Chapter Two: St. Circe's

I was under general anesthesia once for an appendectomy, and the duration I was under was like a hole in time. Two hours completely swallowed from my life. This was a lot like that - no notion of happening, no notion of passage, just a big empty blank canvas until I woke up in the St. Circe's infirmary. I have no idea how long I was out but, from what I can infer, it was a couple of days.

Part of me was very warm and part was very cool, so I murmured and shifted and gradually realized that I had no idea where I was. I was somewhere unfamiliar and, beyond that, something about my body felt very off. I sat up in a dimly-lit infirmary room and frowned as a mass of slightly-curled auburn hair shifted down my face. I grabbed it, gave it a little tug, felt its silky luster across my fingers, and soon discovered that it was firmly affixed to my scalp. My scalp atop my head, which was firmly affixed to a body that was not my own. Looking down, I almost screamed. But the little pre-scream 'eep' that I made was enough to make me gasp again.

My voice was high, a woman's voice (or slightly higher yet - a teenage girl's), and my body matched the voice. Smooth and slender and dressed in a white cotton blouse and tartan skirt, it was a schoolgirl's body. I reached down between my legs and sighed - it was a small relief, perhaps, but Mr. Warner was still in attendance down there. In fact, he felt a lot bigger than before... probably because my hands were small and slender now, just like the rest of me. I stood, glanced at myself in the mirror, and finally summoned enough outrage to scream.

"Aaaah!" It came out high and keening.

A girl in an identical outfit, a slightly chubby brunette perhaps fifteen years old, rushed in, flicked the lights on, and shushed me.

"Shh! What in the world's wrong with you?"

"I'm... I'm a girl," I said. I cringed at the voice. It wasn't especially high for a teenage girl's, but it was a sweet and silvery middle soprano. "I'm... where the hell am I?"

The attendant took it in stride: "St. Circe's, and I think you're still disoriented... Nurse Argent brought you in this morning, but she's just left for the day. So... unless it's an emergency, the headmistress is expecting you."

"It's a fucking emergency," I stated. "I'm not a girl!"

The nurse's attendant lifted my skirt. Down there, encased in soft blue cotton, was my Mr. Warner, bizarrely large and bulging from my otherwise-feminine groin. "You certainly aren't," she said. "But it isn't a *medical* emergency. Still... you might mention that to Headmistress Lily if it's unexpected. Because unexpected things sometimes happen around here. Please follow me."

+++++

I didn't yet have an understanding of how St. Circe's worked (and I'm not convinced that anybody fully does, but I understand enough now). In my naiveté, I thought I might run then and there. I could push the attendant away and flee, escape the building and... what, exactly? I'd been changed, through some power I couldn't comprehend, into a teenage girl, altered in every way but my intact male genitals. I convinced myself that I needed more information... and, after that, whatever transpired, I'd GTFO.

The nurse's attendant escorted me down a long hallway, sturdy plaster walls, red-framed wooden doors, and long, occasionally-shuttered windows facing the interior hallway from offices and meeting rooms, the décor gave the impression of an old school's administrative area. The suffuse light of late afternoon slanted in from the windows, casting blots of brilliant gold upon the floors and walls where it struck. The attendant led me past an unoccupied secretarial station and to a waiting room with about six chairs done up in sumptuous burgundy. I saw no computers, no digital phones, no digital anything, and I wondered whether I had somehow been transported to a bizarre 1970s acid trip. But, my dramatic transformation aside, everything being conveyed through my senses suggested that this was totally real. My escort tapped my shoulder to get my attention.

"Headmistress Lily will know to expect you," she said pointedly. "She knows everything that happens around here."

Then she shuffled back into the hallway, skirt swishing, leaving me alone in the headmistress's waiting room. The big oak door there was imperious, lacquered, and labeled: Headmistress Bethany Lily, the letters etched in one-inch copperplate upon a bronze plaque. There were voices within. The occasional clack of heels came and went in the outside hallway. Otherwise, the only sound was my breathing. I imagined that even that sounded different, that somehow my breaths had a different, higher timbre and faster rate relative to my usual body's, but perhaps that was just my imagination.

A group of students passed by outside. One of them, a younger girl, peeked in, and they whispered to her classmates, one of them darting back to spy on me. I gave her the middle finger, which only made her giggle. I had the impression that there weren't any men at St. Circe's. A moment later, the headmistress's door creaked open.

"Enter, please," she said. "And close the door behind you."

Within was a lavish office paneled in dark wood, warmly lit by the afternoon sun. It was much larger than I'd have thought, and I suspect that St. Circe's has at least a bit of Dr. Who-style 'larger on the inside' nonsense about it. In any case, Headmistress Lily had a big office, a big desk, and a big ego, all of them well-deserved. She was in her early-forties, raven-black hair with a single silvery lock tumbling down the front, slender of frame, and thin-lipped but otherwise attractive, her face stern… I got the impression of a woman who brooked no nonsense. Seated behind Lily and bearing an utterly indifferent expression was a larger, rounder woman, rosy-cheeked, smoke-gray hair, and perhaps a decade older. Aside from her smattering of rosacea, everything about her was gray, down to the matronly felt dress she wore. But Headmistress Lily was not matronly. The black silk, patent leather, and gunmetal chrome of her outfit had airs of Sexy Gestapo about it.

I stood there in confusion for a minute, wondering whether I should just turn tail and run. Lily sighed, and with a casual gesture magicked the door shut behind me. Unused to displays of the supernatural, I yelped and hopped half a step toward her desk.

"Just look at you!" Lily stood, swooped around her desk, and sidled up to me. In her heels, she had three or four inches on me - without, we were probably about even. "My! Rowan really outdid himself. Didn't he, Prudence?"

"A fine job," the woman in gray agreed. "I believe he enlisted Heirophant's help."

"The gangling men," Lily sneered. "Still… you can't argue with results."

"If you don't mind my asking," I said, "what in the fucking fuck is going on here?"

"We'll do something about that language in due time," the headmistress tutted. "You, my dear, are about to embark on a wonderful, educational journey! Somebody to-remain-nameless has enrolled you here at St. Circe's School for Girls of Good Breeding. Lucky you - we're very exclusive… no curriculum in the world can match ours! Let's crack open your file..."

"Enrolled? Bullshit!" I spat. "I'm not a sixteen year-old girl, and I'm not about to attend a girl's high school. My name is Martin Wagner, and I'm a twenty-six year-old M-A-N man! I'm leaving, and if you don't change me back right now, I'm suing the fuck out of whoever did... this..." I gestured to my whole body, "to me!"

"You will speak to your betters with respect," the woman in gray said, finally easing up from her chair, her demeanor emanating far more ominous threat than a middle-aged schoolmarm ought to.

"Young..." the headmistress glanced inside the folder, "Young Natalie here has yet to understand how our school operates, doctor. I'll allow her a smidgen of leeway. Let us explain to her the gravity of her situation before we get too bent out of shape."

The headmistress opened my folder - a sizable thing bound in dingy green cardboard - and spread the contents across the dark teak of her desk. School records, medical records, a passport copy, even a birth certificate. My blood ran cold when I read the name on the documents: Natalie P. Bryce, age 16. Bryce. It was then that I knew that the Bryce family and their fortune had somehow taken extrajudicial revenge on me by sending me here. As far as Headmistress Lily and her compatriot were concerned, it seemed, how I'd arrived at their doorstep didn't matter - I was Natalie Bryce, legally and physically, and now a student at their school.

"Ours is a very prestigious school for girls in need of special training and, if need be, changes in demeanor," Headmistress Lily said. "Doctor Sauvage, have you got Natalie's plan?"

"I have," the doctor said. She handed an inch-thick stack of handwritten notes to the doctor, bound in the same 1970s olive-green as my school folder.

"I see," Lily said, flipping through the pages. "A drama in three parts. Quite a demanding behavioral program... though by no means the most severe we've got. Lots of attitude adjustment - very good - and very convenient. I know exactly who to room her with."

"I'm not a 'her'," I corrected.

"For our purposes, and for the purposes of everybody who doesn't peek under your dress, you are," Lily said. "I don't know why Rowan kept your boy bits, but they're yours to keep until you misuse them. Keep your bait and tackle under wraps and your 'disguise' can remain unmolested." She chuckled at the double-entendre.

She went on to explain to me the strictures of my enrollment at the school: that I had been enrolled for a period of up to two years by a *very* generous patron and that I would stay at the school and take lessons there until my plan, as devised by Lily and Sauvage and as authorized and underwritten by my 'benefactors', was completed to the satisfaction of the signatories on my behavior plan - my benefactors, Headmistress Lily, and Doctor Sauvage. My plan was slated to take up to two years but, if I kept on my best behavior, it could be done much sooner and without the need for further transformation. Once Lily had gone through her spiel, Lily looked to me expectantly.

I sighed. "Look, I don't now what the racket is here, but I'm in no mood for it. Please just change me back. This isn't me. I'm not sixteen - I'm twenty-six - and I'm not a student at anybody's school. This is illegal and unethical, and I'm not going to play your fucking games. Obviously, I can't stop you from doing what you want with me, but I'm not going to go along with whatever sick scheme you've got going on here."

"Sick scheme?" Doctor Sauvage chuckled. "I'd call it well-deserved. Headmistress, shall I discipline our willful little ward?"

Sauvage strode over to me. I wasn't sure how big I was anymore - a hair over 5'6" and 122 pounds at the moment, it would turn out - but Sauvage was a lot bigger than me. She stood me up and held me fast. I struggled against her, slipping free once or twice before she clamped my hands behind me in a leather brace and secured my chest with a beefy arm. With her other arm, she slipped a tiara over my auburn-tressed head, holding her palm against it while muttering a few words in what sounded like garbled nonsense. She let me go, and I stumbled away, looking back angrily, pulling free from the brace and balling my little fists up, ready to fight.

"There now," Headmistress Lily said. "Who are you, again?"

"My name is Nnn... Martin-fucking-Warner," I said through clenched teeth. They'd somehow placed a compulsion over me - my mouth wanted to say I was Natalie, but my brain overrode the signal. "I don't know who the hell you think you are, but you're not getting away with this," I spat in my girl's voice.

"The construct didn't work," Lily said, vexation playing across her face.

"She must be strong-willed. I'll try again," the doctor said. "With a lot more energy."

With that, she pricked the skin of her thumb and grabbed at my wrist, the blood beading up smearing across my own supple skin. As I struggled to pull free again, she traced symbols over the tiara and muttered the same nonsense words, though they somehow seemed less garbled. I felt an electric chill spread across my body and spots speckled across my vision. I gasped, and then stumbled away again, looking for something to use as a cudgel, should the big woman try it a third time. Both of them waited expectantly.

"Let's try that question again," Lily said. "Who are you and why are you here?"

I crossed my arms and said nothing.

"Tell me, or we'll have to up the ante in the basement - and, believe me, you won't want that," she said. I glanced at Sauvage - who, frankly, looked exhausted from whatever she'd done. But the headmistress looked as sharp as ever.

"I'm M-Natalie... Br.. Warn... ner... and I'm... sixt... *not* sixteen... a student... *not* student..." I struggled to get the words out. My mouth was trying to say, 'I'm Natalie Bryce, and I'm sixteen and a student at St. Circe's'. Trying to work past that was like swimming against a mighty river current, but I could barely manage it.

"I don't understand," Doctor Sauvage sighed. "It's more than just willpower. She's got an innate resistance to the therapy."

"Therapy?!" I said.

"Perhaps that's why she kept her bait and tackle, too... I wouldn't have expected Rowan to let her keep that. Not after what she did..."

"What I did? What the fuck, lady?"

"I'm adding this to your behavior plan, Natalie. No talking about your real self or your past, not one peep about Martin Warner or being a man, or you'll be punished. And, as I mentioned previously, no using your manly endowments for anything beyond micturation or I'll see to it that you lose access to them."

She cracked open the olive green booklet, entitled 'Natalie Bryce, Behavioral Plan, specialist-in-charge, Dr. P. Sauvage, St. Circe's School', scrawling further notes into the pages with assiduously neat cursive:

addendum 1: Direct mentions of life outside the school shall result in level 2-3 reprimand. Indirect mentions subject to reprimand at specialist's discretion.

addendum 2: Use of male organs for sexual gratification / intercourse shall result in revoked privileges.

Addendum approved: B. Lily

The headmistress handed the plan to the doctor, who co-signed on the addenda and returned the booklet to her satchel. Then she wrote on the cover of a smaller, hard-backed blue book where it said: 'St. Circe's School for Girls of Good Breeding, Official Code of Conduct for: _______'. She wrote 'Natalie Bryce' in the same impossibly-neat cursive and then handed it to me.

I flipped the book open. For an instant, the page was blank, and then it filled in with text, immaculate diagrams, tiny notations, and references to subsequent pages. The first few pages were general information on school hours and the dress code - including a very good likeness of my current self in the school uniform with notations about how each item of clothing, as well as my personal hygiene and styling, should present itself. Toward the back of the book was a section labeled, 'Punishment and Reinforcement' that I couldn't flip to no matter how hard I tried. It wasn't like the pages were glued together, but I simply couldn't get my fingers to turn to the pages.

"That section is for faculty and staff only, dear," Lily said sweetly. "If you're a good girl, you'll never have to find out what's back there."

"I'm not a..."

She held up a finger. Mischief lingered in her dark eyes. "Do you really want to be punished on your very first day? After what the doctor has just shown we can do?"

I cast my eyes down, defeated for the moment. "No."

"No, headmistress," Lily corrected.

"No, headmistress," I repeated. There was no point in exacerbating things. I'd lick my wounds and ponder my next move.

"Excellent," Lily said. She pushed a little recessed button on her desk. "Somebody will see you to your room. Good day, Natalie."

Thus ended my first meeting with Headmistress Lily. If you'd told me she would become a mentor and valued friend in short order, I'd have called you crazy. But St. Circe's is a strange place, one where your expectations soon learn to be humbled.

+++++

A student was already waiting outside the headmistress's office when I emerged. She smiled noncommittally and led me outside to the dormitories. We went down the hallway, past the little infirmary where I'd woken up, and out the big oaken double-doors and onto a well-manicured, topiary-strewn lawn. The late afternoon light shone golden and the grounds were immaculate - it looked a lot like the campuses of the several small liberal arts colleges I'd been on. Only this wasn't a college campus. I could see perhaps a dozen students strolling to and fro at present, and they were all wearing variations of the same uniform that my escort and I were wearing. One very buxom girl had her skirt hem drawn up near the point of indecency. She passed us in a wave of jiggling and bouncing and a waft of perfume that I found it very difficult to ignore. A pair of more distant students were... I had to be imagining that. But I wasn't - one student was leading the other student by a leash around her neck, the smaller girl meekly following behind with her hands clasped behind her back.

"What the fuck kind of school is this?" I said.

"One where we use proper language," my guide said. "I'm Jenny, by the way."

"I'm... Natalie," I said.

She smiled. "Read your rule book, follow the rules, follow your behavior plan, and you'll be fine," she said. "I'll be an advanced girl soon, and I've only ever been punished twice."

"Um... great?" I said.

I followed after her, watching the swish of her skirt and reminding myself that these were all grade school students, far too young to be ogling. Unless they were like me. That was a possibility - I certainly didn't look twenty-six anymore. Beyond that, my entire body moved differently - far less mass up top and the beginnings of womanly dimensions below, making me much more bottom-heavy. The relative width of my hips changed my gait, and my slender shoulders didn't provide much counterbalance. My manhood wobbled slightly with each wiggle of my hips but, looking down at my plaid skirt for the forth or fifth time, it wasn't at all obvious that anything was unusual down there. Just a slim teenager in a skirt.

We approached a building - ruddy brick and covered with ivy, its windows, gables, and eaves detailed with whitewash. The sign over its entrance read: Beginner Girls' Dormitory. Jenny unfolded a piece of paper, gave it a look, and made a little gasp.

"What?"

"Nothing… well, you'll want to *really* follow the behavior plan. We probably won't be seeing much of one another since you're in the back hallway."

The back 'C' hallway was the shortest of the three hallways in the building. It stuck out from the back of the building, making the dormitory a squat t-shape from above, with the C hall only forty or so feet in total. There were three doors on either side of the hallway, smallish terracotta-painted doors with neat numbers in shiny brass over each frame.

"The door will only open for you, your roommate, or staff members," Jenny said.

She jiggled the handle to illustrate the point. When I reached for the doorknob and turned, it opened easily.

"Good luck," Jenny said. She patted my shoulder and headed off.

+++++

Half of my room was already occupied - a bookish young woman sat stooped over a little study desk. She was a bit on the chubby side but well filled-out, with mousy brown hair and a cute face that had never quite gotten ride of its baby fat. From the piles of books, I assumed she was a big studier.

"Oh!" she said when I entered. "Are you my new roommate?"

"For the moment, yes," I said. "No offense, but I hope I'm not stuck here long."

She sighed. "Me, too. I mean, private schools, whatever. But a girl's boarding school? And they don't even let us keep our phones? When I get out of here, my parents are getting an earful! How can I be an engineer if I don't have access to my computer? This so-called education is something out of my grandma's generation... I mean... look at this textbook. 'The Prim and Proper Lady'? What the fuck, man?"

"I'm Natalie," I said when she calmed down.

"Cassandra Petersen," the girl said, blushing slightly. "You can call me Cassie."

"Pleased to meet you, Cassie."

I put my Code of Conduct book on my own little study desk and rifled through the drawers of the little dresser. Two school uniforms, gym clothes, little white socks, white and pastel bra and panty sets, mostly in soft cotton, and a pajama set. Nothing in the way of casual clothes. I sighed and sat on the bed.

"Been here long, Cassie?"

She shook her head and looked back to me. Outside, the sun was starting to set - our room overlooked a little area of lawn, and from my bed I could lean forward and look right out, through a line of topiaries, and see the administration building I'd woken up in.

"A day and a half. I got here yesterday morning."

"You drove?"

She shook her head. "Train and then a cab. The cabbie had never heard of the place, but her GPS worked just the same. What about you?"

"I woke up in the infirmary an hour ago. I have no idea how I got here, and I'm dead certain I shouldn't be here. Do you know the way out of here?"

Cassie looked me up and down uncertainly. "I love your hair color. Is that natural?"

I grabbed a handful of loose curls and examined them - a vibrant, russet-red just understated enough to be believable. Far from my normal dark brown. "Um... yeah," I said. "You're changing the topic."

"I don't want to get in trouble."

"Yeah, me either. But if I shouldn't be here, what right have they got to punish me? I'm not supposed to talk about my life outside of here, but I can tell you that, as of right now, I'm not a student. I haven't had a class in years. I guess that'll change soon. And I can't tell you who I was, but I can tell you that when I look in the mirror, I see someone I don't recognize."

"You should talk to the headmistress..."

"Yeah, she's the one who put the kibosh on my talking about my old life." I shot Cassie a very pointed look. "My name is Natalie Bryce and I'm sixteen years old. I couldn't tell you my middle name because my paperwork only listed the initial 'P'. I'm pretty sure my eyes are green."

"I don't underst..." Cassie's hazel eyes shot open in surprise and she covered her mouth. "Jesus. You mean... you really aren't you anymore?"

I nodded. I've always been good at skirting around rules, and my first day at St. Circe's was no exception. Headmistress Lily and the doctor were in possession of strange powers I didn't quite understand, but I could weasel around them like I weaseled around lots of things. But I had to be careful. Did they have some experimental technology? Magic (which I would have sworn didn't exist)? It didn't matter - they had strange powers, they'd given me rules, and they had the means to enforce them. I wouldn't break their rules... not yet... but I'd bend the hell out of them.

+++++

We'd been chatting for perhaps an hour when the tone summoned us to dinner. It was a warm chime, like something that might be played over a school's loudspeakers, except there was no obvious source for the sound. It seemed to flow out of the very walls. I heard doors opening in the hallway, and Cassie informed me what the chime denoted - supper with the other C-wing students.

I'd learned a lot about Cassie in an hour, as well as what little she'd gleaned about St. Circe's School for Girls of Good Breeding. It was insanely expensive, she said, and selective - she'd heard her father grumbling over the sum of a million dollars a year, and that despite the enormous sum she was still lucky to have been chosen. The school, according to the brochure in her father's study, was renowned for 'taking promising young women of good breeding [whatever that meant], even those plagued with obstinacy, and turning them into model women, according to your needs and guaranteed to meet or exceed each girl's potential'. Her father, Cassie suspected, had hopes of her becoming more like her brother - outgoing, confident, athletic, and well-liked in addition to his natural smarts.

"He wants you to be someone you're not," I observed.

She shrugged. "Yeah. And he thinks St. Circe's will do it for two million bucks."

If Cassandra Petersen's father had hammered out plans for how the school ought to shape his daughter, that meant Rowan Bryce had probably specified how he'd like to see me changed - mind, body, and soul. Given that he'd been staring daggers at me the last time I'd seen him, enraged beyond belief that I'd just been exonerated in the rape and attempted murder of his beloved Amanda, it couldn't possibly be good. That I was completely innocent of the crime didn't seem especially pertinent at the moment. I'd cross that bridge when I got to it.

The two of us filed out into the hallway to meet up with another eight girls. Most of them wore the same school uniforms that we did, though one had tights under her skirt, one still wore slightly-sweaty tennis wear, and one was clad in a maid's uniform (not exactly a fetish uniform, but not a drab, utilitarian 'real' maid's uniform, either - it was functional, but the black dress was a bit too tight, a bit too brief, and a bit too frilly to be boring).

"You must be the new girls," the girl in the tennis skirt said.

"No shit, Cecilia," another said. "They're here and they weren't here yesterday."

"I was," Cassie said.

"Oh yeah. Candice, right?"

"Cassie."

"Right, Cassie. Sorry. Well I'm Hailey, that's Cecilia, obvs, and that's Jordan and Eva."

"What about the other four," I said, gesturing toward the girl in the maid's uniform for emphasis.

"Those are the littles," Cecilia said with a toss of her platinum-blonde hair. "They don't really count. And you are..."

"Natalie," I said, automatically offering my hand. Cecilia shot her hand out in a demure and distinctly feminine way and graced me with an odd look when I did an inadvertent man-shake.

It was hard to see what separated the four named-girls from the as-yet-unnamed 'littles'. They seemed to be the cool clique - taller than the other four girls on average, sure, but also firm-bodied and undeniably hot. The way they wore their St. Circe's uniforms (or, in Cecilia's case, a white tennis skirt with blue piping) was confident and sexual. The other four girls weren't differentiated by being smaller, per se, so much as that they were cute rather than hot, and completely lacked the confidence of the other girls.

"Everybody in C-wing is either a Big or a little," Jordan said. Her hair was fiery-red, just a shade lighter than my own and cut short into a fetching pageboy style. "I guess we'll find out which of you is which soon enough."

"How?" Cassie asked.

She shrugged. "Different classes."

It didn't take much guesswork to predict which one I was going to be. I very much doubted that Rowan Bryce wanted to see me as a hot, assertive, confident bombshell. The petite blonde mincing along in the maid's uniform was probably more his intent for the dastardly Natalie Bryce née Martin Warner.

For the moment, though, there was uncertainty over the issue. Therefore, Cassie and I were the odd girls out, and we dined with one another, separate from either clique. The ten of us from C-wing filed along with a group of about fifty other students. I would later learn that the students of St. Circe's ate in three shifts - the Junior Girls (aged 10-13) ate at six, the Beginner Girls (aged 14-18) ate at seven, and the Advanced Girls (also aged 14-18) ate at eight, sixty or seventy in each group, and around two hundred girls in attendance in total. And, if my math was right, that meant St. Circe's was taking in around two hundred million dollars in tuition each year. Oof.

The girls, especially the 'Bigs', chatted with some of the students from the other wings of our dormitory, but once we arrived at the dining hall, we immediately split off toward our own special side-room. There, ten dining platters sat at the ready all along a table at the back: five large platters and five slightly-smaller ones. The four 'littles' served their respective roommates and then retrieved their own meals. Cassie and I took the remaining pair, neither of us committing to either platter. When we lifted the domes off, I noted that the two meals were identical - broccoli, russet potatoes in herbs and olive oil, and an herbed chicken breast served over rice pilaf - save that the portions on the smaller platter were about three quarters that on the larger one. Both seemed reasonably adequate in my opinion.

"The difference seems more psychological than anything else," I observed.

Cassie agreed, and we chatted more as we ate. Mostly, though, we eavesdropped in on the other girls. The Bigs spoke mostly about their classes, various upcoming school events, and sundry social plans. The littles were harder to hear - they spoke in hushed mumbles, barely above a whisper, and seemed more concerned with avoiding punishment and following school strictures. Quite the difference. Afterward, there was ice cream with lady fingers for desert, and then, when the tone sounded, the littles cleared the tables (only putting the dishes into a wash bin - dishwashing was done elsewhere) and we all filed back to the dormitory.

As we walked through the dusktime campus, the air was brisk and wisps of ghostly light played against the southern (I think) horizon. It struck me that I had no idea where in the world we were - quite literally. Presumably, Cassie had an idea. Somewhere with cabs and GPS, I supposed.

"Well... that was interesting," I said.

Cassie sighed. "At least I had someone to talk to. Yesterday evening and today at breakfast, it was just me by my lonesome. I don't know what's worse - the prospect of being a little or of joining those four preening bitches."

I would have taken the preening bitches any day of the week. Would have being key - in retrospect, that would have been exactly the wrong decision. But I think both Cassie and I knew the tangents of our respective social arcs even then. And neither of us much liked what the future held.

"I'm getting the fuck out of here," I said. "Tonight."

"Yeah, okay," Cassie said. She brought her hair back into a ponytail. Her hazel eyes flashed with keen determination. "Me, too. We ride at midnight."