Miss Lilly's Spring Surprise

Charleston Steele and Jim Long were both looking vaguely off into their own little worlds, too, and neither of them answered her immediately. It was Constable Rodney -- his uniform shirt back around his broad shoulders but as yet unbuttoned -- who said: "We're done. For now."

She was very still at those last two words. Finally she repeated, dully, in a voice heavy with dread: "For now."

"Well, I think Mr. Steele here's going to let you keep your job. Am I right?" the Constable looked over at Principal Steele.

Charlie didn't meet her eyes as he nodded. "Actually," he said, clearing his throat. "Uh... the Board already decided to up your contract to probationary, at my recommendation. I'll... uhh... of course I'll give it."

Miss Lilly looked at him as if he were speaking another language, for all the words might mean to her. But finally she said: "Okay. Thank you, sir."

"You should be happy, Miss Lilly," Constable Rodney put in, buttoning his shirt methodically. "That means more money for you, doesn't it? Maybe you might not even need your... sideline any more."

For a split second, Lana turned a look of naked loathing on him... but she hid it quickly, wrapping her arms tighter around herself and looking down at the ground as she asked: "So, what else?"

"Well," said Rodney. "Let's face it. You've tasked us all with keeping one hell of a secret for you, haven't you, Miss Lilly?" With his uniform shirt re-buttoned, he was casting about for his tie as he added: "A secret like that, well... I think it's going to need some maintenance, don't you?"

"Maintenance." Lana Lilly uttered the word flatly, but there was a tremor in her lip as the import of the Constable's words started to come clear. "You mean... you mean this won't be... the last time."

"I mean, I don't think we'll all be getting together and fucking in Mr. Steele's office again anytime soon," the Constable conceded, frowning slightly as he looked around for where he might have tossed the dark blue uniform tie. "But for each of us to keep your secret... well, I think it's only fair you do a little favour for each of us once a week from now on. Don't you? I mean, just to keep us all... motivated to secure your best interests. That includes our lovely Mrs. Salinas out there, of course."

Steele and Long were both looking at him in confusion as he said this... but neither of them got to the point of actually raising an objection. Lana's eyes were glazed, looking off into nothingness as she intoned. "Favour. Each of you. Once a week." She was sickly pale, as if on the verge of vomiting, but all she did was wrap her arms even tighter around her midsection as she finally said, in a very small voice: "Yes... I... I understand."

"Good." The Constable nodded approvingly as he finally spotted his tie, hanging off one of the Principal's bookcases where it had been tossed heedlessly in the heat of passion. As he moved to retrieve it, he added: "Well, that's all I've got to say right now. Either of you gentlemen got anything further?"

Both the Principal and the Vice Principal still seemed to be contemplating their own private worlds as they quietly shook their heads. "You can go, Miss Lilly," said Steele almost robotically. "Congratulations... on a successful performance review."

"Thank you for coming," Jim Long added, his nasal voice low and embarrassed.

Miss Lilly gave an abstracted nod and turned to limp out of the room. Just as she reached the door, the Constable -- tying his tie securely in place, looking as fully dressed and put together as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all -- called out after her: "Oh, Miss Lilly? Just one last thing."

She paused on the threshold, tense, silently waiting.

The old jarhead gave her an almost kindly smile as he said: "Just thought you should know, there's actually no recording of you on the Internet. At least not that I know of. None of us knew about your... other job. Not until you told us yourself." He spread his hands and shrugged as he said: "I guess this is where I say... April Fool's."

Miss Lilly stood stock still for a long, long moment, staring listlessly off into nothing. Her face looked cast in pale wax. She stood there, just breathing, until finally, without looking at any of them or saying another word, she went out of the office and shut the door behind her.

In a weary voice, Principal Steele muttered: "Dude. That was just cruel."

The Constable snorted. "As opposed to everything else we just did to her? Give me a break."

The Principal had his head in his hands. He still hadn't mustered the energy to put his shirt back on; he still looked like a man half in a trance. "How the fuck did I let this happen?" He said it aloud but seemed to be talking almost to himself. "I just... I just violated my professional ethics. Cheated on my wife. Twice over. Helped bluff and blackmail our new hire into sex... how did I let this happen?"

"I tell you what, Old Man," Dick Rodney said bluntly, suddenly intense. "You didn't do anything you didn't want to do. And you didn't do anything you won't do again. You know it and I know it. I just showed you the door and helped you walk through it. The rest is on you." He gave a hard smile and added: "Now we're all in this together. And I know neither of you gentlemen is going to go blabbering to anyone, right? Because you both know the smart play here is just to relax and go with the flow, and accept all those sweet, sexy rewards Miss Lilly's going to be doling out every week for the price of your silence. Not to mention that you, Old Man, get a second incredible piece of on-the-side ass out of the whole thing," he gestured in Mrs. Salinas' direction outside, "for the price of one. You're one lucky bastard, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Am I." Steele's head was still in his hands, his voice still distant.

"Damn right you are." Rodney was leaning over the desk now, right in his face. "And it's a perfect deal for all of us if nobody rocks the boat. Right? You gents are the voice of academic authority, I'm the voice of the law... we stick together and our story will be the only one that matters. And so we're sticking together. Right?" He looked back and forth between them, jaw clenching as he repeated the last word emphatically. "Right?"

Both Steele and Long seemed sapped of any will to resist the freight train of the crooked Constable's perverse will. "Right," they said quietly, almost in tandem, looking neither at him nor at each other.

"Right then. We understand each other." Giving them each a mock salute, Constable Rodney turned on his heel and headed for the door. He was whistling jauntily as he opened it, turned back to his partners in crime and said: "Barrymore Collegiate just got a lot more interesting, don't you think? So long, gents!"

And with that the door swung shut, leaving the Principal and the Vice Principal behind in a silence that lasted a very long time indeed.

* * *

It was four thirty on Wednesday afternoon. A cherry-red Camry was pulling into the parking lot of a small, dingy apartment building across from a strip mall in Riverside. Out of it climbed Barrymore Collegiate's sexiest young schoolteacher, at the end of the longest day of her life.

After the surreal ordeal in the Principal's office, the volume had been turned down on the rest of Lana Lilly's day. She had walked out, cocooned in the numbing shock of Constable Rodney's final cruelty, the April Fool's "joke" that she'd been bluffed and tricked into letting them do what they'd done to her, into agreeing to let them keep doing it every week henceforth; that it had all been for nothing. She'd made her way to the nearest bathroom, vomited copiously into a toilet, pulled herself together and composed her beautiful features. And then she'd gone about the rest of her day.

The students had been unruly, April Fool's Day at their hands every bit the trial she'd been promised... but after what she'd gone through and compared to the sense of futility and defeat pervading her, it was nothing. It mostly just washed over her. She had to consciously remember to simulate the appropriate reactions to whoopee cushions placed on her chair -- a favourite gag of three separate classes -- or spitballs fired at the back of her head while she was at the chalkboard.

One kid she'd caught trying to slip a packet of salt into her tea. It was the only student incident that found a chink in her new-made armour of despair. The sheer innocence of that last "April Fool's Day" prank, the sheer mundane normalcy of it, had almost brought her to tears. She'd had to leave the room, to cover her reaction by pretending to be angry when she got back and forced the offender to spend the rest of the period sitting outside the classroom door. But that incident as much as any other had made her conscious of a sudden sense of being an onlooker, of having stepped that morning -- or maybe a month ago, or longer -- into some parallel half-world from which there was no exit, and whose rules and customs simply couldn't be explained to any of the teenagers she'd been charged with shepherding through the high school experience.

The sense of loss she'd felt at that realization had been a sharp pang of pain, at first. But as the day went on, that pain dulled, along with all the other pains in her body. It was just one more wound about which there was nothing to be done.

Lana walked into her apartment building, taking the drab elevator to the seventh floor, every movement by rote, barely really even seeing her surroundings. She let herself into her shoebox of a condo, tossing aside her jacket and purse negligently as she walked straight into the messy bedroom that she'd plastered with pictures of Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. She stopped, looked around at the bed, draped in pink sheets and adorned with big old stuffed teddy bears she'd been dragging everywhere her childhood; at the computer tucked in one corner, adorned with cute bobble-heads. She cocked her head.

And she snapped.

She started by pouncing at the cheery pop-star posters, ripping them down with snarling abandon, shredding them and tossing the pieces in a pile on the floor. She ripped the heads off the bobble-heads and threw them at the window, ping-ping-ping. She stormed through to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife she could find, and stormed back to rip and shred and cut the pink sheets and draperies off the bed, tossing them around in a fury until the room was fluttering with roseate shreds of fabric like leaves fallen from the trees in autumn. She picked up one of the teddy bears and stabbed it furiously, ripping out its guts and slashing at its beady little eyes and screaming "Fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU FUCK YOU!!!" She repeated the ritual with another stuffed animal, and another, and another, until they were all dismembered and strewn on the floor, a massacre of fluff and down and glass eyes looking up uncomprehendingly from the wreckage into the great nothingness that was her life. She rammed the knife into her headboard over and over until it stuck so deep she couldn't pull it out.

Finally she stopped for a moment, stared at the mess around her, perplexed. But the outburst hadn't helped. The word was still drumming in her head, buzzing inside her skull, and it wouldn't stop, it wouldn't stop, it wouldn't stop. WHORE. WHORE. WHORE. WHORE. She clutched her hands to her temples, squeezed her eyes shut and said: "Shut up." But it wouldn't stop, and so she said it louder, shouted it, shrieked it: "Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP! SHUUUT UUUUP!" Beating at her head, sobbing, her screams growing incoherent... but they did no good. They offered no release.

Finally she calmed down. Dropped her hands, her dark eyes growing clear. She got up, heedlessly ripping off her blouse -- taking a few buttons with it -- and pulling down her skirt. She doffed her bra and walked naked over to the closet, opened it.

On the right-hand side, clustered there as if for mutual protection, were the sober clothes she wore for work, a handful of blazers and pantsuits and pencil skirts and demure blouses. On the left-hand side, and by now far more numerous, were the clothes she'd bought -- through discount partners of MeetEasy.com -- for her second life as "Party Partner" Lucy Loveless. Tiny shrugs, bolero jackets and mini-dresses and micro-skirts in black, in silver or gold, in neon animal-prints, in stripes. Plaid schoolgirl skirts. Racy thongs and bikinis. An assortment of colourful t-shirts sporting pictures of rock stars or slogans like BOSS-ASS BITCH or SLUT UP OR SHUT UP. An assortment of cute boots and Chucks and wedges and platform heels.

Scanning through them, she picked out a t-shirt and a black leather bolero jacket, both of which she tossed on the bed. She grabbed a racy black thong which she pulled on, took a tiny red plaid skirt off the rack and grabbed a pair of black platform heels. Looking in a drawer of the dresser she'd wedged into the closet, she pulled out a pair of fishnet stockings, tossed them on the bed too and donned the little plaid skirt as she walked over to her computer.

Switching it on, she brought up her homepage: her "Party Partner" profile on the MeetEasy.com site. It featured a grinning, surprisingly innocent-looking picture of her -- snapped with a cell-phone at one of her first parties with the company -- and her "vitals":

LUCY LOVELESS

Age: 24

Race: Caucasian

Hair: Blonde

Eyes: Hazel

Height: 5'9"

Measurements: 34C-24-36

Non-smoker

Interests:

Loves running and horseback riding, days at the beach and nights spent drinking mojitos and shaking it to a hip-hop beat

Funny, sassy, fun-loving and a great companion who loves a gentleman that knows how to treat a lady

Social escorting only, On-call evenings & weekends, contact through site

She'd left out the "services provided" section of the profile, which she'd been tacitly given to understand was only for the girls who put out. She sat looking at the profile for a while, then came to a decision: got up and retrieved her cell phone from her purse, standing and poising it behind her and taking a saucy up-skirt shot of her thong-clad ass which showed just enough of her to reveal she was topless. Sitting down, she plugged the phone into her computer and uploaded the sexy photo to replace her original profile pic.

Then she went into "edit profile" mode, started typing, running through a number of different categories until she was satisfied. Sat and looked at the "publish" button for a moment, clicked it, said yes when a dialogue box popped up to ask "Do you really want to publish?" And just like that, her new second self, Lucy Loveless mark 2.0, was live. She cued up the profile, read it:

LUCY LOVELESS

Age: 24

Race: Caucasian

Hair: Blonde

Eyes: Hazel

Height: 5'9"

Measurements: 34C-24-36

Non-smoker

Interests:

Nasty, sexy party girl who loves to get down and dirty -- will try anything once

Knows how to let loose and have a good time -- no limits, no boundaries, no strings, no BS

Services:

BBFS, speaks French, Greek, Italian, Russian, Spanish

Open-minded, all races, couples & fetish play welcome

On-call evenings & weekends, contact through site

The new profile had been live for only minutes before her message box chimed. It was a message from Daniella, the woman who'd hired her, saying simply: "Love yr makeover. Glad you to decided to take plunge. Now it's time to make some REAL $$$." She read it blankly, shrugged, deleted it.

The message box kept chiming as she went through to her bathroom, kicking her way through the drifts of pink fabric and shredded posters and slaughtered stuffed animals on her floor. Looking at herself in the mirror, she pulled a pair of scissors out her drawer and started cutting at her long blonde locks, the tufts of downy golden hair falling around her as she gradually trimmed it down to a short blonde fuzz close to her scalp. Splashing some water over her head and shoulders to get rid of stray hairs, she ran her hair through the fine golden fuzz she'd left behind, nodded to herself. Applied some red lipstick and blue eyeshadow and headed back to her room.

By the time she got there, more than twenty messages were waiting for her -- more than she'd previously received through the site in a whole week. She opened the first one, saw an address and a time and a coded proposition for a three-way with the customer and his girlfriend, including "GS" and "DATO," acronyms for golden showers and rimming. The time was two hours from now, more than enough to get to the destination by cab.

Without further hesitation, she clicked "accept" and shut the computer down. Calmly she pulled on the slutty fishnet stockings, donned the black platform heels, pulled the t-shirt down over her pert breasts -- it was midriff-baring and barely covered them -- and threw on the black leather bolero jacket. Grabbing a tiny black evening-wear purse, mainly to hold her phone and her wallet, the shorn-haired and sluttily gorgeous Lucy Loveless turned and strutted for the door, her breasts bouncing, her heart pumping and her heels clacking in time to the rhythm of the single word that thrummed through her mind like a mantra.

It was the same single word that was blazoned in big red letters across her tits on flimsy white fabric, announcing her to the world in ornamental, scroll-decorated script. The word was WHORE. And Lucy Loveless sported it defiantly as she sauntered out into the warm spring night.