appeared in a certain kind of newspaper completely out of touch with the present day. The term everybody else used was 'punishment pill', although I'd heard some of the teachers referring to them as 'shame enhancers' as some weird kind of euphemism. Only my dad would use the name that was set down in the law.

"Grateful for what?" I growled. "For trying to humiliate me in front of all my friends?" I gestured at a group of girls around my age outside the huge glass windows that separated the pharmacy from the rest of the mall. There weren't actually any of my friends there; nobody I knew would have seen me here. But that wasn't the point. They would have to know sooner or later...