Chapter 4: Art class
The day after the walk of shame dawned grey and drizzling, matching the persistent ache that had settled deep in Alice’s muscles. Her skin was a tapestry of fading bruises—yellows and greens layered over Mrs. Gable’s original violets. Dressing was a cautious ritual. She chose loose-fitting jeans and a thick sweatshirt, armor against the world and the damp.
She met Charlie by accident near the student union, both veering toward the same coffee cart. An awkward silence hung between them, thick as the steam from the espresso machine. His “hey” was a low grunt. Her “morning” was a mumbled word into her collar.
“You okay?” he asked finally, not looking at her.
“Sore. You?”
“Yeah. Think my jeans are permanently ventilated.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “C’mon. I’ll walk you. Where you headed?”
“Art history lecture. North building.”
“Same direction as my poli-sci. Let’s cut through the Fine Arts center. It’s covered.”
They fell into step, the memory of their synchronized, exposed hobble making their current normalcy feel fragile. The Fine Arts building was a maze of whitewashed corridors smelling of turpentine, clay, and stale coffee. Echoes of a violin screeched from a practice room. They were passing an open doorway labeled “Advanced Figure Studies” when a hand shot out.
Fingers, strong and bony, closed like vices on the crests of their ears, twisting sharply. Alice yelped; Charlie sucked in a sharp breath.
“There you are!” The voice was a rich alto, sharp with theatrical annoyance. They were yanked sideways into the room. Anderson was all angles and intensity—black hair in a severe bun, sharp cheekbones, a smudge of crimson paint on the collar of her man’s white shirt. Her eyes, a startling green, blazed at them. “Twenty minutes! The class has been waiting twenty minutes for their models. This is professional disrespect!”
The pain in Alice’s ear was a bright, clarifying fire. “M-Models? We’re not—“
“Save your excuses,” Ms. Anderson cut her off, dragging them both by the ear further into the spacious, skylit studio. Easels were arranged in a wide circle. The students stood behind them, brushes and charcoal sticks idle. And there, among them, Alice recognized faces that turned her blood cold: Lucy, wearing nothing but a silk kimono hanging open over her underwear, grinning like a cat. Brittany, pristine in a paint-splattered smock, her expression one of delighted venom. And Sam, Alice’s childhood friend, who gave a sheepish little wave that did nothing to quell the rising panic.
“We found the vagrants, class,” Ms. Anderson announced, releasing their throbbing ears with a final, painful flick. “Now, perhaps we can begin.”
Charlie recovered first, rubbing his ear. “Professor, there’s a mistake. We’re not in this class. We were just cutting through.”
“A likely story from the pair who signed the model-release sheet during registration,” Ms. Anderson said dismissively, waving a hand toward a clipboard on her desk. “The schedule says ‘Charlie and Alice’ for ten a.m. It is now ten-twenty. Strip. Everything. You’ve wasted enough of our light.”
A stunned paralysis locked Alice’s joints. The room was silent except for the hum of the overhead heaters. The other students watched, a gallery of expectant faces.
“Now,” Ms. Anderson said, and the word was a sheet of ice. It wasn’t a request. It was a fundamental correction of reality. Her tone brooked no argument, it simply was. The command hung in the thick air, as undeniable as gravity.
Shame began its familiar, hot crawl up Alice’s neck. Her fingers went to the hem of her sweatshirt. Across from her, Charlie’s hands moved to his belt buckle. Their movements were slow, drugged with humiliation. The zip of his jeans was obscenely loud. Alice pulled her sweatshirt over her head, leaving her in a simple cotton bra and her jeans. Anderson tapped her foot. “Pathetic. We don’t have all day. Class? Assist your peers.”
Lucy was across the room in a flash, the kimono fluttering. Her knowing grin was inches from Alice’s face. “Always so shy,” she whispered, her hands expertly undoing the button of Alice’s jeans. She yanked them down in one smooth motion. “Let’s get you out of that shell.” The jeans and panties were around Alice’s ankles before she could process it.
Brittany descended on Charlie. “Think you’re so brave?” she mocked, grabbing the waist of his boxers and jeans together and shoving them down violently. “Just a little boy who needs his pants taken away.” He stumbled, trying to step out of the tangled fabric.
They stood there, in the center of the ring, completely naked. Instinctively, Alice crossed her arms over her breasts and cupped herself below. Charlie hunched, turning slightly, hands splayed defensively.
“Stop that,” Ms. Anderson commanded, circling them like a sculptor assessing raw marble. “The human form is not something to be hidden in shame. Hands at your sides. Now.”
Trembling, they obeyed. The air in the studio was cool on every inch of skin. Anderson’s critical gaze raked over them. She paused, a slow smirk spreading across her lips.
“Well. It seems the embarrassment is… generative. Stimulating, even.” Her eyes lingered on Charlie’s obvious, helpless erection, then flicked to Alice’s taut, peaked nipples. “Good. Arousal introduces interesting tension lines. The body doesn’t lie. Class, note the candid physiological response. Begin with a standard contrapposto. You know the drill.”
For what felt like hours, they posed. Alice with her weight on one foot, Charlie with his arms folded. The scratch of charcoal on paper was a thousand insects crawling over her skin. She focused on a crack in the skylight, feeling every stare like a physical touch.
“Boring,” Ms. Anderson declared suddenly. “Static. We need narrative. Conflict.” She strode to Charlie, took him firmly by the wrist, and guided him to a sturdy stool. She sat, and with unnerving efficiency, pulled him across her knees. His back was to the class, his lower half elevated and fully exposed. “A study in applied color,” she announced, picking up a wide brush and dipping it into a cup of vibrant cobalt blue. “The canvas is pre-textured, I see.” She meant the faint, leftover marks from Mrs. Gable’s ruler.
She began to paint broad, wet strokes across his buttocks. The paint was cold. Charlie flinched, a sharp gasp escaping him.
“Lucy,” Ms. Anderson said without looking up. “The other canvas. Use the cadmium red.”
With a giggle, Lucy pulled a stool over. “My pleasure, Professor.” She sat, grabbed Alice’s wrist, and manhandled her into the same position over her lap. The vulnerable, childish pose was worse than simply standing naked. Alice felt Lucy’s warm thighs under her stomach. “Remember,” Lucy whispered, dipping a brush into a pot of screaming red, “I’m just helping you be less shy.”
The cold slap of the paint was a shock. Then Lucy began to spank her, not with her hand, but with the stiff, wooden handle of the paintbrush. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. It was a sharp, stinging punctuation to each wet, painted stroke Ms. Anderson was applying to Charlie. The class scribbled and sketched furiously, capturing the scene: the models, painted and punished, squirming over the knees of their tormentors.
When the painting was done—their buttocks now a glistening, abstract landscape of blue and red—Ms. Anderson stood them up again. She surveyed them, their front halves pale and vulnerable, their rear halves a lurid, wet mess. Her expression shifted from clinical appraisal to one of pure, visceral disgust.
“Filthy,” she spat, the word dripping with contempt. “Disgusting creatures.”
And then she did it. She leaned forward and spat a thick, warm wad of saliva directly onto Alice’s face. Alice recoiled, blinking it from her eyelashes. Anderson turned and spat on Charlie’s erection, the act so dismissive it was worse than any blow. She then spat onto Alice’s chest, the moisture trickling between her breasts. Finally, she spat onto each of their painted backsides with a wet slap.
“Class,” she said, her voice cold. “Clean your brushes.”
A moment of hesitation, and then it began. Brittany was first, aiming a gob of spit at Charlie’s cheek. Sam followed, her spit landing on Alice’s shoulder with a look of apologetic grimace. Soon, a spatter of warm, wet projectiles came from around the circle, landing on their faces, torsos, and the bright paint on their skin. It was a rain of utter degradation.
“Enough,” Ms. Anderson finally said. She pointed to two opposite corners of the room. “Corner time. Face the wall. Contemplate your unprofessionalism. And don’t you dare smudge the paint.”
Numb, dripping with spit and humiliation, they shuffled to their assigned corners. Alice pressed her forehead against the cool white plaster. The taste of salt and shame was in her mouth. Behind her, the class resumed drawing, the sound of their tools now the only thing filling the vast, terrible silence.
The paint dried into a tight, alien shell over the worst of her bruises. Alice listened to the rustle of paper, the soft scuff of easels being adjusted. Her own breathing sounded too loud in the corner. From the opposite wall, she heard Charlie shift his weight, a faint sticky sound as his painted skin pulled away from the plaster.
“This is worse than the walk,” Charlie whispered, his voice barely carrying across the space between them.
“The walk was cold,” Alice whispered back, her throat tight. “This is… warm and sticky and I can feel it cracking.” She meant the paint, the spit, the entire horrifying situation.
“Class dismissed,” Ms. Anderson’s voice cut through, crisp and final. “Leave your studies on the drying rack. Models, you will remain until the room is clear and I say otherwise.”
There was a shuffle of bags, the squeak of sneakers on polished concrete. Alice kept her eyes on a single fleck of impurity in the white paint before her. She heard Lucy’s familiar, light footsteps approach instead of retreat.
“You two are just so perfectly pathetic,” Lucy sighed, a touch of genuine admiration in her voice. A phone camera shutter clicked, subtle but unmistakable in the emptying room.
Alice froze. The sound was a needle of pure clarity in the fog of her shame. She knew that coy, deliberate click. Lucy had documented every clumsy spill, every failed test, every wardrobe malfunction since they’d roomed together. “A scrapbook,” she called it. This wasn’t a scrapbook moment.
Alice turned her head, just enough to see over her shoulder. Lucy stood a few feet away, phone held low, screen tilted away. She was pretending to examine a drawing on a nearby easel, but her thumb was poised over the screen. She tapped it again. Another silent, digital capture of their painted, naked corner time.
A raw, animal noise tore from Alice’s throat—part sob, part shout of betrayal. “You’re filming us!” She spun fully from the corner, her modesty forgotten in a surge of violation. The cracking paint on her backside felt like a grotesque costume. “Delete it! Lucy, delete it right now!”
Charlie turned too, his expression shifting from miserable acceptance to sharp anger. “What the hell, Lucy?”
Ms. Anderson, who had been wiping her hands with a turpentine rag, went very still. Her gaze locked onto Lucy’s phone. The easy, artistic cruelty she’d wielded evaporated, replaced by something colder and far more professional. Her studio, her session, her rules.
“Lucy,” she said. The single word dropped into the room like a stone.
Lucy’s coy smile faltered. “I was just—”
“You were documenting a private pedagogical exercise without consent,” Ms. Anderson interrupted, her voice a low, controlled blade. She strode forward, her hand outstretched. “Give me the phone. Now.”
The fury in the professor’s eyes was entirely new. This wasn’t about modeling or punishment; this was about ownership, control, and the brittle façade of academic propriety. Lucy, seeing the real danger, hesitated for only a second before slapping the phone into Ms. Anderson’s waiting palm.
Anderson’s thumbs moved across the screen, her jaw tight. She deleted the videos and the photos, her motions quick and vicious. Then she powered the phone down completely. She held it out, not to Lucy, but to Alice. “You will take this to Eleanor Gable. You will tell her exactly what occurred here, and you will give her this. Every detail.”
Alice took the cold, dead phone, her fingers trembling. She looked from the professor’s stormy face to Lucy’s pale, startled one. The power in the room had just upended itself completely.
“As for you,” Ms. Anderson said, turning the full force of her attention back to Lucy. The fuming anger was now a settled, glacial promise. “You will report to the ceramics studio. You will spend the next four hours wedging clay. By hand. Every single pound of it for next week’s throwers. You will do it in the outfit you so proudly wore to my class.”
Lucy looked down at her open kimono and underwear, her face draining of color. “But—”
“Your commentary on shyness was noted,” Ms. Anderson said, cutting her off. “Now go be un-shy in the busiest studio on this floor. If I hear you’ve covered up, I will extend the time indefinitely. Get out.”
Lucy fled, the kimono flapping behind her like a shameful flag. The heavy door swung shut with a final thud. Anderson looked at Alice and Charlie, standing naked and painted in the sudden silence. Her anger seemed to recede, leaving behind a strange, exhausted practicality. “There are solvents and rags in the utility sink. Clean yourselves up. The Gable report is your only priority now.” She turned her back on them, effectively dismissing them from her world.
At the deep metal sink, they worked in silence, the mineral spirits biting cold but erasing the lurid colors and the dried, tacky evidence of the class’s disdain. The chemical smell burned Alice’s nose, cleaner than spit. They used paper towels to dry off, their skin pink and raw.
They dressed in their ordinary clothes, which now felt like disguises. Alice clutched Lucy’s phone like a dead bird. Charlie zipped his jeans over skin that still hummed with the memory of the brush.
“Think she’ll be mad?” Charlie asked quietly as they stepped back into the anonymous hallway. He didn’t need to specify who.
“Eleanor?” Alice said, the name feeling both foreign and inevitable on her tongue. She thought of the vanilla scent, the sharp pinch on her cheek, the blanket. “She won’t be mad.” She looked down at the phone. “She’ll be… interested.”
Alice’s prediction hung in the air between them, a dark little cloud. The walk to Willow Hall was different this time. No synchronized shame, just a shared, deepening dread that grew with every step. The phone in Alice’s pocket felt radioactive, a compact brick of someone else’s bad decisions.
“Think she’ll make us watch?” Charlie asked, shoving his hands deep into his jacket pockets.
“I don’t know what she’ll do.” Alice’s voice was flat. “But it won’t be painting.”
They pushed through the heavy oak door into the lobby’s perpetual twilight. Mrs. Gable was not at her desk. The space was empty, silent except for the slow tick of the grandfather clock in the corner. The polished wood surface held only a single fountain pen and a clean blotter.
“She’s never not here,” Charlie whispered, as if the building itself was listening.
From down the hallway leading to the resident suites, a door clicked open. Light spilled out, followed by the soft, firm tap of heels on parquet. Mrs. Gable emerged, adjusting the cuff of a crisp linen sleeve. She saw them and paused, one eyebrow lifting a precise millimeter.
“You have the look of carrier pigeons,” she observed, her tone dry. “Bearing news that nobody wants. What’s happened?”
Alice pulled the phone from her pocket. She held it out, a silent offering. “Lucy took pictures. And videos. Of us. In the art studio. Anderson took it from her and told us to bring it to you.”
Mrs. Gable didn’t reach for the device. She simply looked at it in Alice’s palm, then up at their faces, reading the residual horror there. Her expression didn’t change, but something behind her eyes grew very still and very sharp.
“The art studio,” she repeated. “You were modeling for Celia Anderson’s class.”
It wasn’t a question. Charlie nodded, his ears turning pink. “We got grabbed. She said we were late. Made us… participate.”
“I see.” Mrs. Gable finally took the phone. She turned it over once, a scientist inspecting a specimen. “And the state you were in for this documentation?”
Alice felt the ghost of cold paint and warmer spit on her skin. “We were… decorated. And then corner time.”
A faint, almost imperceptible sigh escaped Mrs. Gable’s nose. It was the sound of a puzzle piece snapping annoyingly into place. “Celia always did favor spectacle over substance.” Her gaze sharpened on them. “You are dismissed. Go about your day. Try not to break anything else.”
“But Lucy—” Alice started.
“—is my concern now, not yours.” The finality in her voice was absolute. “Go.”
They went, the dismissal somehow more unsettling than any punishment. The door hadn’t fully closed behind them before they heard the soft, decisive click of Mrs. Gable’s heels moving back toward her private quarters.
The ceramics studio was a special kind of purgatory. The air was thick with damp dust and the sour smell of wet grog. A huge industrial mixer sat silent in the corner, a blatant mockery next to the mountainous mound of raw, gray clay on the wedging table.
Lucy’s arms were coated to the elbows. The silk kimono, once a symbol of casual audacity, was ruined—smeared with streaks of gray and beige, hanging open to reveal her bra and panties which were similarly spattered. Her hands worked mechanically, slamming a ten-pound lump of clay down, folding it, twisting it to bleed out the air bubbles. Slam. Fold. Twist.
Every muscle in her shoulders burned. Students filtered in and out for their afternoon classes, their stares lingering. Some snickered. A guy in a wheel-throwing apron whistled low, then laughed with his friend. The professor of the three o’clock section, a pot-bellied man with a kind face, had taken one look at her, seen the determined fury in Ms. Anderson’s note on the board, and simply nodded. He didn’t interfere. He didn’t offer help.
This was the un-shyness she’d championed. It was brutal, monotonous, and utterly isolating. Her thumbs ached. The kimono’s belt kept coming undone. Four hours. She checked the clock above the kiln for the hundredth time. Only two had passed.
The door to the studio swung open. Not a student. Not a professor.
Mrs. Gable stood there, elegant and out of place amidst the earthy chaos. She held Lucy’s dead phone loosely in one hand. She didn’t speak. She just looked at Lucy, at the clay, at the ruined kimono. Her expression was unreadable.
Lucy’s hands slowed, then stopped. A glob of clay dripped from the table onto her bare foot. She didn’t feel it. The entire room seemed to hush, the other students suddenly intensely focused on their own work.
“You are finished here,” Mrs. Gable said. Her voice was calm, conversational, and cut through the room’s background noise like a scalpel.
“But Professor Anderson said four—”
“I have spoken with Celia. Your time is reallocated.” Mrs. Gable’s eyes flicked to the mess on Lucy’s front. “Clean your hands. You will accompany me.”
There was no “please”. It was a gravitational pull. Lucy stumbled to the deep sink, scrubbing the clay from her arms under cold water. It left her skin rough and pink. She retied the kimono as best she could, but it was a lost cause. She felt like a mud-caked ghost following a queen as she trailed Mrs. Gable out of the studio, down the white corridors, and out into the sharp autumn afternoon.
They didn’t speak. The walk to Willow Hall was a silent procession. Students parted for them, eyes wide at the bizarre pair: the impeccably dressed dorm matron and the half-naked, clay-streaked girl shuffling behind her. Lucy kept her eyes on the cracked pavement, the humiliation a hot, tight coil in her stomach. This was different from the studio. This was official.
Mrs. Gable’s private sitting room was not what Lucy expected. It was warm, floral, with overstuffed armchairs and a steaming teapot on a silver tray. The normality of it was terrifying. Mrs. Gable sat, gesturing for Lucy to stand before her. She placed the phone on a small side table.
“Explain,” she said.
The word was simple. It gave no direction, no hint of what she wanted to hear. Lucy’s mind raced. “It was just a joke. I was documenting. For the scrapbook.”
“A scrapbook.” Mrs. Gable repeated the word as if it were in a foreign language. “Of other people’s compelled nudity. Their punishment. Their degradation.”
“It’s not like that! Alice is just so… it’s funny!”
“Is it?” Mrs. Gable leaned forward slightly, her eyes locking onto Lucy’s. “Describe what you saw in that studio. Not as a joke. Describe it as if you were telling a coroner.”
Lucy swallowed. The warm room felt suddenly airless. “They were… painted. Blue and red. On their… bottoms. They were put over knees. Spanked with brush handles. Then the class… spit. On them. They were put in corners.”
She heard the words leave her mouth. Stripped of her giggling commentary, they sounded like what they were. A clinical report of a humiliation ritual.
“And you filmed this,” Mrs. Gable stated.
“I just wanted—”
“You wanted a trophy. A little digital prize from someone else’s suffering. You confuse cruelty with comedy, and invasion with intimacy.” Mrs. Gable’s voice never rose. It remained a calm, devastating monotone. “You have violated the privacy of two individuals under duress. You have also violated the sanctity of a disciplinary process, however unorthodox Celia’s methods may be.”
Lucy said nothing. The coil in her stomach was now a cold, hard stone.
“You will, of course, apologize to Alice and Charlie. Sincerely. That is a precondition for what comes next.” Mrs. Gable picked up the phone. “This, however, is the core of the issue. Your tool. Your weapon of choice.”
She stood, walked to the fireplace where a small, gas-fed flame flickered decoratively. She opened the fire screen. With a deliberate motion, she tossed the phone directly into the center of the flames.
The plastic casing hissed. A faint, acrid smell of melting components wafted out. Lucy watched, dumbstruck, as the little rectangle blackened and warped. Her entire digital life—contacts, photos, messages—curled and died in a matter of seconds.
“A symbolic gesture,” Mrs. Gable said, closing the screen with a soft click. “But symbolism only goes so far. The root of the problem is your perspective. You see others as subjects for your entertainment. This requires a correction of vision.”
She moved to a heavy oak escritoire against the wall, unlocked a drawer, and took something out. When she turned, she held a simple, old-fashioned bar of soap. It was yellow, translucent, and smelled sharply of lye and pine tar.
“You will learn to mind your own business, Lucy. Literally.” She pointed to the far corner of the room, where the walls met in a shadowed point. “Corner. Now. Undergarments only.”
A fresh wave of panic surged through Lucy’s fatigue. “You can’t—”
“I can. I am. Or you may leave this room and pack your bags. Your scholarship, I believe, is contingent on residency in my hall. Choose.”
Lucy’s defiance crumpled. She untied the ruined kimono, let it fall to the floor. She walked to the corner in her clay-stained bra and panties, the plush carpet unnerving under her bare feet.
“The soap,” Mrs. Gable said, her voice right behind her. A strong hand gripped the back of Lucy’s neck, not painfully, but with immovable firmness. The other hand brought the bar of soap to her lips. “You will not bite. You will take it and you will hold it. Until I am satisfied you understand the taste of your own interference.”
The soap pressed against her closed mouth. It smelled medicinal, vicious. Lucy squeezed her eyes shut. She opened her lips.
The taste was instantaneous and overwhelming. A bitter, burning chemical tang that flooded her tongue and made her gorge rise. It was like licking a cleaned battery. Her mouth flooded with saliva, an automatic, desperate attempt to wash the horror away.
Mrs. Gable held it there for a long ten seconds, ensuring it was fully seated between her teeth, then removed her hand. “Hands on your head. Do not drop it. Do not try to scrape it on the wall. You will stand and you will taste it.”
Lucy obeyed, her eyes watering. The bitter poison seeped into every crevice of her mouth. Time dissolved into the unbearable, focused misery of that taste. She heard Mrs. Gable sit back down, the rustle of a newspaper, the gentle clink of a teacup.
After an eternity—five minutes by the clock, fifty by Lucy’s screaming senses—the voice came again, calm as ever.
“You may remove it.”
Lucy’s hands flew from her head, yanking the soap from her mouth. She spat, gagging, strings of saliva and yellow froth dripping onto the carpet. The taste was baked into her tongue, a permanent brand.
“The taste of being where you do not belong,” Mrs. Gable said. “Remember it. The corner is not for you to hide. It is for you to think. You will remain there, facing your own choices, for one hour. Then you will clean yourself up, and you will find Alice and Charlie.”
Lucy turned her forehead back to the plaster, the foulness in her mouth merging with the salt of her tears. The cozy room no longer felt safe. It felt like a beautifully appointed cell. Behind her, the newspaper turned a page, a soft, definitive sound. The lesson had begun.