Never Lose Hope

No Pattern

My father's laugh was the kind that is only at someone else's expense.

"You are so my daughter, littlest wolf." Dad shook his head in disbelief as he smiled. "You don't have a leg to stand on, you're completely in the wrong, yet you have the tenacity and audacity to keep fighting."

I wasn't quite sure if my father was speaking from a point of admiration or dismay. I was getting some mixed messages here. Is he proud of me, or ashamed? Before I had the chance to contemplate the motivating factors behind my dad's actions and emotions, he settled the argument quite definitively with the next sentence he spoke.

"You will learn from my mistakes, littlest wolf, and I will spend all of eternity ensuring so, if need be."

"Dad, please..." I tried to plead my case but my father quickly put a stop to it.

"There will be no negotiations and in this case, no preliminaries either." Dad took a step in my direction. "Bend over the desk, my child. You'll be receiving twenty-five strokes of motivation from my little helper," he chided, snapping the belt in front of my face. "Bend," he reiterated when I hadn't immediately complied, as he motioned towards the desk.

I knew there was no point in trying any further to change my father's mind, or to attempt to argue my way out of this punishment. What Shilpi and I did was pretty stupid. No, actually it was quite ingenious. What was stupid was thinking we wouldn't eventually get caught. Had Shilpi not decided to be creative, we would have gotten away with it for a lot longer but if I'm being honest with myself, that would have just delayed the inevitable.

This is the point in the disaster of the fiery crash and burn. I slowly made my way over to my dad and uncle's desk. Resigning myself to accept my fate, I bent over the edge, gripping the lip on the other side as I draped my upper body across the smooth veneer surface.

"Let's begin," my dad ordered. Flipping the hem of my school uniform skirt up onto my lower back, he tapped the belt on my bottom. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and gripped the edge of the desk, my knuckles turning white from the strain, in anticipation of the first stroke. I didn't have to wait long before I heard the sharp slap of my dad's stiff leather belt, a moment before feeling the pain of its sting against my skin as it striped an angry red swath across my upper thighs. Dad brought his belt down again swiftly, giving me little to no time to process what was happening.

He continued to strike my bottom and thighs repeatedly, with not only tenacity but ferocity and deadly accuracy as well. My school issued thin white cotton briefs offered essentially no protection against the punishing effects of that cruel strip of leather. This is the period of unimaginable suffering for the victims of the disaster. The point where you're sure you're going to die because there is no escape.

My dad is anything but methodical when he spanks. He comes out swinging hard and never slows down. There is no pattern. There aren't any calculated strikes with designated placement for optimal effect. Don't get me wrong, he can be extremely accurate when he wants to be, it's just not very often his point of focus.

The fact that my dad has a predetermined number of strokes in mind for this spanking, tells me one of two things. He's either so angry, he's afraid he'll take my punishment too far if he doesn't limit himself from the beginning, or he's not really that concerned by what I've done to earn myself this whipping but he still feels it's his moral duty as my father to enforce negative consequences for my misbehavior. Judging by how angry he was in Headmaster Saltzman's office and the fact he looked even more irate as soon as he returned home, I'm betting it's the former and not the latter reason.