Chapter 5: Under the dim glow of their bedside lamp, Mackenzie turns to Kara with a fierce whisper, 'I can’t watch Shayna bully everyone anymore. Tomorrow, I’m going to humiliate her right back—but I need your help.' Kara hesitates, her religious convictions warring with her desire for justice, before nodding slowly in agreement.
The silence in Mackenzie and Kara’s room felt different—not just an absence of sound, but a thick, listening quiet. Mackenzie lay on her back, the crinkle of her diaper loud in the dark as she stared at the photograph of Larissa pinned to the wall.
“You awake?” Mackenzie whispered, her voice rough.
“Yeah,” Kara murmured from the other bed, the springs groaning as she turned over.
“I can’t stop thinking about what Shayna did today,” Mackenzie said, her words coming out in a low, urgent stream. “The way she talked to Megan and Sarah. The humiliation. It’s not just mean, it’s… it’s poison. It ruins this place.”
Kara was silent for a long moment. “Larissa said she’d handle it.”
“Larissa handles things by the book,” Mackenzie countered, a rare edge of frustration slicing through her usually calm tone. “She’ll give a strike, or take away a privilege. Shayna just wears that like a badge of honor. She doesn’t get it. She needs to feel it.”
Another rustle from Kara’s bed. “Feel what?”
“Consequences. Real ones. Not just a mark on a chart.” Mackenzie pushed herself up on one elbow, the pale light from the hallway under the door illuminating the determined set of her jaw. “I want to look her in the eye and make her understand the damage she does. I want to… I don’t know. Shake her.”
“Mackenzie,” Kara whispered, a note of alarm in her voice. “That’s not how we do things here. That’s the old way. The angry way.”
“Maybe the old way had a point sometimes.” Mackenzie flopped onto her back again, the plastic of her chastity belt pressing cold against her skin. “This peaceful acceptance thing only works if everyone’s trying. Shayna isn’t trying. She’s tearing it down, brick by brick, and laughing while she does it.”
“So pray for her,” Kara said softly, her voice gentle. “That’s what helps me. Turn the anger over.”
Mackenzie let out a short, breathy sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I’m not giving my anger to anyone else. I’m going to use it.”
The quiet that followed was heavy. Kara finally spoke, her voice small. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.” Mackenzie’s hand found the cold metal of her belt’s lock, her fingers tracing its unforgiving shape. “But it won’t be by the book. And it won’t be peaceful.”
She turned her head, her green eyes glinting in the dim light as she looked toward Kara’s silhouette. “You can pretend you didn’t hear this. You’ve earned your way out of this cage. I haven’t. I’ve got nothing to lose.”
Kara didn’t answer. She just pulled her thin blanket up higher, the silence settling back over them, now charged with a new, dangerous potential. Mackenzie stared at Larissa’s photograph until the features blurred into a pale smudge, a plan beginning to form in the dark, taking shape not from love, but from a deep, smoldering sense of justice.
Mackenzie stared at Larissa’s photograph until the features blurred into a pale smudge, a plan beginning to form in the dark, taking shape not from love, but from a deep, smoldering sense of justice. The quiet stretched until Kara’s voice cut through it, thin and strained. “You think you’re so different, but I used to be worse,” she said, the words rushing out now. “Back when I first got here, I’d… I’d find ways, with anyone who’d let me.”
Mackenzie turned her head on the pillow, the crinkle of her diaper loud in the new silence. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s why the belts started,” Kara whispered, the confession seeming to physically pain her. “I broke into the supply closet once, found the key. I’d unlock myself, or… or others. It was a game.” She drew a shaky breath. “Larissa found out after a month. She said my sickness was contagious, that I’d made the house unsafe. So she got the belts for everyone, a permanent rule, because of me.”
Mackenzie was utterly still, the cold plastic of her own belt feeling suddenly heavier, a punishment with a history she never knew. “You?” was all she could manage, the image of pious, reformed Kara dissolving into something unfamiliar and dark.
“Shayna was my usual hook up,” Kara whispered into the dark, the admission hanging in the sterile air. “She was a monster then, and letting her have me was how I kept her from turning that on me.”
Mackenzie stared for a second in the dark, her mind scrambling to fit this new, jagged piece of Kara into the picture she thought she knew. “What are you getting at?” she finally whispered, the question hanging between their beds.
“Sex is Shayna’s weakness,” Kara said, her voice low and certain. “It’s the only currency she understands, the only thing that ever made her pause.”
Mackenzie laughs, a low, knowing sound in the dark. "I can work with that," she says, her voice now carrying a sharp, calculated edge.
Mackenzie let the silence stretch, the crinkling of her diaper the only sound as she studied the shadow that was Kara. "So how does someone who broke the rules that hard end up... like this?" she finally asked, her voice quieter now.
Kara let out a soft, unexpected laugh. "You can love sex and Jesus, Mackenzie," she said, the sheets rustling as she shrugged in the dark. "I just finally learned how to control the urges instead of letting them control me."
Kara shifted under her blanket, her voice lowering even further. “Do you think Megan has a crush on you?” Mackenzie laughed softly into the dark, the sound warm and knowing. “I can feel something,” she said, letting the words hang there.
Kara laughs softly, the sound like dry leaves rustling in the dark. “Girl crushes are so common in the program,” she says, shifting under her blanket. “It’s practically a cliche.”
Mackenzie absorbs this with a slow blink, the damp cotton of her diaper pressing cool against her skin as she settles back onto her pillow. Kara's advice about Shayna’s weakness still pulses quietly in her thoughts, mixing now with this new piece of information.
Mackenzie considered the landscape of covert alliances that must exist within these walls, a hidden economy of touch and risk. Shayna, operating without that currency for so long, might be hungrier, and therefore more reckless, than anyone realized.