Your grades suffer and a few new bruises grace your cheeks, but you stopped acknowledging the pain a long time ago. Regardless of the arithmetic drills and the table setting instructions and the complete cliché of improving posture by balancing textbooks on your head, all your attention is on the students and administration at this school. Disobedient children besides yourself ceased to be a real problem no more than a week into the semester. It can’t be mind control; you’ve endured plenty of detentions and corporal punishment, and not once did the Headmistress even threaten to take away your free will. “You are free to be incorrect,” she once told you, “and it is your duty to convince yourself otherwise, not ours.”
Perhaps the Headmistress is correct. There’s nothing particularly sinister about the classes themselves, and while you haven’t gotten along with any of the girls, their bullying is limited to whispering behind your back. Can you fault them? You clearly don’t belong, and it’s your job to prove them wrong by passing this semester. What’s wrong with obedience when the authority figures are just? You’re lucky they even let you stay at all. All they ask of you… is to be a good girl.
No.
FUCK this.
You never agreed to any of it, you barely had anything explained to you until it was too late to back out. You’re not some soldier to indoctrinate or a trophy for a parent to brag about. Oh, dear lord, is this how we treat children who don’t even understand that they have a choice? The school’s authority is backed by violence and isolation, and you reckon that you’ve suffered long enough.
And yet the security as this school is air-tight. There are no dedicated guards or even alarms on the antique doors- nor is there a fire exit, that seems like a problem- but you can barely wander the halls for more than a minute on a bathroom break without being ambushed by the long shadow of a teacher, or a traitorous student acting as hall monitor. It’s a far cry from the metal detectors and police officers you were expecting, but to a five-year-old boy in a dress this might as well be Alcatraz.
That is why you were so eager for gym class. Like everything at this school, the classes are archaic; instead of an indoor pool, swimming lessons are taught in the dammed artificial pond built behind the faculties. Only a roughly regulation-sized rectangle of netting suspended by buoys marks where swimmers are supposed to end a lap. Behind a wall of rammed earth and stones, under a wooden footbridge, only a steel floodgate and a railing stop you from following the creek back to civilization. People build towns near water, right? If you keep following a landmark like that, you’ll be out of the woods in no time… right?
You ignore the quiet stares as you undress in the locker room. The girls have already seen you naked before, and you don’t feel any sort of attraction to them. It’s probably just your fully functional ethical compass, or your young body having no libido, or how the few times your mind wandered to happier memories from before the transformation were followed by your chastity cage squashing them back down. It’s a good thing the cage is waterproof. It’s also impact-resistant, as you learned right before another evening in detention.
The swimming uniform is even more puzzling. This pretentious east coast charm school assigns the students old-fashioned Japanese one-piece swimsuits for reasons you don’t want to think about. The broad straps press down on your shoulders as blue fabric slides snugly over your torso. Your bulge is still tiny, but something about the way your swimsuit frames it makes it look even less threatening, or almost adorable. On your chest is a white placard labelled “Crystal” next to your ID number, seemingly just to taunt you. You’re permitted to take off your wig while swimming, as long as your undignified curly hair is tucked underneath a black rubber swimmer’s cap. Your swimming goggles are resting on a strap around your neck until you’re ready to dive; they’re the least gendered clothing you own, but it’s still really hard to see where you’re going with them on out of the water. Asking for pool shoes or waterproof fin socks for your feet got confusion and a shrug from the gym teacher. As revealing as this uniform is, it’s technically the least women’s clothing you’ve worn while enrolled at the school.
You rush through the opening stretches and warmups, trampling dry grass underfoot. You strap on your goggles, plug your nose, get a running start and dive. The class starts with some basic overhead strokes, nothing you haven’t learned already, but all you can think about is your plan. There has to be an opportunity during the class, one where eyes aren’t on you…
And there it is! A flock of turkeys is passing by the pond to get a drink, only to be spooked away as the girls all stop to stare at them. The gym teacher walks in front of the whole spectacle to shout at them… and has stopped paying attention to you. This is your chance… this is where you use everything you learned in this class. You build up steam, dive for a brief moment, and leap like a salmon!
It takes longer than you think it would for the teacher to start shouting for you. You pay them no heed, for you can only think of two things; running and pain. The stones in the waist-deep creek scrape your knees and palms, every other step feels like it’s going to twist your ankle, but you can’t stop running.
Your body runs out of steam sooner than you’re used to. There’s no way for you to measure how for you’ve run, except that the school is still visible on the horizon- not far enough. You can’t just keep running forever; you need to disappear, and fast. What will you do?