Just a scarf

The reality, cold and implacable, imposed itself upon her stupor. The bell for the next class would ring in a matter of minutes. She could not stay there, curled up on the floor, forever. She had to go to her next class. She had to move.

With a superhuman effort, Sabrina stood up. Her legs were shaking. She clung to the tatters of the tunic, but the attempt was as futile as trying to stop a hemorrhage with her bare hands. The seal mark on her pubis seemed to pulse with a light of its own.

Lost and Found. It was her only **** hope. She waited for a clamor of voices in the corridor to move away and then slipped out of the classroom, hugging the wall like a shadow, feeling every inch of her bare skin beneath the ripped silk.

As she opened the door to the small room, her heart sank. Where she expected mountains of forgotten clothing, there was only a nearly empty drawer and a couple of dusty shelves. She rummaged with frantic hands. There were no jackets, no sweatshirts. Nothing.

Then, at the bottom of the drawer, her fingers touched a piece of rough wool fabric. She pulled it out. It was a scarf, but not a long one. It was short, square, almost a large kerchief of a dull brown color. A useless object.

Despair blurred her vision.

With a choked gasp, she decided to use it for the most critical area. She folded the square scarf into a triangle and, with trembling hands, tied it around her hips, like a minuscule loincloth. The rough fabric covered her Venus mound and the SPQR mark exactly, but it left the tops of her thighs exposed and, of course, the rest of her body. For the top, she had nothing. Absolutely nothing.

She looked at her reflection in the window. The image was even more humiliating. The transparent, ripped tunic showed her torso and breasts without any concession, while the small brown scarf tied at her hips seemed like a mockery, an attempt to cover herself so pathetic and miserable that it almost accentuated what it was intended to hide. She looked like a savage, a primitive dressed in rags for a ritualistic degradation.

But it was something for her most intimate part. A **** gesture of modesty that only she would understand.

The bell rang, strident. A cold sweat ran down her. Now she had to walk to another classroom, completely transparent above the waist, with only that piece of rough cloth as her sole shield over her deepest shame. She took a breath, opened the door, and plunged into the corridor, feeling the rough wool graze her pubic hair, a brutal reminder that her protection was as fragile, as insignificant, as a sigh in a storm.