The heck? she wondered. Do all girls have this problem?

 
Ultragreen
7- Cabin 23B
by Erin Halfelven

 
Shellie and George pedaled through an emerald cathedral made by the pines and oaks of the mixed forest between the town and the academy. The Arizona hills never looked so green, as if they too had been soaked in the radiation from the machinery in the basement of the old house. Even the verge of the steeply winding road glowed with the short winter grass that sprouted after every rain in the mountain springtime.

George made his peculiar noises, exuberant with the effort of climbing the hill, and Shellie felt so alive she came near to bursting out in some silly song, like a character in an old-time musical.

They rode through the gates at Carson Rogers with plenty of time to spare, stopped at the office to sign back in and waved casually at the weekend office person, Harry Bonds, who also taught woodshop and history, part-time.

Their bunk was in Cabin 23, Room B, a rustic building made of timber and stone in the second row behind the main campus quad. They biked there and stored their machines in the nearby utility shed, a more modern building of aluminum sheeting. It wasn’t really necessary to lock the bikes up on campus, but they did so anyway, so they wouldn’t get in the habit of not locking them up when off campus.

Same for their rooms, really; theft was not a problem at the academy, but they had started locking their room when away as a declaration of privacy. This was allowed by school policy as long as someone in administration had a copy of any keys.

Cabin 23 was a four-by-eight, as it was called: four rooms and eight students. About half of the student living at CR was made up of such units. Each room had a separate entrance and shared a large bathroom with one of the other rooms. Fortunately, George and Shelley were not in one of the two-by-twelve dormitories where students had only cubicles instead of semi-private rooms.

The buildings were of stone waist-high, in a bungalow construction, with a covered porch all the way around. Being up in the mountains, the famous Arizona heat was not as much of a problem, and winters saw only a minimum of snow at their elevation. The last snowfall, much celebrated at the time, had fallen in January and was long gone.

Once inside, their room, Shellie threw herself on her bunk, dropping her satchel of books on the floor. “Wow,” she said. “The mountain seemed steeper today.” She rolled over to look up at George standing just inside the room, staring at her with an odd expression.

“You wanna go get dinner in the cafeteria before they stop serving?” she asked him.

He mumbled something and shuffled toward his own bed.

“Huh?” Normally she understood George, but sometimes his babble reached peak incoherence.

“I said, ‘Garbage in, garbage out,’” he replied a little more clearly, not looking directly at her.

Shellie giggled. It was a phrase they had both learned in their computer sciences class, and it had application in many places. “The cafeteria isn’t bad at all, really. And our folks do pay for it. Also, I’m kinda hungry.”

George waved vaguely. “Go ahead. I’ll come in a bit.”

Shellie nodded. “Saturday night is roast beef sandwiches with gravy, one of your favorites,” she got up and headed for the door to their shared bathroom. “I’m gonna wash up.”

“Lock the door while you’re in there,” George reminded her, looking concerned.

“I’m not gonna take a bath,” she said.

George shook his head, looking disturbed. “You gotta lock the door every time, so you don’t forget. I don’t want you to get kicked out for being a girl. It would be terrible, and I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to.”

His hound dog expression almost made Shellie giggle again, but she repressed it. George might get his feelings hurt when he was trying to be genuine. “I’m more worried that they won’t let us continue experimenting and I get stuck, so yeah, you’re right. I’ll be sure to lock the door.” She turned to grin at him before going through the internal passage to the toilet.

George gave one of his spastic grins back, sudden and fake-looking as always. Shellie did not consider it significant. George was always George; kind but socially inept.

In the bathroom, she hurried, locking both doors before sitting down to do her business, and wasn’t that weird, and discovering that, furthermore, it was almost impossible not to dribble on herself down there. The heck? she wondered. Do all girls have this problem?

A bit of toilet paper took care of it, but she wanted to have a look. That proved harder than she expected. Without a hand mirror, she had to spread her legs and look between them at the full-length mirror to get a view.

Huh? A couple of fleshy folds but not much to see.

With the blood rushing to her head, she kept looking and used a finger to examine herself until she got dizzy. Yup, she thought, I’m a girl. And things are kinda sensitive down there.

Just then, someone tried the door from Room A, and Shellie almost landed on her head trying to stand up quickly. “Be done in a minute,” she called out. She blushed, thinking about what she had been doing when the neighbor had tried the door.

“Who’s in there?” inquired a voice from the A side of the door. It sounded like Andy Fluyt who shared A with Denny Pointer. Both of them were George’s age, two years older than Shellie.

“It’s me,” she called back, quickly pulling her pants up and turning on a faucet to wash her hands. The sound came out a bit higher pitched than usual when she raised her voice, but she didn’t notice, covering her anxiety with the noise of running water.

“Who is it?” asked Denny’s voice.

“Sounds like a girl,” said Andy.

But with the faucet running, Shellie didn’t hear that part, either.