Foxum Hall: The Empty Drawers

On the fourth floor of Foxum Hall, Michelle Embers stood naked in a shower stall. She stepped into the steamy spray cleansing herself of the soapy lather coating her skin. Her eyes drifted closed and she drowned herself in the moment, leaving behind the chaotic sounds of the morning rush. The tension washed away from her muscles and she inhaled the clean scent of a fresh day. She snapped her eyes open, turned off the shower and wrapped herself in the crisp starch of an over-sized towel. Michelle exited the showers thinking it was the beginning of another drab school day.

Inside their dorm room, Chelsea Wolfe sat on Michelle’s unmade bed. She glanced at her watch and then at her bag sitting beside her. There remained just enough time to make her escape or to return everything to its proper place. Her gaze turned to the picture sitting atop their shared chest of drawers. It reminded her of friendlier days and she hesitated a moment longer. Wistfully, she wondered if things could have turned out different, but every avenue of their past had led to their present and more importantly, to Ryan Bircham. Chelsea grabbed her bag and left the room.

Michelle arrived to find Chelsea closing the door. “I thought we were going to have breakfast,” Michelle said.

Chelsea faced her roommate and forced a smile. “Mr. Bircham wants to see me first, but I’m sure I can meet you there after,” she said, holding her large bag close to her side and hoping Michelle would not notice.

“Don’t tell me he caught you running in the halls again?” Michelle tried to hide her amusement with a stern face, but the quivering corners of her lips betrayed the image. Mr. Bircham had threatened a spanking of epic proportions for the next girl he caught running inside the confines of Foxum Hall.

“Nothing so glamorous,” Chelsea said. She forced a friendlier smile onto her lips and walked backward along the wall toward the stairwell door. She held the door open with her shoulder. “I’m sure it’s nothing really. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria.”

“I’ll save you a seat,” Michelle said. She recognized the deception in her friend’s smile. Chelsea had a habit of landing in messes others could only imagine in their wildest daydreams. Sympathy tugged at Michelle’s heart, but deep down she knew Mr. Bircham’s strict consequences were never given without cause. She opened the door into their room and stepped inside, keeping an eye on her friend. “Hopefully, you’ll be able to sit in it.”

Chelsea laughed. “I’m sure one of us will be sitting,” she said, disappearing into the stairwell. Her smile transformed into genuine glee as the stairwell door slammed closed, cutting her off from Michelle. The echo of her footsteps on the metal stairs resonated with her laughter as she descended to the bottom floor.

Michelle closed the dorm room door and laid down on her bed. The temptation to drift back into sleep was strong, but the consequences for being late or worse, missing a class, were far from worth the luxury of a few minutes extra rest. With a sigh, she pushed herself back up into a sitting position and let the towel fall off into a puddle around her bottom on the crumpled bedsheets. In her typical fashion, Chelsea had left the closet door open. Michelle’s gaze focused on the pieces of her school uniform hanging inside, waiting for her.

The school’s uniform policy had been an irritant in her early days. Michelle had rebelled against it with stunts consisting of shortening her skirts and rolling up the sleeves on her blouses. Mr. Bircham had been tolerant at first, issuing only verbal warnings, but when Michelle continued with her rebellion he had turned to more forceful measures. After three trips over his knee, she decided to view the uniform in a new light. Instead of seeing it as a symbol of conformity, she chose to appreciate it as an attribute of honor and respect earned and awarded. It was Mr. Bircham’s perspective and shared by Michelle after seeing the glowing light of his conviction.

Pushing aside the embarrassing memories, Michelle stood and walked to the chest of drawers. She pulled open the top drawer and reach inside to find it empty. Rising up on her tiptoes, she looked inside and blinked at the emptiness. She pushed the drawer closed and pulled open the next one down. It too was empty. She turned to the closet and the clothes hamper inside. Empty.

Chelsea’s parting words and laughter rang in her ears: I’m sure one of us will be sitting.

Michelle pulled open the remaining two drawers, each in turn. Chelsea had left her with no panties, no bras, just a single pair of white uniform socks. She looked at the door to the outside as if it embodied her roommate. Bitch!

She searched the rest of the room, under the beds, between the mattresses, in the trash and the desk drawers. There was nothing to be found; Nothing of any use to her as either leverage against Chelsea’s plans or undergarments to avoid the almost certain repercussions of wearing none. Frustrated and without options, Michelle donned the available pieces of her school uniform. She exited the room, intent on finding Mr. Bircham and trying to head off the trouble as best she could. Descending the stairs, she was particularly self-conscious of the shortness of a skirt she customarily thought of as too long.

Chelsea watched from behind a corner as Michelle exited the stairwell on the bottom floor. Michelle headed up the corridor toward Mr. Bircham’s office at the far end. Chelsea grinned at her roommate’s receding back, pleased at Michelle’s easily predictable behavior. Chelsea waited until Michelle disappeared from sight into Mr. Bircham’s office and then stepped out from behind the corner. She rushed into the stairwell, fingers crossed with the hope she would not encounter anyone on her way.

Mr. Bircham was sitting at his desk filling out a summons for Michelle Embers when she walked into his office. He had been the administrator for Foxum Hall long enough to know that the odds of her presence being a coincidence were minimal to non-existent. The faint flush of color on her cheeks told him the report he had received concerning her lack of undergarments was accurate enough, but it also suggested the reason behind it was something other than a new streak of rebelliousness. They were being played.

“Miss Embers, what brings you here on this fine morning?” he asked, turning over the summons to hide its contents from her.

“It’s rather embarrassing,” she said. Her hands twisted together in front of her plaid skirt. She focused on his hands sitting atop his desk. They were deceptively benign, folded together. She knew first hand their strength and harshness when applied to a nubile backside.

“I would remind you that you can trust me, but you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t already know that,” he said. Studying the nervous girl before him, Mr. Bircham caught the faint protrusion of bare nipples pressing against the crisp contours of her white blouse. The anonymous report was at least partially true, but her presence in his office defied the logic behind its reasoning. “However embarrassing your situation might seem, Allow me to assure you that being open and honest with me here and now is in your best interests.”

Michelle nodded, careful to keep her gaze away from his discerning eyes. Her mouth went dry and she gulped at the dryness, wistful for a glass of water. “My roommate,” she said, hesitating as her harried mind attempted to put the thoughts coursing through it into some sort of coherent order. “I think my roommate stole my undergarments.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He frowned. He despised the phrase, the shrug, the attitude it represented. He said, “I should hate to think you go around shoveling accusations without cause.” He was disappointed. He had better expectations of her. He had expected the truth.

“She was acting peculiar this morning,” Michelle said. Her voice trembled with the fear of further upsetting Mr. Bircham. She struggled to find the words to convey the things she knew without landing herself in more trouble than Chelsea’s scheme had intended. “I didn’t understand at the time, she was leaving the room early. If I had been any later coming back from the shower I would have missed her entirely. She was nervous and eager to leave, but as she left she intimated I would be getting a spanking before breakfast. I thought she meant it for herself at first, but now I see she meant me.”

“Peculiar behavior is hardly proof of wrong doing, Miss Embers.” He stood and walked around his desk until he stood only an arm’s length away from Michelle. Reaching out, he lifted her chin with his index finger and forced their eyes to meet. She blinked and tried to look anywhere, but into his gaze. He nodded. “What did you come here for? Did you think you could just walk in here, give me a name, no proof, and I would just punish another girl on your whim?”

Michelle clenched and unclenched her fists. Her jaw set and she ground her teeth together searching for the words to extricate herself from his wrath. “I’m telling you the truth,” she said.

“No, you’re not.” He turned his back on her and lifted the folded note from his desk. It was computer printed in easy to read block letters. Michelle Embers is a liar, a thief, and a cheat. She thinks of herself as above the school rules and repercussions and to prove it to everyone, she is going without undergarments beneath her uniform. Some of us do not think this is appropriate or fair. Do you? “You’re telling me a version of it, but it’s decidedly short on rationality.”

She stared at his back. Her thoughts wound through the fogginess of her situation and the things he was not saying. Realization sank in her stomach. “You knew before I arrived,” she said.

He faced her, holding the note up for her to read. “I don’t like being manipulated,” he said.

Michelle’s eyes raised from the note to meet his gaze with confidence. “Then don’t be,” she said. Her back straightened tall and her hands abandoned their nervous wrestling to rest peacefully at her sides. “That note may not prove Chelsea is behind this, but it definitely proves I’m being setup.”

“Does it?” He turned the note back to himself. He studied the page and the young woman before him. The truth was somewhere between them. “How do I know you didn’t write this note yourself?”

She regarded him disdainfully. “That doesn’t even make sense. Why would I?”

Sitting on the front edge of his desk, Mr. Bircham laid the note beside him. He said, “Allow me to walk you through the logic; You have a fight with your roommate. Maybe she caught you doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing. She threatens to turn you in, but you bully her into believing no one will believe her because she has a much worse disciplinary record than you do. Just to make sure she knows you’re in control, you hatch this plan to land her in trouble and prove just how well you can manipulate things.”

She shook her head and continued to meet his gaze. “You’re way off base,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said, watching the angry flinching of her cheeks, “but you and I both know there is more going on between you and your roommate than missing underwear. If you expect my help, you’re going to have to come clean with the whole story.”

Michelle huffed. “I’ve already told you everything I know.” She threw her arms up and sighed. “I don’t know what you expect from me, but I came here because I didn’t know what else to do. My undergarments were stolen and I don’t fancy running around campus all day without them.”

He shook a finger at her. “Watch the attitude young lady,” he said. Michelle swallowed the protestations rising up inside her. Mr. Bircham pushed off the desk to stand in front of her, finger still raised. “You came here because you thought it would keep you out of trouble for running around without underwear.”

“Yeah, maybe I did,” she said, nodding her head. “It’s not like I had a real choice. Someone took them. You can’t punish me for that.”

Mr. Bircham stepped closer, forcing Michelle to crane her neck back to continue meeting his gaze. “Let me make your situation clear, Miss Embers. My job is to administrate this dormitory and insure you and every other student residing here, complies with the rules and polices of the university. Right now, you are in violation of those rules for not wearing appropriate undergarments. The only reason you aren’t already laying over my lap getting your bare bottom spanked is the mitigating circumstances of the theft you are alleging.”

She gasped. “Alleging? Really? Why else would I even be here?”

“I don’t pretend to understand the devious nature of a college girl’s mind, but so far, all I have is your word that your undergarments were even stolen. What I do have is a note that suggest you are trying to make a fool of me, your fellow students and the university. Your attitude thus far is making the allegation difficult to simply dismiss.”

Michelle rolled her eyes. “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you search my room? The drawers are empty and I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Mr. Bircham nodded. “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Embers. Let’s go.”

A few minutes later, Michelle stood outside her dorm room with Mr. Bircham standing beside her. She opened the door and stepped aside, allowing Mr. Bircham to enter without her in his way. He walked inside, stopping at the chest of drawers and pulling open the top drawer. He looked inside and shook his head.

Michelle watched him from the doorway, hands planted on her hips. “I told you,” she said.

Mr. Bircham reached inside the drawer and lifted out a white bra for Michelle to see. She gulped. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes searched his face, desperate to find some sense that he understood what was going on. “I swear those drawers were empty when I left,” she said.

He sighed and dropped the bra back in the drawer. “It seems you have a problem, Miss Embers.”

“You can’t possibly believe I made this up!” Michelle stared wide-eyed at Mr. Bircham. He walked to her work desk and pulled the chair out, turning it to face the center of the dorm room. She said, “You know this isn’t fair.”

He pointed at a spot on the floor beside the chair. “Over here, Miss Embers,” he said.

She stomped her foot in the doorway. “You can’t,” she said. Her head shook back and forth, throwing strands of hair in her face as tears welled up in her eyes.

Mr. Bircham inhaled sharply and he adopted his sternest face. “You don’t want to make me drag you over here, young lady.” He snapped his fingers and pointed once more at the spot on the floor.

“I’m being setup and you’re being manipulated,” she said. Mr. Bircham flinched as if to take a step toward her, but before he could move, she began scuffling across the floor toward the spot he had indicated. She stood beside the chair and him, head lowered, downtrodden by the firmness of his stance. He sat in the chair.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her closer. “Over,” he said, patting his lap with his free hand. She looked for compassion in his eyes and finding none, laid herself over his lap, closing her eyes and sniffling back tears of injustice. He lifted her skirt high onto her back, exposing her naked bottom. She flinched at the touch of his hand resting against the bubbly flesh. He said, “You can think of this as unfair all you like, but I think we both know you’ve been less than completely honest with me.”

The first spank came before she could formulate a response. She gasped. Her bottom quivered in the absence of his hand. Michelle gripped her hands together, bracing for the next spank. Mr. Bircham delivered it and more in a flurry of slaps, bouncing her white bottom on his lap until the white globes glowed pink. She breathed through the sting and humiliation, choking back her tears. Her body trembled against the building discomfort. Her hair fell around her face, masking the outrage in her eyes.

Mr. Bircham rested his spanking arm. He pinched her globes and cheek at a time ensuring the sting he had already built would not interfere with the sting he had yet to impart. Michelle sniffled as the first tears slipped from her eyes at the humiliation of insensitive touch. She breathed through the objections swirling in her head and remained mute over his lap. Comfort came from future intentions; there would be revenge, cold and sweet. Chelsea would rue the day. Mr. Bircham would see to it, just as he was seeing to her.

The spanking resumed. Mr. Bircham struck her bottom with his open palm, alternating his assault from cheek to cheek. Michelle kicked and squirmed, but he held her tightly in place with his left arm, wrapped over her back. His arm blurred through the air, using every inch of available space to add momentum to every spank. She squealed. Her bottom burned and reddened. Michelle cried.

He laid his hand on her bottom. “Now that we’ve got a nice, hot blush back here, is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

She shook her disheveled hair away from her lips, brushing the right side behind her ear with trembling fingers. He patted her bottom firmly, but short of the power of real spanks. She sniffled and said, “I’ve already told you everything I know.”

Mr. Bircham sighed and lifted his hands from her body. “Stand up,” he said. She pushed herself off his lap without hesitation. The ruffle of her skirt kept it up behind her despite gravity’s downward pull. She wiped tears and stray hairs from her face. He stood and pushed the chair back to its place under the desk. “Fix your attire and get yourself to class,” he said and left her alone with the door still open to the hall.

Michelle nursed her hot bottom with both hands, oblivious to the open door and anything not directly related to the aftereffects of her spanking. Chelsea stepped into the doorway, a tickled smile on her lips. She said, “I saved you a seat at breakfast, but it looks like you wouldn’t have needed it even if you had made it.”

Michelle glowered at her roommate. “Bitch.”

Chelsea pointed at herself. “Me? You might want to look into the mirror when you say that.” Chelsea turned and started walking away, but turned back as she reached the stairwell door. “Oh, and you might want to remember this moment the next time you think about blackmailing me to do your homework. Because if you try it again, I’ll make sure Mr. Bircham sees fit to use something more than his hand.”