Chapter 17: Humiliation in the gym
The hallway lights were a violent shock to his system. They buzzed with a sterile, institutional energy that felt utterly foreign after the humid, scent-saturated darkness of the gym. Ben walked, if you could call it that. His body moved forward through muscle memory alone, a hollowed-out puppet with its strings cut.
Every part of him felt raw and branded. The phantom pressure of their feet seemed permanently etched into his skin. The collar, which Patricia had allowed him to remove but ordered him to keep in his pocket, was a leaden weight against his thigh. He could still taste the layered bitterness of rubber and sweat in the back of his throat.
A group of students rounded the corner, their laughter loud and unselfconscious. Ben flinched, his eyes darting to the floor. He expected recognition, pointing, the echo of Jess’s giggles. But their eyes slid over him without interest. He was a ghost in his own life.
His phone, which had been silent for hours, buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out with trembling fingers. Notifications bloomed across the screen.
Unknown Number: Hey its chloe whats ur schedual tomorro. Need my gym bag carried from Kirkland to the field house after chem.
Unknown Number: Maya. My white nikes got muddy. Be at the Sigma house tomorrow at 3 to clean them. Don’t be late.
Jess 🤪: omg the video from the gym is SO FUNNY! I put it on my finsta you’re famous!
A link followed. He didn’t click it. His stomach turned to liquid. He scrolled further.
Patricia: Library. 2pm. Second floor, study carrel 12B. You take notes. From the floor. Bring your own pencil. Don’t speak unless spoken to.
The commands were bullet points in his new existence. Each one shaved off another sliver of who he had been. He stood frozen in the middle of the bustling hallway, a rock in a stream of normal life, drowning in plain sight.
The walk to his dorm was a gauntlet of imagined whispers. He kept his head down, his shoulders hunched. He saw a classmate from his political science seminar, a guy named Liam who’d once borrowed his notes. Ben’s instinct was to raise a hand in a feeble wave. Liam’s eyes met his, paused for a fraction of a second too long, then flicked away with a dismissive neutrality. The video. They’d all seen it.
His room was a time capsule of a different person. Textbooks were stacked neatly on his desk. A framed photo of his high school swim team sat beside his monitor. He looked at the confident smile of the boy in the center of the third row. A stranger.
He fell onto his bed without undressing. The smells from the locker room clung to his clothes, a corrupt perfume. He stared at the ceiling, his mind a static hum. Sleep was a distant country. Every time he closed his eyes, he felt the warm, damp press of fabric against his face, saw the red recording light of Jess’s phone.
When a pale, thin light finally bled through his window, he hadn’t slept at all. He just existed in a state of numb suspension. His body moved on autopilot through his morning routine. Shower. Teeth. Clothes. The normalcy of each action felt like a grotesque parody. He picked up a notebook and a pencil, obeying the order.
His 10 a.m. lecture on European Intellectual History was a fever dream. The professor’s voice droned about the social contract. Ben’s pen scratched meaningless shapes on the paper. He could feel eyes on the back of his neck. A girl two rows ahead kept glancing back, her expression unreadable. Did she know? Was she on Jess’s finsta?
When the bell rang, he was the first out the door, a frantic escape into the crowded flow of students changing classes. He moved with his head down, a specter haunting the quad.
The campus library was a monument to quiet order. The air was cool and smelled of old paper and dust. He took the stairs to the second floor, his feet silent on the industrial carpet. Study carrel 12B was in a secluded corner, tucked between towering shelves of bound periodicals.
Patricia was already there. She had her statistics textbook open, a highlighter in her hand. She didn’t look up as he approached. He stopped a few feet away, unsure of the protocol.
After a full minute of being ignored, he slowly lowered himself to the floor beside the wooden chair she occupied. The carpet was thin and scratchy. He arranged his notebook on his knees, pencil ready.
“You’re late,” she said, not lifting her eyes from her book. Her voice was a low, conversational murmur.
He checked his phone. 2:01 p.m. He said nothing.
“Your first task,” she said, turning a page. “Summarize the core argument of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. From memory. Write it in your notebook.”
Ben blinked. It was a test, but not the kind he expected. His mind, sluggish with trauma, struggled to engage. He began to write, the familiar cognitive pathways flickering weakly to life. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains…
He wrote a paragraph, his handwriting shaky.
“Read it to me,” Patricia commanded softly, still studying her own work.
He read it in a hushed, monotone whisper.
“Passable,” she said, as if grading a mediocre paper. “Now translate it into a single sentence a child could understand.”
He stared at his notes. The abstraction was a relief, a brief shelter. “Society… corrupts natural innocence,” he whispered.
Patricia finally looked down at him. A faint, chilly smile touched her lips. “Good. Now apply that concept to your current situation. One sentence.”
The shelter shattered. The abstract philosophical framework became a cage around his reality. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The pencil felt like a dead stick in his hand.
“Your natural state was to compete with me,” she prompted, her voice dangerously sweet. “Society—well, my society—put you in chains. Right, Chair?”
He nodded, a tight, miserable jerk of his head.
“Say it.”
“My natural state was to compete,” he breathed, the words ashes. “You put me in chains.”
“I own the chains,” she corrected, returning to her textbook. “Now, take notes on this chapter. Summarize each section in the margin. Legibly.”
For an hour, she studied in silence, and he transcribed dense passages on probability distributions onto his pad. His body ached from the awkward position on the floor. His knee brushed against the leg of her chair, and she shifted away without comment, as if avoiding contact with a piece of furniture.
It was a different flavor of humiliation. It was quiet, academic, and absolute. He was not a worthy adversary to be crushed, but an accessory to her productivity, an extension of her will as irrelevant as the chair itself.
The slam of a book closing made him jump. “Up,” she said, gathering her things. “Carry these to the chemistry building. Walk three steps behind me. If anyone speaks to you, you don’t exist.”
He scrambled to his feet, his legs prickling with pins and needles. She handed him her backpack, heavy with books, and her sleek laptop case. He shouldered them, the straps cutting into his flesh. She strode off without a backward glance.
He followed, three paces back, as ordered. They descended the stairs, crossed the main lobby. Students milled everywhere. He saw Liam again, talking with a group near the circulation desk. Liam’s eyes found Ben, then found Patricia walking ahead. Understanding clicked in his expression, followed by a faint, dismissive smirk. He turned back to his friends.
Outside, the autumn sun was bright. Patricia walked confidently, her ponytail swinging. He was her shadow, her porter. A girl from the cheer squad, Kelsey, passed them going the other way. “Hey, Pat!” she called.
“Hey, Kels,” Patricia replied warmly.
Kelsey’s gaze flicked to Ben, loaded with the locker room. A knowing, complicit smile. “I see you brought your study aid.”
“He’s useful for carrying things,” Patricia said, her tone light. “And he takes okay notes.”
They shared a laugh, a sound that crackled in the sunny air between them. Kelsey moved on. The interaction was casual, normal. It solidified everything. This was his accepted role, visible to the world.
They reached the steps of the chemistry building. Patricia stopped and held out her hand. He transferred her bags back to her. “You have Chloe’s bag to carry at three-thirty,” she reminded him, as if managing his calendar. “Don’t forget. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
He nodded.
“And Ben?” she said, her voice dropping. She reached out and adjusted the collar of his shirt, a grotesquely intimate gesture. Her fingers brushed his neck. “You’re doing better. The defiance is almost gone. It’s becoming… natural.”
She turned and walked up the steps, leaving him on the sidewalk. The weight of the books was gone, but a new, heavier burden settled in its place: the horrifying simplicity of obedience. The chains didn’t chafe as much when you stopped pulling against them. He stood there, watching her disappear into the building, the ghost of her touch on his skin colder than the cellar air of the locker room.
He had a purpose. He had a schedule. The Chair was in use.