Decadence

Untitled Part 1

CHAPTER ONE

"I bet they told you at orientation that Ashgrove wasn't like your old school."

The speaker was a tall girl with dyed black hair and the claw-like markings of a tattoo visible from where she had left her uniform shirt unbuttoned-deliberately, it seemed.

Rachael Williams nodded. In fact, the principal had told her exactly that, with a superior looking smile that served to underscore his private convictions regarding her education. She wouldn't have been surprised if he thought she'd been taught in a one-room schoolhouse.

"Well, they were right," Mystery Girl said, tearing Rachael from her thoughts. "It's worse."

Rachael was already anxious about starting at a new school so late in the social strata, but now it coursed through her in a renewed tide of anguish, closely followed by logic and good sense. I'm being punked. All schools had hazing rituals. Any minute now, someone would hop out from around the corner with an iPhone, pointing and laughing at her gullibility.

"You think I'm fucking with you." The girl smiled thinly. "You do, don't you?"

Rachael stared at the polished floor and wondered if it was actual marble.

Mystery Girl sighed, and got to her feet. "Come with me," she said tiredly.

Rachael glanced back towards the principal's office. Rachael's mother had taken the day off from both of her jobs to see her daughter settled in, and Rachael could see the shadows of them now in profile, gossiping like a bunch of old hens at church. "If it's quick," she said.

To her surprise, Mystery Girl entered the girls' bathroom. As far as school bathrooms went, it was pretty clean. No sharpie on the mirror, no used tampons floating in the toilet like buoys. She swung open the door to the handicapped stall and gestured for Rachael to come inside.

Again, Rachael hesitated. But curiosity won out over caution and she joined the taller girl in the stall. For a moment she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be looking at. Then she saw the writing-in a rainbow of colors, styles, and fonts, it filled all three walls of the stall.

'Daphne Kim's voice sounds like my vibrator when it's running low on batteries.'

'Maria Herrera's face looks like a nuclear testing site.'

'I fucked Andrew Worth.'

'Who hasn't?'

'Does anyone else think that Meredith Rehnquist is a dyke?'

'Oh, totally. I bet you she has a penis, too.'

There was a crude drawing of an ejaculating penis.

'Meredith probably hasn't fucked Andrew Worth.'