[In Part One, ex-best-friends Bryony and Maria enlist the help of Angelica Highsmith and her unusual organisation to run an elaborate and very public stripping game to permanently settle a feud. The two women are racing around their University Campus on Graduation Dare, solving clues, as their specially prepared cheerleader outfits begin to malfunction…]
****
“What’s past is present, where the part is the whole, you’ll find what you look for where stories are told.” Bryony tried to focus on the clue she’d just been given as she hastily made her way across campus, but she found it hard to concentrate with the constant threat of flashing forever at the forefront of her mind.
Her skirt was the greatest threat. Yes, her top had now exposed her bare tummy and the material was so tight on her chest that from a distance people might almost mistake it for body paint. However the skirt would fly up at the slightest provocation, and with no panties left, that meant her crotch and ass would be instantly on display.
Her face had already gone through several shades of red by the time she’d passed the History Department, which hovered over her on the right-hand side. She’d run along the path from the Pool Complex that cut from north to south across the campus. That had been a tactical error, as the path occasionally crisscrossed a scenic, crystal-clear blue river that seemed to be very popular with parents touring the campus. The other scenic vista that was proving to be very popular with parents, or at least the fathers anyway, was the sight of Bryony Richmond sprinting along commando-style in a skirt that would have been short on someone half her height.
She needed to solve this clue. She desperately, desperately needed to solve this clue. If this was how revealing the outfit was after Maria beat her once, who knew what fresh hell would be unleashed if Maria beat her a second time?
As she stopped to catch her breath, she looked around urgently and considered her options. There were several side paths nearby, each which would lead to a different building.
“What’s past is present…” she said to herself. Spinning around again, she was about to randomly pick a path and hope fate was on her side when a sudden burst of recognition hit her. Turning around slowly a second time, she looked up at the History Department Building and shook her head slowly. She must be severely distracted, she thought, if it took her this long to figure that one out! It still left the small issue of what the rest of the clue meant, but right now she’d at least narrowed it down to the right building.
She set off again, dashing through growing crowds and hoping against hope that if she moved fast enough and didn’t stay in any one place long enough, no one would recognise her. At least she’d never taken History classes, so there was less danger of running into someone she knew.
The History Department had four floors and was a large sandstone building with arches over the entranceway. As she madly ran through them, she almost bowled over an old gentleman with a walking stick, who let loose a curse word Bryony didn’t even recognise and was at least spry enough to whack Bryony on the ass with his stick while she tried to apologise.
Yelping at the contact, Bryony gave him a hard glare and flared her nostrils with displeasure. Clenching her fists, she was about to slap him across the face when she finally regained some measure of self-control at the last second and pulled out. Slapping someone as old as him wouldn’t go down well at the best of times, let alone when she was dressed like this and had almost sent him sprawling to the ground in the first place.
Instead, she settled for intensifying her glare and shaking a disapproving finger at the man’s walking stick. “Sir,” she said, with all the authority that she could muster considering the situation and current wardrobe selection, “I said I was sorry so I’ll kindly tell you never to do that again!” She stamped her foot so as to emphasise how serious she was, however unfortunately the action merely caused the skirt to bounce up. For at least a full second, her neatly trimmed blonde-haired pussy was presented to the old man.
“Well, fuck me!” The old man said in less than gentlemanly language, putting one hand to his head as if trying to steady himself so he could burn the memory onto his eyeballs.
Bryony’s expression went from anger to anguish, and she let out a high-pitched “meep” as her hands flew down to try and suppress the skirt’s exhibitionist tendencies.
Unable to form any useful words, Bryony took a couple of stumbling steps backwards, and then turned and ran. Into the building she flew, and since the ground floor seemed to be full of tour groups examining rooms full of historical artefacts or listening to sample talks, she made directly for the elevators and threw herself into one, jabbing at the panel to take her as high as possible and as far away as possible from this latest embarrassment.
She breathed a huge sigh of relief as the elevator took her up to the fourth floor without any other stops and with nobody else wanting to hop on. At least all of the activity seemed to be located on the ground floor, and while she’d probably have to brave that area again to find her target, she’d at least be able to find some temporary sanctuary in a quieter part of the building where she could gather up what was left of her wits and her courage.
Bryony emerged out onto the fourth floor and looked nervously around. It seemed to be the floor where the main administration offices of the Department were located, and other than a single female administrator who was sitting behind a counter on the other side of the reception area and who seemed engrossed in their screen and their headphones, there was no one else around.
Bryony quickly snuck out of the elevator unseen and took a sharp turn down a corridor away from the administrator and their reception counter. It was quiet here. She passed the Office of the Executive Assistant and the Office of the Head of Department, and both were closed with the lights off. Probably already heading over to the Graduation Event, or downstairs congratulating soon-to-be graduates and their families.
She gave a brief sigh, and sank to the floor, propping her back up against a door and keeping one ear out for any sound that might herald a staff member’s imminent arrival.
Closing her eyes, she took a few deep breaths in and out and then tried a few meditation chants that she picked up over the years. When she opened her eyes again, she looked up and down the corridor again. The plaque on one of the doors caught her attention, and she slowly pulled herself up. Free from the distraction of the piecing stares of assorted bystanders and gawkers, Bryony’s mind began to function again at something approaching full speed.
“Head of Department. Department of History” she read to herself slowly, letting each word linger in her mind. Head of Department, who is a person. Yet a person has a head as well. A person who is a head, and yet a person has a head. “Where the part is the whole…” she recounted to herself. The part is the head, and the whole is the person, and the head is a person too.
She jumped up, not caring now about the skirt or the top, but with a mad glint in her eyes, rejuvenated as the pieces fell into place. The target must be in the Head of Department’s Office! And yet, as she fumbled at the door handle, it was most definitely locked. Was she supposed to break in, and if so, with what? Nothing in her ensemble resembled a lock pick, even if she knew how to use one properly. She could try ramming the door down, but that seemed a little over the top even for a game where she was currently flashing her crotch and ass to 20-somethings and 80-somethings alike!
For a moment, she wondered if she was supposed to ask the administrator at the reception, but how on earth could she possibly hope to talk her way into the Head of Department’s Office? Maybe if the administrator had been some dodgy old dude, then with Bryony’s natural assets complemented by an outfit that accentuated everything sexual about her, she might have stood a faint chance of pulling it off. However, she looked to be a normal woman in her mid-30s and was far less likely to be susceptible to Bryony’s charms.
She was beginning to slump back down again, a victory seemingly being snatched from her grasp, when she looked further down the corridor and frowned. At the end of the corridor was a meeting room, and the meeting room door was framed by numerous pictures of indigenous Native American cultural works.
“Where stories are told,” Bryony whispered to herself. Her eyes narrowed. Didn’t the Native Americans share knowledge through story-telling? Clambering back to her feet, Bryony cast one more look behind her to make sure no one else was coming and then began to walk towards the meeting room. Her walk turned into a jog, and then the jog turned into a run. She almost collided with the door as her hand flew up to grasp the handle, and she let out a victorious “a ha!” when the handle turned and the door opened with the full force of her weight bearing down on it.
As she stumbled into the room and came to a halt, she thanked the Gods for two things. Firstly, the room wasn’t in use and there was no one around. Secondly, placed perfectly in the exact centre of a long table that ran the length of the meeting room, was a perfectly formed blue cube with “DE” proudly engraved on each side. Two-one, Bryony thought, with a look of growing confidence.
****
A crop of auburn hair peeked around a row of shelves, followed quickly by a deeply concerned face. The face looked about quickly and then retreated back into the relative safety of the aisle. It was the fifth floor of the University Library and while the study tables beyond the rows of books had only a smattering of people at them, there was still enough to keep Maria pinned down in temporary isolation amongst several rows worth of particularly dusty and dry legal texts.
The rows of books had happened to be near the stairwell from which Maria had emerged, and that had immediately presented itself as cover. This was however only a temporary refuge and she knew that hiding away in the aisle was a surefire way to lose. This meant that at some point she was going to have to brave it and expose herself to the people by the tables, as she made a play for the box that she could just about make out was sitting perched on a window sill, overlooking the small river that wound its way across the campus and alongside the library building.
She’d already been cruelly exposed to a number of library patrons and staff on the ground floor as she’d made a dramatic entrance into a building that – as a computer science student herself – she’d barely ever visited. Paper books weren’t really her thing. It had only been a mad flash of inspiration out of thin air that had caused her to realise that the latest clue – “to find the legal view on a bank with no money” was asking her to locate the floor of the library with the Law Faculty’s books and that overlooked the river. That had been after far too many intense moments of abject humiliation when it had been revealed to her that Bryony had successfully acquired her second target.
As she’d sprinted into the library foyer, she’d had to pause for precious seconds to check the building map to find the floor the legal section was on. Those precious seconds had left her feeling more exposed than she ever had before, and several stunned staff had been struggling to find the words to even start telling her off when she’d found that her destination was the fifth floor and that there was a stairwell mercifully close by. Maria had wasted no time in seeking the dubious shelter of the stairwell and had taken the stairs two at a time as she hastened to her target, throwing all caution to the wind as the remaining fragments of her outfit teased and exposed every part of her body.
She was one loss away from permanent and total humiliation, and she simply couldn’t afford to let Bryony get to the target first. And since Bryony was a commerce student far more familiar with the physical library than Maria was, she was already half-convinced that any second now the earpiece would erupt one final time to inform her that Bryony had beaten her again and that her defeat was now absolute and final.
As she’d emerged from the stairwell and taken refuge in the aisle though, and realised Bryony was nowhere to be seen, a fresh wave of hope welled up inside her. That hope was now clashing with the reality of having to streak past the people at the tables to acquire the box. The fact that she’d already exposed herself to so many others on the way over in no way made the job ahead any easier.
Worse was yet to come for Maria. Peering around the edge of the aisle again while summoning the courage for one final dash, she began to focus on exactly who was sitting at the tables. She groaned as her brain finally processed what she was seeing. Sitting at one table, with a perfect view of the window that Maria had to reach, was a tall, gangly pale-skinned man with black hair and a pair of glasses that perched haphazardly on a thin long nose.
“Shit!” Maria swore to herself and then clamped a hand over her mouth in case the noise attracted undue attention. It would have to have been Bobby. Of course – knowing her luck so far – it would have to have been Bobby who chose that table of all tables to sit at, and on today of all days.
Bobby Chen was a year younger than Maria but in the same programme and she’d previously been a teaching assistant in some of his advanced programming courses. Needless to say, the number of women in the Computer Science Department wasn’t quite at the same levels as other Departments around the Campus, and the number of women who were as attractive as Maria was already low in the general population anyway, let alone in the niche space she and Bobby inhabited. It was also undeniably the case that Bobby lived up to every one of the usually unfair stereotypes that afflicted the discipline. The awkward crush that Bobby had almost instantly developed over Maria was something she’d worked steadfastly to avoid, ever since he professed his undying love via a hand-crafting a Pokemon-styled figurine of her, resplendent in its own Pokeball. He had, she shuddered at the memory, proudly said in front of her friends that he was only interested in catching her from now on. Bryony had found that especially amusing at the time and had given her no end of grief about it.
Maria had found it neither desirable, necessary or indeed easy to explain to Bobby the variety of different ways that he was not her type, and so she had resorted to a policy of avoidance where possible.
And now she’d have to streak past him in this absurd partial outfit, all because a smart woman like herself had been dumb enough to let things spiral out of control. She closed her eyes tightly, hoping that when she’d re-opened them Bobby had suddenly found it necessary to disappear off to the toilet after consuming one Mountain Dew too many.
Stealing herself for the upcoming humiliation of being spotted by her greasy admirer, Maria took one small step out from behind the aisle, her body clenched tight and her legs shivering weakly. She felt like she could barely move. Taking a huge breath in though, she knew deep down that speed was of the essence, and she could hardly hope to simply tip-toe through a throng of people in her current ensemble. Two losses to Bryony had turned her outfit into something a pole dancer at a strip club would probably call “excessively revealing”, and Bobby seemed to have a sixth sense for spotting Maria at a distance even when she was wearing her far more comfortable and sensible hoody and baggy jeans combo. Her proximity and her clothing now would probably give him a heart attack!
Maria willed her legs to move forward, and she edged closer to the window slowly, before beginning to build up acceleration. She half-expected Bryony to come flying out of the stairwell behind her at any moment, sprint past, grab the box, hold it aloft, and then point with a triumphant and evil grin at a shattered and defeated Maria. She simply couldn’t let that happen!
Maria tapped into the deep well of fear and found the source of the strength she needed to press on. Now she was running, as lightly as she could while hoping that her footsteps wouldn’t betray her presence, and her eyes were locked on the prize. When she passed Bobby’s table, she was practically flying along, and the back of the skirt was horizontal – her completely bare bottom presented for full inspection.
Bobby looked up in surprise for a moment, dragging his attention away from the assorted collection of historical manga books he’d happily stumbled across in the University bookstore. He gave a disapproving glare at whichever rude library patron had so abruptly intruded upon his close, thorough and detailed inspection of a Japanese character’s rather well-endowed breasts.
He looked down again with a grunt and had settled back into the book for a few seconds when suddenly he gave a strangled gurgle and his eyes almost popped out of their sockets. Looking up slowly, his mouth hung open as he was treated to the sight of a woman at the window, her back to him but with little else hidden.
He slowly stood up from his chair, banging his knees on the desk and disturbing the books further. However, even the Japanese manga girl’s breasts in his new haul couldn’t compete with the real-world artwork that was currently being exhibited, and he gave the books no further concern.
“M’lady…” he stammered, cursing himself under his breath for having left his fedora behind at home so that now he couldn’t do this fine specimen the ultimate courtesy of tipping his hat to her.
The woman turned around and Bobby almost fell backwards in shock. Maria Higgins, only never as he’d seen her before! Maria let out a whimper as her moment of triumph was doused with an incredible wave of raw searing embarrassment, as she stood in front of her not-so-secret admirer and bared an order of magnitude more skin than she’d even hoped he see.
She tried to do a small hand wave to try and make this all seem casual and ordinary, but the drool coming out of his mouth and the way his hand seemed to be fumbling in his trouser pockets simply compounded her problems. Oh, dear God, she thought in a moment of revulsion, he wasn’t going to masturbate right here and now, was he?! Feeling trapped against the window, Maria didn’t know exactly how to respond. When his hand emerged from his trouser pockets, Maria’s sense of relief that he wasn’t trying to jerk himself off was short-lived when she realised that he’d actually been retrieving his phone. A phone that undoubtedly had a camera in it.
She let out a high-pitched squeak and tried to wave both hands in front of her to dissuade him from what was likely to be his next course of action.
“M… M… Maria, the flower of my dreams!” Bobby said, his voice breaking from the strain that the sight of Maria was placing on his nervous system. “Y… you’ve come to me, so that we may finally find comfort in tender embrace!”
Maria sucked in a deep breath. Hell. No. She thought.
Bobby held the phone up. “Perhaps a photo of us to capture this moment, so that we may tell our children of the day we professed undying love to each other?” He asked, a wheedling and nasal hope evident in his tone.
Maria opened her mouth to say something, however, no sound emerged and she was at a complete loss at what to say. After a few seconds, Maria realised she’d even forgotten to exhale, and let out a deep sigh that only caused her tattered clothing to flap around some more.
The phone fell out of Bobby’s grasp as his eyes settled on Maria’s chest, and she thought for a moment that the man was going to faint. As the phone clattered to the floor, Maria was also aware that others at the nearby tables were paying more and more attention to the impromptu floor show. As Bobby raised his hand up to take a picture with the phone he hadn’t yet realised he’d dropped, Maria took the opportunity to dash past and seek the relative safety of what she sincerely hoped was an empty stairwell.
As she sprinted with every ounce of speed Maria could muster, Bobby called out behind her “Please, oh sweet Maria, wait for me!” Realising now that his finger was prodding at thin air rather than the screen of his iPhone as he’d expected, he looked down in confusion and spotted the device on the floor. Dropping to his haunches, he picked up the phone and looked back up at the retreating backside of his beloved. With an instinct and speed born from many an attempt at an up-skirt photo, Bobby pointed the phone at Maria and the disobedient skirt that simply refused to cover her bottom. The light click of the camera claimed a small consolation prize at least, as the target of his affections slipped out of his grasp once more and headed off towards destinations unknown.
Then, with another satisfied gurgle, Bobby fell back on to the floor and just sat there for a while, wondering if he’d dreamed it all. As his trembling hands grasped at his phone though, he stared admiringly at the single image he’d taken, proof positive of his latest encounter, and clasped it to his heart.
Then a thought occurred to him – now he’d have to handcraft an updated evolution of the Pokemon character for his beloved – after she’d been so generous as to provide a new costume idea for it. This day kept getting better and better, he beamed.
****
Bryony stumbled through a side entrance to the library and emerged into a small corridor that had several glass doors leading off it, fighting every urge to press one hand against her micro-skirt so as to stop it from bouncing up and down. The larger heavy wooden door at the very end would lead into the main open foyer of the library, and on the other side of that foyer were the elevators that would take her to the fifth floor and her third and final victory. Instead, all those elevators would do now would be to take her where Maria Higgins apparently now already stood, holding the very box that by all rights belonged in Bryony’s own hands.
Unimpeded, the frilly yet impossibly short skirt continued to flash her crotch and ass to what would have been a mesmerising rhythmic beat for any men who happened to look her way. She’d flashed at least ten people on her way over to the library, with the skirt actively fighting against her futile efforts to cover up by finding a new way to billow out and flash skin every time she moved. She had given up trying to walk – hoping against all evidence that the skirt would settle down – and had instead resorted to maximum possible speed, leaving plenty of spectators to comment either in outrage or admiration at the beautiful ass and barely concealed breasts that streaked past them, as the red-faced owner of these magnificent assets mumbled “sorry, sorry, sorry!” to anyone still with the capacity to listen.
Not that the skirt now didn’t have serious competition in terms of attracting attention. After the latest announcement that Maria had acquired her second target, the voice had chirped in her ear that the game was now deadlocked at 2-2 and that in a matter of moments, the voice would reveal the final clue that would decide once and for all who’d be graduating a winner, and who’d be graduating a sinner.
Bryony’s jaw had clenched in determination – there was no way she’d be streaking across the stage in front of everyone after all the hard work of the past few years. However, as she nervously waited for the final clue, her body tensed in preparation for what she knew would be another humiliating modification to her outfit.
She hadn’t had to wait long for either the modification or the humiliation. After Maria’s first solved clue, Bryony had been subjected to the embarrassment of having her panties dissolve on her, and her skirt shorten to the point of obscenity. Now, it was the turn of her upper half to receive the same treatment. With a yelp, Bryony’s hands flew to her stomach as she found the material of her top begin to edge up her body. More and more of her tummy became exposed as she uselessly tried to yank at the material to keep it down. She quickly realised though that doing so only risked tearing it off her shoulders as the top was resolute and determined in its mission to minimise itself.
As the top climbed up, Bryony resigned herself into it turning into an even skimpier and obscene crop top, only to then discover in horror that the top had greater aspirations than even that. Her eyes bulging, Bryony watched on in horror as the top continued its relentless shrinkage even as her breasts came into view and her nipples popped out.
It was only when the top was halfway up her chest that it finally stopped and, in between panicked shallow breaths, Bryony spotted herself in the reflection of a glass door to her left. A woman in a ridiculously short skirt and with a top that covered her shoulders and a thin strip of skin below her neck, stared back wild-eyed at her. The thin strip of skin beneath her neck read “Cheer!”, and both breasts were substantially exposed.
“I… I can’t continue like this!” Bryony shrieked, pleading for the mysterious voice to return and propose some alternative.
She pressed herself against the corridor and prayed that no one decided now was the opportune time to take a stroll from their exploration of the library and stretch their legs. Shivering, she looked back and forth and her mind boggled at the fact that surely Maria must have suffered this same malfunction after Bryony’s last successful clue, and yet she’d managed to pull it together to solve a clue of her own.
Then, as she trembled and draped a protective arm across her chest, she glanced down and realised that the pom poms that she hitched to her belt for ease, were similarly shrinking at a rapid rate. Gawking at them in amazement, Bryony realised that soft long strands in the pom poms were bunching together and the small hand grips that were on each had similarly morphed into something else. With a start, Bryony realised what this strange organisation had planned. The two pom poms had shrunken and turned into glorified nipple tassels, and the handles she’d previously used to grip them were now similarly shrunken and turned into something that could be clipped to her exposed breasts.
With a shudder, Bryony saw what she had to do, and hurriedly unclipped the pom poms from her belt. Then, closing her eyes and grimacing in preparation for the upcoming punishment on her sensitive nipples, she gingerly placed a pom over each breast and tenderly clipped both of them on. Mercifully, the pinching on her magnificent mamilla was gentler than she’d thought, and it seemed the organisation had at least had the consideration for the clamps to be somewhat cushioned. Still, Bryony couldn’t help but unleash a grunt as the clamps latched on, and while she now at least had two bushy tassels that would dangle down and partly obscure the lower half of her breasts, she still squirmed awkwardly at the uncomfortable and unfamiliar sensation. Bryony was also intimately aware that the tassels may have covered some skin, however, the look of the top and the tassels together was still far more extreme than anything Bryony had ever seen anyway wear on campus.
If she was seen, then there would be an awful lot of her that would be seen that wasn’t used to being seen…
“Well done, Ms Richmond,” the voice in her ear piped up.
“Thank you so much!” Bryony retorted, with as much sarcasm as she could force into her voice.
“You’re welcome.” If the voice had any sense of how sarcastic Bryony’s response had been, it certainly wasn’t going to deign to acknowledge it. “Now,” it continued, briskly, “I imagine you want your final clue!”
Bryony nodded vigorously, still throwing looks up and down the corridor and wondering just how many people were already in this part of the library, which was at least a little off to the side of the main area. Bryony envisioned someone in the library suddenly making the decision to parade a bunch of visitors on a pre-graduation campus tour down to the side exit, where they’d emerge and march down the corridor, passing and pointing at an embarrassed and increasingly exposed Bryony, while she pressed up against the wall and hoped that the wall would absorb and spirit her away from this predicament.
Thankfully, no one seemed to have made that impromptu decision just yet. With her heart beating at three times the normal rate though, her fevered imagination thought it couldn’t be too far away though.
“So,” the voice interrupted her day-mares, “the clue is simply this: ‘You’ll find your salvation in the memories of those who have formed the foundations for a chapter of success.’ Good luck, Ms Richmond, the next time you hear from me – other penalties notwithstanding of course – we’ll be discussing the final outcome of our little game. I trust you are still aiming to be on the right side of that outcome…”
****
Maria hurried along the edge of the park in the middle of the campus, keeping to the leafy tree line that bordered the park and separated it from the river that meandered alongside. There was no walking path on this side of the river, although there was a path on the other side. Unfortunately, the river wasn’t wide enough that people walking along that path would be too far away to confuse what she was now wearing for something more modest. The tasselled nipple clamps swayed, and she still occasionally winced at the entirely new sensation of them connected to her sensitive breasts.
Now she was outside again, and with a growing summer breeze to really play havoc with the material, her skirt was flying this way and that. Even when at its most obedient the skirt only barely covered her ass, and now that the wind was having some fun as she ran along, she was incredibly conscious that she was flashing her backside to anyone and everyone who wandered by.
She tried to ignore just how vulnerable and exposed she really was, and focussed her considerable yet highly distracted brain on the clue that represented the final tie-breaker in this winner-takes-all, loser-bares-all contest: “You’ll find your salvation in the memories of those, who have formed the foundations for a chapter of success.”
At first, she’d thought that perhaps the clue was referring to the University Archives, which were in the basement of the very library she’d been in when the clue had been given to her. However, that had seemed too easy, and she’d been halfway down the stairs when the thought occurred to her that, as this was the last clue and the ultimate loser would be walking their way across the Graduation Stage – the clue could be referring to the Auditorium Hall where the Graduation Event would take place.
She instinctively felt that the organisers would want her to be close by to the scene of her final and absolute humiliation, if indeed she was the last one to reach the target. Of course, that could also mean that the Auditorium Hall was a red herring that would get her there, while Bryony was elsewhere solving the problem and acquiring the very object that would doom poor Maria to a lifetime of being remembered as “that weird girl who ran naked across the stage in front of everyone”.
Maria agonised over whether she was doing the right thing by heading to the Hall already, but she’d committed now. As she dodged between the trees, trying to use them as cover, she heard a series of wolf whistles from her left, and she made the mistake of looking in the direction from which they came. A group of men were standing on the opposite side of the river and were pointing and laughing at her, as they tried to get as close to the water as possible to see more of her. Maria shrank back and hid behind a tree for a moment, but that only meant that she was now more visible to the people in the park behind her. She was soon subjected to more laughs and shouts of appreciation and disapproval from another group of men who were coming onto the park to play a ball game.
Caught in a bind, Maria knew that simply hiding by a tree only gave Bryony more and more of an advantage. Gritting her teeth, she had to choose which group of men to expose herself the most to. Since the first group were at least separated by the river and wouldn’t be able to physically catch her if they tried, she hopped out from behind the tree and ran along the river bank, trying to block out the jeers, whistles and offers of dates that were now floating across the water. A few of the men on the other side of the river began to run along the path, keeping pace with Maria and laughing loudly. Maria stopped trying to use her hands to cover her body and instead covered her ears instead, upping her pace and hoping they’d soon grow tired.
As she ran, she tried to turn the clue over in her head one last time, fighting the self-doubt that was beginning to consume her. Maybe “chapters of success” referred to Student Chapters and Clubs? If that was the case, she was running in the wrong direction! She stopped for a moment, but when she turned Maria saw that she’d built up a small lead on the men on the other side of the river, and if she ran back she’d have to pass them again. Instead, she made the snap decision to push on to the Auditorium, hoping that her first gut instinct was correct. If it was, then “foundations” might refer to the basement level of the building, and while that was undoubtedly large, it would at least give her a fighting chance.
Flashing her naked rear one more time, and with “Class of 2024!” bouncing up and down in small writing on the back of her flimsy pleated micro-skirt, Maria forged on towards the Hall that was now just around the corner and across a broad driveway. There would be a side entrance somewhere on the right-hand side, and Maria prayed that it would be open, as walking through the main entrance with everyone arriving for Graduation would nearly be as bad as what would happen if she lost. And that didn’t bear thinking about…
****
[To be concluded in Part 3]
