Rearview Mirror

From the 46th, Thirteen was sent all the way back down to 7th Floor, and then proceeded to spend the bulk of that afternoon bouncing around the teens and single digit floors. An interoffice here or there, a coffee delivery for a meeting taking place on the 10th, a series of electronic communications that she ferried from floor to floor on her arm. After the run-in with Drew Wagner, Kim Kinney, and the cheerleader's outfit, the rest of the afternoon was filled with more standard fare.

Mistress Zero had undoubtedly seen the rapid increase in the number of demerits the naked blonde suffered at Kim's hand. But as Thirteen was still on the right side of another punishment, Mistress Zero hadn't said anything to her over her afternoon break. If she hit number twenty-five (and she probably would now, given the numbers she'd wracked up in Investment Banking), would she receive another round of attention from her mistress? It was rare for Mistress Zero to administer a spanking at the end of the day; more often than not, she held back and did so the following morning. But given that Thirteen wasn't going to be here tomorrow, or Monday morning, would she stick around to give the naked blonde one last round of corporal punishment? If Thirteen managed to stay below the threshold, would the German woman find some other way to balance the ledger?

It was, for the most part, beyond Thirteen's control. She could do her best to hit her deadlines and avoid any more demerits, but that was no different than any other day. As the session with Drew and Kim illustrated, demerits could be handed out almost arbitrarily. So it did Thirteen no good to worry about Mistress Zero, nor about how sore her ass might be on the trip back to New Haven in the morning. Instead, she focused on her deliveries.

Or, rather, she tried to. The thought of the pictures getting out - and they would - was horrifying and humiliating, but there was a part of her that was turned on by the thought of her former classmates seeing her as some sort of sex object. It was the dichotomy she felt as a mailgirl in a nutshell - suffering and embarrassment on the one hand, surrender and excitement on the other. The idea that Mark Agnew might see her pictures - and he would - sent a thrill up and down her spine. Would he even show them to his wife? Would he keep them hidden away? Would he masturbate to them?

But as it did her no good to worry about Mistress Zero's plan's for her backside, it did her no good to focus on the pictures Drew and the others had snapped that afternoon; it was all out of her control. The more she thought about it, the more cringe-worthy the whole thing became, and the more she'd be tempted to touch herself again before the day was through.

And she wanted to. There were plenty of girls - One, Six, Fourteen, Twenty - who'd just completely given in to their baser instincts, and for whom any amount of free time was an opportunity to have their hands between their legs. And then there were the girls on the other end of the spectrum - Five, Eight, Twenty-Four - who'd managed to keep from doing so. Here at the Plaza, at least. Most of the others, however, found themselves somewhere between those two poles, often making little deals with themselves about when and how often they'd relent, compromises about how much they were willing to masturbate in front of an audience. Thirteen had certainly had her "bad" days, when she'd touched herself before her shift, after her shift, and during every break in between. And she'd certainly had her "good" days, in which she might be able to escape the day without giving in once; even just once probably now resided in the "good day" column.

No, she told herself while on her afternoon break. She'd already gotten off twice that day. And even with a chorus of breathily panting girls echoing off the locker room's tiled floor, and even with everything that had gone down with Drew, Thirteen told herself that she could make it to the end of the day. Maybe, just maybe, she'd allow herself the indulgence in the showers once her shift was over. Or maybe it'd be in the misleadingly-named "Kissing Booth" at the Imperial's bar, while another girl stood look-out. Or maybe she could make it to the end of the night, and have one last wild evening with Seven. Or Seven and Ten. Or Seven, Ten, and Nineteen all together; she knew they'd begun renting a hotel room at the Imperial on Friday nights for the last couple of weeks.

Careful, she told herself as she bounded up the stairs between the 12th and 13th Floors - that's how your self-control falls apart.

Instead, she chose to focus on Catherine Ryan. Thirteen typically did everything in her power to keeping from thinking about her mother, to avoid letting her non-mailgirl life bleed into her work. But it was now almost five o'clock. With just two hours of her life as Mailgirl Number Thirteen left, she'd begun to think more about her life thereafter.

How would Catherine respond to Thirteen's revelation? Poorly, Thirteen told herself, to be sure. She wasn't uptight or conservative in any real way. She had two girls who were both on their way to doctorates, but she wasn't a break-the-glass ceiling sort of women's libber for whom such academic achievement was the be-all, end-all. She'd have been just as happy if Thirteen had become a waitress, or a grocery store cashier, or something else; she often told both her girls that she just wanted them to be happy and find meaning in their own lives. Thirteen, though, wasn't sure that extended to her daughter's happiness as a naked, masturbating mailgirl. She'd come close to telling her mother how she was truly spending her summer on more than one occasion, but she'd chickened out each and every time. It was going to be easier, she reassured herself, to tell her after the fact, when she was looking at her summer in the rearview mirror.

For the most part, the mailgirls at USF rarely brought up their families or friends. And Thirteen understood why. It was the for the same reason that they all continued to refer to one another by their numbers, and not names, when outside the building; it was just easier to forget that they had another life besides this one. But, over the course of the summer, Thirteen had managed to tease their relationships out of them regardless, often framed by looking for advice on how to handle Catherine.

In contrast to the stereotypical stripper coming from a broken family and an absent father, most of the mailgirls came from fairly mundane and boring backgrounds. Thirteen supposed that, given how academically successful and career-oriented most of them were prior to this life, it probably shouldn't have been all that surprising. Thirteen was just one of three girls at USF whose parents were even divorced. If there were some underlying psychosexual issue that had driven them all to become mailgirls, that had caused them to give in to baser instincts once becoming a mailgirl, it wasn't one that was self-evident. For those girls who'd confessed to their families what their new occupation really was (and Thirteen estimated it was more than half of them), reactions had run the gamut between shock and horror on one end and acceptance and support on the other. Eight's parents had angrily stormed the building and demanded their daughter's release, and Seventeen's had hired a lawyer to do it for them. This was in stark contrast Mailgirl Number Two's mother - who had not only opened her arms to her daughter's new lesbian girlfriend, Mailgirl Number Three, but who'd also opened her house to all the girls for a Sunday barbecue and pool party out on Long Island.

A more normal reaction might have been that of Seven's parents. They didn't understand Seven's decision, and they themselves were embarrassed by what their daughter had chosen to do with her life (at least, over the next two years). But they recognized she'd been backed into a corner, chose to focus the career opportunity that awaited her on the other side, and did everything in their power to avoid talking about how Seven spent her days. Still, Seven had confessed to Thirteen that her mother had later gotten intensely specific in her line of questioning - once her father wasn't around. And though she hadn't come right out and said so, Seven believed that part of her mother was curious and secretly excited about the fantasy life her daughter was living.

Thirteen hoped for similar acceptance out of her own mother. She didn't need Catherine to fully understand what she'd been through that summer, but she couldn't hide it from her forever. And Thirteen hoped she'd see if for the professional opportunity that it was, a chance to make a name for herself in the narrow sliver of academia in which she'd chosen to concentrate. Maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to put herself in Thirteen's shoes, and - like Seven's mother - begin to understand what being a mailgirl truly, truly meant.

Thirteen hit the 13th Floor, and glanced again at the summoning she'd received from Jessica Cochran. She grimaced, seeing an associated spend of chits - not only would she have to be subjected to Jessica's leers (sorry, Miss Cochran's leers), but it looked like she was going to be held here in Finance & Accounting for the better part of the next ten minutes.

Thirteen had adjusted to the attention she received from men here at the Plaza. She'd always been on the shy side when it came to men, as the fact she'd slept with just four men by her twenty-sixth birthday could attest. But despite that, and despite the fact that she'd always been a bit of a nerd, she still had always received a fair amount of their focus. She was now able to recognize that she was attractive, hot even, in a way that she hadn't prior to becoming a mailgirl; there was something about being reduced to little more than a set of tits and ass that caused one to reflect on what a fine set of tits and ass it was. Men were visual, men were sexually aggressive, and the attention she received while bounding naked from one corner of the building to another was expected, and had now become almost a sort of complement.

Thirteen hadn't expected the same from women, however. And now, admittedly, vice versa - she couldn't deny how much watching the other girls get themselves off turned her on. She wasn't a lesbian, nor even really and truly bisexual; like any number of the girls, she'd become a "letter-carrying lesbian" for convenience sake. But she found herself open to the idea that her sexuality was more fluid and dynamic that she would have thought it to be three months prior, and so it shouldn't have shocked her that there were other women at USF - even non-mailgirls - who were similarly engaged in a journey of self-discovery.

Jessica Cochran, an accountant here on the 13th Floor, was Exhibit A. She was engaged - the enormous diamond ring gave her away. And she might have even been happily looking forward to the wedding - the pictures posted in her cubicle showed her smiling alongside a cutely awkward young man about her age. But Thirteen had walked past her just that morning, in the lobby outside of the Mailgirls Locker Room - sitting alone with a cup of coffee and preparing for the show. She'd made deliveries to Finance & Accounting previously, and Thirteen had felt raked up and down by the accountant's eyes. Thirteen wasn't exactly sure what it was - was Miss Cochran a closeted lesbian? Or was it something else, a fantasy about being a mailgirl herself? She was short, and a little on the homely side - if she were going to be a mailgirl, it wasn't going to be here at USF.

Thirteen was a Sociocultural Anthropologist, who'd come to New York to study "mailgirl culture" firsthand. But her area of study had always been more broadly defined as "women's culture," and she'd increasingly found herself more and more interested in how a mailgirl program affected non-mailgirl female employees. As boorish as men could often be, she found that it was women - fully clothed women - who tended to be meaner, nastier, and more verbally abusive. Kim Kinney, for example. On the other side of the coin were women like Miss Cochran, mailgirl fangirls who seemed intensely intrigued by either the life of a mailgirl or the mailgirls themselves. Female attrition always tended to spike up when a program was first announced; but, in the aftermath of that initial spike, female attrition always seemed to drop even more significantly than male attrition. Thirteen wasn't sure what to make of that paradox. She wasn't sure what it said about the women who remained.