Physical (7 page)

Anderson eyed me up and down, trying to get
a sense if I was bluffing my way into his heart or if I had some
caliber of expertise that I had yet to display.

“
Go on,” he said in a
simple tone of a seasoned mind.

“
Well, there are certain
things a woman has either learned or will never learn at this point
in her life,” I told him.

“
Such as?’

“
Such as the extreme care
that must be taken not only of her man but of his relations with
the world around him. Men thrive on power and power they must
have.”

His eyes fixed intensely on my own before
they darted away to the far end of the room as he let the
cogitations simmer in his mind.

“
Yet, certain erotic
proclivities often distract him from the task at hand,” I told him.
“I would make sure that your distractions were reduced to mere
white noise on a muted TV.”

He ogled me again as he began to understand
how extreme my mental disposition could be altered.

Anderson sat back in his chair and eyed me
from a more distant perspective. He knew when he had met me that he
had stumbled upon a special women but he hadn’t realized how
eclectic I truly was in my acute perspective.

“
Anything else you would
like to add before I conclude this interview?”

I thought for a moment if I should add
anything else to my previous diatribe but I believed I had gotten
my point across. I wanted to leave a little dap of whipped cream,
though, to make sure he understand how sweet of a cunt I truly
was.

“
Well, I can drink like a
lady, fuck like a slut and cook like a chef.”

He glanced at me as it tried to take all the
words in.

“
That’s all. Maybe there’s
more, but I’m sure your experience will tell you if there is, Mr.
Norton.”

Anderson nodded up and down methodically. He
was still in firm control of the interrogation but he was
definitely taken back by how thorough I was in my profession of my
skills and experience. He rose from his chair deliberately and I
followed his lead. He quickly extended his hand.

“
I’ll look over your
qualifications, Miss Natalie Cinderella, and I’ll be in
touch.”

We shook hands, or at least I placed my hand
forward and he proceeded to engulf it in his own potent grip.

“
I just want to thank you
for the opportunity, Mr. Norton. I hope I have made a good first
impression.”

He simply glared at me with a fresh sense of
reserve.

“
Yes, you have performed
well. I’ll be in touch. Let me lead you out.”

He passed by me and unlocked the door to his
office. It was only once I was at the threshold of the door that I
realized that my little black g-string was still on the floor. I
glanced at it out of the corner of my eye but thought it might be
best just to leave it there. Anderson led me back out into the main
part of the house. I could hear the roar of the crowds from the
football game on the television in the living room as the announcer
made the call on the play. Our quick exchange of eyes communicated
that his sons were occupied with the game. He led me out to the
front entry way and opened the door for me.

“
Thank you again for
meeting with me. I’ll be in touch,” he told me. The tone of his
voice had grown exponentially more formal in the short distance
from his office to the exit.

“
Thank you for the
interview, once again, Mr. Norton. I hope this is the beginning
rather than the end. I have barely met your sons.”

He smiled reservedly and extended his hand
once again.

“
Drive safe,
Natalie.”

“
Thank you.”

Before I knew it, I was sitting in the quiet
comfort of my car and the reality of what just happened hit me.
There was still a strong tingling sensation between my legs. I
looked around to make sure no one was watching and then lifted up
my dress to take a look. The sight of my reddened, enflamed cunt
instantaneously turned me in the rawest of ways. I had never had a
man do that to me and the fact that this was the only thing this
man had done to me made it seem especially deviant. I ran my
fingers between my legs. It felt incredibly sensitive but almost
numb at the same time. A car suddenly passed by and I quickly
pulled my dress back down over my legs. I started the engine and
headed back home. As I drove, the erotic images of what had
happened saturated every one of my thoughts. I began to ask myself
how far I really wanted to take this wild and outrageous housewife
situation. Was something like this even possible? Was this my idea
of settling down? Could this really happen? I hadn’t even been
offered the “position” yet, but I wondered how long I would be
considered the “hired housewife” if things moved forward? It all
sounded so outlandish, but it was certainly more interesting than
corporate work. There was no doubt about that.

Ivy Glen Academy

from The Slut List

Valentina never imagined
that her 18
^th
birthday would end up like it did, much less the
rest of her senior year at Ivy Glen Academy. She always had a view
of the school as this pristine private institution in the heart of
white-washed suburban Mariposa. It was the type of place that was
always receiving blue ribbon awards and at the top of the list of
America’s best high schools to which parents were just dying to get
their kids accepted.

She had felt like an outsider since her
first day there. Most of the other girls thought of her as
rebellious and free-spirited, but she thought it was simply a
matter of not fitting in. She detested all the school’s strict
rules and had migrated from one group of friends to another as the
years had passed. She planned to go art school when she graduated.
Maybe Parsons in New York or the Art Institute in Chicago, she
thought. Getting into an elite art school was everything in the
world to her, but it would all depend on the usual prerequisites-
stellar recommendations, a brilliant portfolio and some kind of
scholarship or financial aid.

Valentina never imagined her entire world
would come to revolve around “the slut list” nor that her
step-mother would do everything in her power to keep her on the
list. It was not at all how she imagined her senior year was going
to turn out.

She had spent months planning her birthday
celebration. It felt like it was finally going to be her coming out
party into adulthood and the beginning of a new life. She was so
sick of all the immature cliques of high school kids who tried to
exclude anyone who didn’t fit into their stereotypical image of
perfection and who didn’t conform to all those rules of perfection.
She didn’t mind some of them, such as the emos, the goths and the
skaters, but it was that group of preppy girls who got under her
skin with their obsession over wearing the latest couture brand of
clothing and their fixation on only dating a practically inbred
group of guys from other wealthy families.

The “goodies” were this select group of
girls that seemed to hand down their feeling of superiority from
one class to the next, with each higher class deciding who would be
included in the coterie of the cool ones and who would be relegated
to lower regions of the pecking order. When she was a freshman, she
immediately was cast as one of the “dirties.”At first, she couldn’t
figure out why anyone would call her that, but after the first few
weeks of school, she pieced it all together. She dressed
differently, lived in an average neighborhood, had a step-mom and
looked too foreign to fit in with the elite white girls and the
other girls who tried to be white. She was a bit of an exotic
ethnic mutt with a mixture of Italian, Spanish, French and African
heritage. Her olive colored skin and green eyes made her feel like
a foreign exchange student among the homogenous collection of
typical-looking white girls. She was thin but she had what her
friends called a “butt made out of bubbles” and enough cleavage
since she was a pre-teen to make even old men take notice. She
quickly got used to the girls sneering at her and making up things
about her behind her back. It was just how it was- the “goodies” on
one side of the teenage planet, the “dirties” on the other and
everyone else in between.

For the first three years,
the conflicts were fairly innocuous. There was name calling at
lunch, minor scuffles at parties and a general ostracizing of her
and her few friends at all school functions. When “the slut list”
came out, though, everything exploded. It was if the “goodies” had
planned it all along and were just waiting for her
18
^th
birthday to really start the hazing rituals. What really
triggered it, though, was when the school decided to institute
school uniforms for every student. It sent a ripple of confusion
through the entire social order. No longer could all the cliques
show who they were with their choice in clothing. Now they had to
up the ante with harsher talk and real actions.

She had no idea that Tyler
Rothschild was going to show up at her party. She didn’t even know
how he had heard about it. She had saved up money for months at a
part-time job in order to rent out this local club so her friend’s
band could play. She even got a friend’s older sister to buy a
bunch of bottles of liquor to sneak in to spike the drinks. Tyler
was the one who came up to her to wish her a happy birthday. She
never believed that he would really ever be interested in someone
like her, but she didn’t really care by the end of the night. It
was her 18
^th
birthday, she was drunk and she ended up hooking
up with him in the back room of the club. First they were just
kissing, but then he began to fondle her stealthily underneath her
clothes and after that, it just turned into a drunken blur. The
last thing she remembered was the two of them sneaking up to the
roof where no one could see what they were doing. Even at her young
age, she knew that life was short and she didn’t want to waste a
single moment on it because of fear of what other people thought.
Not everyone else, though, had the same perspective.

It was early on Friday morning when she got
the list. She was walking up the broad cement stairs in front of
the school. She had finally gotten used to wearing the regimented
blue and green plaid skirt, the white button-up and the white socks
that the private school had decided was the way that school girls
should look. She was beaming with excitement that she had finely
turned 18 and the whole world was going to open up for her.

It must have been that gleaming smile spread
across her face that caught the attention of the goodies. The
unquestionable leader of the clique was Brittney Van Slauson. She
looked like a blond-haired Amazon goddess of white girls. She was
nearly six foot tall, had the slender curves of a model, possessed
a pair of blue eyes as pure as the sky and walked around like she
was going to step on you if you didn’t move out of her way. Her
father had also donated so much money to the school that they named
the library after her family name.

When Valentina entered the central hallway,
it was as if time suddenly went into slow motion. Brittney’s eyes
locked onto her in a hard, cold gaze and a devious smile spread
across her seemingly angelic face. Brittney moved immediately
toward her and Valentina’s body tensed up as she waited for
Brittney to accost her with some new insult. She never understood
why but just being in the presence of that Nordic-looking goddess
made her tremble. She always got the sense that she was going to do
something physical to her. It was inexplicable but the mere sight
of her brought butterflies to her stomach. When their two bodies
met this time, though, Brittney merely stopped in front of her,
took a folded piece of paper from her bag and handed it to
Valentina.

“
What’s this?” she asked
defiantly.

“
I think you know,
Valentina,” she replied with a haughty smirk.

“
No, I don’t,” she said to
her coldly.

“
Well, you should have
known it was coming and you were going to be on it.”

Valentina unfolded the small piece of torn
notebook paper and looked down at what was written on it. There
were eight names, scribed in Brittney’s elegant handwriting, with
her name at the top.

“
It’s the slut list,”
Brittney told her, “and you’re the number one slut.”Brittney looked
her up and down, and then just laughed.

Valentina’s heart beat heavily for a few
quick seconds, trying to figure out what this meant.

“
You’ll be on it for the
rest of the year so you’d better get used to it,” she sneered, and
then just walked away with her books held adroitly in her folded
arms like a model student.

Valentina just shook her head in disbelief
and kept on walking down the hall. At first, she didn’t think
anything of the stunt but it didn’t take long to figure out that
she wasn’t the only one who knew about the list. When she turned
the corner and headed toward her locker, a wave of eyes descended
on her. They giggled or snickered to each other before they
motioned toward her so their friends knew exactly who they were
talking about. The blood flushed through her face. She wanted to
run away then and there, but she held strong and marched on to her
locker. She quickly took out the book she needed, slammed the
locker shut and rushed off to her first class.