Chapter 5: Lucy's Corner Time
The taste was a living thing. It coated her tongue, her teeth, the roof of her mouth—a bitter, chemical film that no amount of swallowing could dislodge. Pine tar and lye. It was the taste of cleaned drains and industrial punishment. Yucky was a child’s word for broccoli. This was an invasion.
Lucy stood in the corner, the floral wallpaper pattern swimming before her eyes. Her bra and panties, once her uniform of casual dominion in their shared dorm room, felt absurd now. Flimsy. Insufficient. The clay had dried into gritty patches on the silk, chafing her skin. She was cold. The room was warm, but a draft from somewhere—the old window frames, maybe—licked at the backs of her thighs. She shivered.
Behind her, the world continued. The soft rustle of paper. The scratch of a pen. Mrs. Gable was doing paperwork. Of course she was. This was a Tuesday afternoon. Lucy’s monumental humiliation was just a sidebar to someone else’s administrative day.
The blush started at her collarbones and crept upward, a slow, hot tide. It burned her cheeks, her ears. She could feel Mrs. Gable’s presence in the room, a calm, focused energy that occasionally sipped tea. She wasn’t even watching, probably. That was the worst part. Lucy was on display, practically nude, standing in the corner like a little brat, and it was so mundane for the woman behind the desk. An amusement. A minor behavioral adjustment in progress. Lucy imagined her glancing up over her reading glasses, a slight, approving smirk at the correctness of the posture, before returning to a roster or a budget sheet.
Her throat tightened. The awful taste mixed with the salt of welling tears. This was it. This was the core of the thing. The exposed, silent, waiting powerlessness.
Oh.
The thought landed softly, a stone dropping into a dark pool.
This is how they felt.
Not just naked. That was one thing. She’d paraded in her underwear for months, owning it. This was different. This was being placed. Being made an object of a specific, quiet, unyielding discipline. Charlie, bent over the stool, flinching at the cold paint. Alice, shuddering under the spatter of spit. Their faces to the wall in that bright, clinical studio. They hadn’t just been naked. They’d been immobilized. Put on hold.
And she’d filmed it. She’d wanted to capture their squirming, their shame, the delicious clash of color on skin. For the scrapbook. For a laugh later.
A hot wave of nausea, unrelated to the soap, rolled through her. It wasn’t funny. Stripped of her own commentary, her own arch perspective, the memory was just cruel. She’d been a gawker. A souvenir hunter at the scene of an accident.
Reflect on your naughtiness.
Mrs. Gable’s words, a simple command. So Lucy did. The hour stretched, measured by the dull ache in her feet, the prickle of shame on her skin, the relentless, bitter aftertaste.
She thought about the first time she’d met Alice, all nervous smiles and neatly folded sweaters. She’d seen her shyness as a challenge, a locked door to be picked. Pranking her. Coaxing her. ‘Getting her out of her shell’ had just been her excuse to poke the bear, to see what funny noises it would make. The spilled coffee. The ‘accidental’ laundry mix-up that left Alice with a shrunken shirt. It was all a game where only Lucy knew the rules.
She thought of handing Alice the phone in the art building hallway, that performative solidarity. Had there been a flicker of real fear in Alice’s eyes then? Lucy had been too busy enjoying her own role as the daring roommate to notice.
The scrapbook on her laptop—now gone, literally up in smoke—wasn’t a collection of funny memories. It was a ledger of violations. A trophy case of moments she’d stolen from someone who trusted her, however reluctantly, to share a space.
A tear finally broke free, tracing a warm path through the clay dust on her cheek. She didn’t wipe it. Let it fall. It felt like part of the punishment, a physical acknowledgment of the emotional calculation happening in the quiet room.
She had wanted to make Alice un-shy. Instead, she’d helped make her a victim. And then she’d tried to record the evidence.
The clock on the mantle ticked. The pen scratched. Lucy stood in her corner, reflecting. The taste in her mouth was no longer just soap. It was the metallic flavor of her own remorse, and it was, without a doubt, the worst thing she had ever tasted.