Good Christian Panties

Good Christian Panties

         The auditorium filled up by drips and plops of students, all of whom wore skirts.
         Iris stood a step outside the student entrance, watching legs go by. Some were double-sheathed in thick grey tights and khaki bells that flared between waists and kneecaps; some let the fine hairs on their shins breathe in the air conditioning. All ended in the same black flats as Iris’s, polished to varying levels of success.
         There was that, at least.
         “Iris!” Yalta elbowed against the crowd’s tide, her cross swinging violently around her neck. It looked like it was trying to beat her collarbone into submission.
         She was wearing a skirt, too, yanking it down every ten seconds. “Didn’t you get the dress code memo?”
         Iris got lots of dress code memos. Everyone did; they were as much a part of the Christian Institute life as the prayer requests that flooded her email inbox right before midterms and finals.
         “Must’ve read that one wrong,” she muttered to Yalta’s shoes. No polish gunk anywhere in that mirror shine. “I thought we just had to wear our uniforms.” Her thighs shifted, pulling the material of her pants against each other’s grain. The cloth crotch dropped an inch under her own womanhood, awkward when she sat and it bunched. But comfortable.
         “Technically,” and here Yalta’s eyes tilted up to her right and her voice tilted down into the monotonous drone she used to recite Old Testament lineage passages, “it did say only uniforms in general were required, but skirts were strongly suggested.”
         Strongly suggested. Oh, boy.
         “But you’re fine. You should be.” Skirts ebbed and flowed around them. “Like two demerits, maximum.”
         That did make Iris feel a little better. Two demerits only meant an hour of supervised Commandments study.
         “Two minutes,” said the loudspeaker. “Repeat. Two minutes.”
         Yalta clumped toward the announcement, eyes bouncing around the black rectangles that framed her vision. The auditorium filled from the front brushing the stage without a gap until three-quarters back, where girls suddenly ended and seats gaped empty to the wall. Iris slipped into the nearest spot.
         “Fathergod.” Professor DuKaukus leaned over the onstage podium into the microphone. A thousand heads before her bowed in an almost audible snap. Iris closed her eyes and tried to see God in the veins behind her eyelids.
         “O Fathergod, we thank Thee for your gracious generosity in lending Dr. Goodwin our ears. Fathergod we thank thee for sharing your wisdom through Dr. Goodwin. We need to hear her o Fathergod protector of most delicate womanhood. In Fathergod’s name amen.” Professor DuKaukus always prayed like steam from a delicious meal was tickling her nose and waiting impatiently for her to finish.
         When Iris looked up, the professor and her podium had melted off the stage and left a large calico dress of a woman, propped up by stick legs and topped with a heap of white hair that sparkled and reminded Iris of vanilla ice cream.
         The skirts fluttered. Dr. Goodwin didn’t move until they quieted; then she took one step forward.
“Sexual relations.”
She shaped each syllable against her teeth and pushed them in her audience’s lap.
“SEX-you-al. Re-LAY-tions.”
Iris instantly felt guilty for no real reason.
“Sexual relations! My young daughters in Christ, I ill shout it to the rafters until you repent and refuse what Eve has given you! SINNERS in the GARDEN!”
There had been a few odd thoughts about Beret Boy as she looked through her old yearbook last week…
“YOU are responsible for YOURSELF in the EYES of GOD!”
I’m sorry, God, Iris thought to the ceiling. I shouldn’t look at mustaches.
“YOU are responsible for what you do! YOU are responsible for what you THINK. YOU are responsible for what you ALLOW into your BODIES.” Dr. Goodwin squinted and frowned until her face was nothing but a wrinkled pair of eyebrows. “YOU—only YOU.  I do not care what the media or your male friends” (spit out like flies caught between her teeth) “tell you.”
Iris didn’t have any male friends, but she made a mental note.
“YOU are RE-SPON-SI-BLE for YOUR. BODIES.”
Her body remained unimpressed. It shifted in its wooden bucket.
Dr. Goodwin snapped her fingers, sharply interrupting the fans humming to themselves. Professor DuKaukus appeared holding out a big leather slouch of a bag.
“YOU are RESPONSIBLE for what you PUT on your BODIES, you women of God and Eve. REMEMBER THAT.” Her hand dived into the bag and surfaced clutching a bundle of string she shook until it dangled from her finger. “Do any of you know what THIS is?”
Silence. Iris suspected it didn’t come close to covered dress code.
“It’s a thong,” said Yalta a few rows down. Her voice was thin but distinct. “Thong underwear, designed to wear so the line of the undergarment doesn’t show through the outer clothing, popular with low-rise—“
“SATAN’S WORK.” Dr. Goodwin breathed her words into fire and shook her fist. “THESE are the WORK of the DEVIL and his tempTAtions! YOUR temptations!”
To Iris, the string wound around itself (bright pink with a tiny triangle of sherbet orange) just looked like an uncomfortable geometric impossibility.
“I was brought here,” Dr. Goodwin continued a notch calmer, “to discuss something very important to not only yourselves, but your sisters, your mothers, your daughters.” She paused. “Your husbands.”
Iris allowed her mind to wander a little way back to her undone homework; husbands interested her less. Anyway, by second semester sophomore year every Christian Institution wore a mandatory purity ring.
“A FECAL NIGHTMARE!”
That woke her up.
“HYGIENE is JUST as IMPORTANT as YOUR PURITY! You DO NOT want the STINK of SIN ENVELOPING you and DRAWING MEN like FLIES!” Dr. Goodwin held high the thong; it trembled above her ice cream hair.
Taking another step toward the crowd (which watched with young pink lips in young pink Os), Dr. Goodwin dropped her hand. The thong wanted to crawl back into the depths of her bag, Iris could tell. It cringed in the spotlight.
“Who.” It wasn’t a question. “WHO among you have WORN these ABOMINATIONS?”
Nobody, if the utter silence was to be believed.
“I don’t believe you.” Dr. Goodwin paced two steps left, two steps right. Two left…two right, massive bosoms straining against its bondage and calico whipping her ankles.
“I don’t believe you!” she screamed her face red. “WHO TRAPS THEIR WOMANHOOD IN THESE WHORE’S WARES?”
Her stare forced its way through the stage lights, searching. Hunting. It settled on the middle with a triumph Iris could see from all the way back next to the exit sign.
“YOU.”
Iris craned her neck until she felt something pop.
“STAND.”
A slim pair of calf muscles propelled upward a skirt rolled at a nipped-in waist, rolled under a regulation white button-up that wasn’t except between full round breasts to the naval, rolled under so two kneecaps peered out like lumpy faces. Brown hair, unremarkable in its color but thick and smooth, streamed down a back that kept its squared shoulders taut.
Valentina. Iris heard more stories about Valentina than she heard about Moses.
Valentina chewed gum in chapel and choir and New Testament Living, Valentina wore lip gloss instead of regulation Chapstick and got away with it by licking her lips all the time, Valentina held hands and kissed her boyfriend on the face when she went home for holidays.
Valentina touched girls in the west wing’s third floor toilet, Valentina was an expert at avoiding curfew by her third week in the place, Valentina believed in abortion.
Valentina wore no underwear, Iris heard.
“And YOU. In the PANTS.”
Thanks, God,” Iris thought, and breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t completely alone.
“Do you hear me, Pants? In the back. With the unfortunate skin!”
Iris’s pimples, all billion and seven of them, glowed with embarrassment so hot she thought her whole face might burst into flames. If that happened, no chance in any sort of afterlife would she be seen as innocent.
“STAND UP.”
Iris did.
“SHOW US YOUR SIN.”
         Terrified, Iris started to bend down to open her back pack and take out the Stephen King novel she had smuggled in from the secular library just off campus.
         “LOWER YOUR MASCULINE TRAPPINGS AND REVEAL YOUR BLASPHEMOUS PANTIES!”
         Slower and more reluctantly than she had ever done anything in her life, Iris unbuttoned her pants and pushed them down, revealing a lower torso covered in yellow smiley faces. Non-regulation, but how would anybody ever know?
         “BE GONE WITH THEM!”
         Gone? As in—off? All the—all the way?
         “OFF! THE BOTH OF YOU!”
         Valentina slid her hands under skirt and emerged with a wad of blue lace cotton, everything still neatly covered by khaki; Iris fumbled, felt tears gathering troops in her eyes. Finally she stood bare, thatch of pubic hair trying to cringe itself away.
         “GAZE UPON YOUR FALLEN SISTERS AND PRAY MERCY FOR THEIR SOULS!”
         I’m sorry, Iris wailed silently. I’m sorry! Whatever I did, I’m sorry!
         Dr. Goodwin’s fingers snapped and the bag emerged again. She took out a pair of white high-wasted shorts that had small tubes stitched to their leg holes.
         “THESE,” she said, holding them over her head in both fists, a bizarrely triumphant surrender flag, “THESE are good, CHRISTIAN panties.” With surprising accuracy, she sent the panties flying into Iris’s row. “Take these and sin no more.”
         Iris covered herself as quickly as possible, grabbed her smiley face underpants, and ran out the door in a desperate attempt to disappear forever.

THE END