Life Among the Mailgirls Ch. 01

For Thirteen, this curiosity hadn't been sexual at the time. Or, at least, she didn't think it had been; who knew anymore? She'd minored in Women's Studies as an undergraduate, and she'd come to the East Coast specifically to study under Dr. Gillian Schang in New Haven, whose work in Anthropology included a particular focus on Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism. Thirteen's own forthcoming doctorate was technically in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, but it was heavily flavored by Women's Studies. Her research to that point had been women's place in society, but also women's "culture," in and of itself. She'd been interested how women interacted with one another -- almost with a social psychology bent. And so, Thirteen had approached what it meant to be a mailgirl from a purely academic standpoint.

Gillian had pushed it upon her even more, encouraging her to double-down on "mailgirl culture" as an area of focus for her doctoral thesis. And Thirteen had complied. After all, the entire thing seemed tailor-made for her particular sliver of academic interest. It was also Gillian who suggested field work: although there had been a handful of peer-reviewed journal articles about mailgirls from an industrial psychology or economic standpoint, no one had yet looked at it from a cultural or anthropological direction. And then, too, Thirteen had agreed and complied, fully intending to fly to Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, to interview and observe some of the nascent mailgirl programs that had begun to get a foothold on the West Coast.

But Gillian wanted Thirteen to go one step further. There was an opportunity, she pushed, to truly understand what made a mailgirl tick, and how a mailgirl interacted with both her peers and her superiors. Thirteen would be losing something by using anonymous surveys and one-on-one interviews, researching and reporting on everything second-hand. No, Gillian reasoned. The best way for Thirteen to study what it meant to be a mailgirl was the live among the mailgirls, to live as a mailgirl herself.

Thirteen, naturally, had balked.

She had more information than most girls had when opting to become a mailgirl, having studied how the programs had worked in Japan, Central Europe, and in the Pacific Northwest. She'd read firsthand accounts of girls being humiliated and tormented time and again. Not every program was exactly the same; in fact, policies varied widely from company to company, depending on their authors. But the commonalities and central concept should have been enough to terrify any girl away. There was no way Thirteen would ever be caught stripping off her clothes and signing her life away.

As she remembered how adamant she had once been, Thirteen slithered out of her skirt, and let it pool at her feet.

Gillian had continued to push her, and had even gone so far as to secure a privately-funded research grant for the two of them. There wasn't a company out there that was going to sign a sixty-year-old like Gillian on as a mailgirl, but she continued to believe that she and her student were at the forefront of something truly fascinating. She pressed Thirteen forcefully, over the course of three separate meetings, before Thirteen had made an empty promise to give it more thought. And, even as Thirteen designed a framework for her research into a mailgirls program that had sprung up in a dot.com in San Francisco the year prior, Gillian hadn't given up on the idea of a placing a research assistant into a program as a mailgirl; if that wasn't going to be Thirteen, she was going to find another girl. Gillian arranged a meeting between Thirteen and Guy Dubuc, another faculty member at Yale, as Gillian herself interviewed a handful of young, attractive first- and second-year female graduate students. While Gillian hadn't come right out and said it, the implied threat was clear -- she'd move on with another girl, and Thirteen would be looking for a new faculty advisor.

That was the stick. But Gillian wasn't empty-handed when it came to a carrot. The research grant she'd received was sizeable, and she was willing to put the majority of it into Thirteen's hands. Food and housing would be completely covered, and Thirteen would receive a generous stipend for other expenses, to use entirely as she saw fit. Moreover, a doctoral thesis on the mailgirl controversy, along with a joint publication with the reputable Gillian Schang, probably meant a faculty position at a place like Stanford or Berkeley, or one of the Ivies.

In the end, it was the opportunity at USF that got Thirteen to finally commit. In San Francisco, she would have been only just north of her mother and step-father in Santa Clara, whereas USF's New York headquarters meant there would be an entire continent between the shame of what she was doing and her family. Also, USF at that time had only just announced their mailgirls program -- which meant that Gillian and Thirteen could watch a program be built from the ground up. And, perhaps most importantly, Gillian knew the program's director personally. Will Barrow, now USF's Director of Human Capital (a smaller unit within USF's larger Human Resources division), had been an undergraduate at Yale, and had studied under Gillian. Unlike other programs, Thirteen could be assured she'd be protected and looked after -- relatively, of course. With Barrow in charge, Gillian was convinced that there was less of a risk that USF's initiative would descend into the realms of full-on sexual slavery that had swallowed up a handful of other iterations of mailgirls.

Even then, the uneasy agreement Gillian had brokered between USF on one end, and Thirteen on the other, had nearly fallen apart half a dozen times before the summer began. Fearful of extensions and legal trickery, Thirteen had refused to sign away her Power-of-Attorney to the company, as other girls were forced to as part of their standard mailgirl contracts. For USF, this was a sticking point, and they ultimately budged only after Thirteen had agreed to sign her legal rights over to Gillian and Yale's Anthropology Department, instead.

USF, on their end, was wary of what they were getting out of the deal, and concerned that they hadn't laid eyes on this grad student turned potential mailgirl. In addition to sharing Thirteen's research, Gillian assured the company that that needn't worry about Thirteen, but they insisted on seeing her picture nonetheless. When they received headshots and fully clothed pictures, they insisted on seeing her body. When they received a naked selfie that Thirteen had taken in her bathroom mirror (to that point, the most humiliating thing that Thirteen had ever done), they'd insisted that she send them more, including shots from behind, from below, from all over. And, the fact that there had been six days between that next submission and when Thirteen finally received an invitation to come down to New York had been tortuous to the girl's self esteem.

In the locker room, Thirteen hung her skirt in her locker, and began to unbutton her already half-unbuttoned blouse. Her black lace, demi-cup bra was exposed first, and a matching thong came into view as she worked her way south. Because USF now controlled every aspect of her life within the building, they even mandated how she hung and folded her "street clothes" as she got "into uniform." Her blouse was hung carefully alongside the skirt, but everything else was to be folded neatly on the lower shelf -- pants, if she'd been wearing them, top (if not hung), then panties, then bra. Outerwear to innerwear, top to bottom. Mistress Zero claimed that this was so the mailgirls' locker room, exposed to the elevator lobby, would never look cluttered or out-of-sorts. The truth was that it was just another petty form of control.

Thirteen was certainly exposed. She was facing her locker, and had her back turned towards the locker room's entrance, but she guessed there were still almost twenty people on the far side who were able to watch her undress. If she turned, Thirteen would only see her own reflection, wearing nothing more than her bra and panties. But it was mirror-glass, and though Thirteen couldn't see out, she knew full well that her audience was able to see in. The mirror-glass ran the length of the locker room -- from the showers, to the sinks, to the bondage-and-discipline set-up by the front door, and anyone on the other side could watch her shower or put on make-up, watch her lap water from the dog-bowl, watch her pee while on one of the exposed toilets. But the mirror-glass had become a blessing in disguise, as even if she knew there were men and women out there able to watch her every move and see every part of her body, Thirteen could trick herself into almost forgetting that fact. She'd entered through the main elevator lobby that morning, and she'd exit through it that evening; in-between, she could deny that that outside world was even there.

Thirteen reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra. She slid the straps down her exposed arms, revealing round, natural, and firm Goldilocks breasts -- neither too big, nor too small. She had pinkish brown areolae, and nipples that had, as of late, spent more time standing at attention than at rest. That very moment was no different, as the cool air of the locker room, combined with the embarrassment and excitement of undressing more-or-less in public, had them standing upright and outwards.

Would transferring to Guy Dubuc to finish out her PhD have been the end of the world? Would letting some other girl assist Gillian Schang and her research into mailgirl culture have set Thirteen back that much, career-wise? After all, Thirteen had suffered for that honor, more than she had ever expected to. Earlier that summer, Thirteen would have mostly certainly said "no," and been more than happy to let some other girl take her place here at USF. Now that she was mostly looking at her time as a mailgirl in the rearview mirror, she felt differently, and just hoped that her work was as significant as Gillian assured her it was.

Thirteen found the waistline of her panties, and slid them off. She dutifully folded the thong neatly, or as neatly as anyone could expect her to fold such a minimal amount of fabric, and carefully positioned it in her locker with her bra on top. She was shaved bare -- as all the girls were -- from the neck down, and her pussy was visible to anyone who even bothered to glance in her direction. She had no tattoos and no piercings (aside from her ear lobes), and the only markings she bore on her body were from a faded, black, felt-tip marker: Thirteen was clearly demarcated as such, with her assigned number scrawled on her right hip.

She'd showered three times since Mistress Zero had traced the number thirteen on her body the previous morning, but the reality was that the marker was stubborn and difficult to get off without vigorous scrubbing. Back in early June, Thirteen had insisted on getting it off before she went home. She had hated seeing it when she was home, being reminded of what her daily life was now like. But, like so many other things as she spent more and more days as a mailgirl, Thirteen had eventually surrendered -- why bother going through that effort if she was just going to be marked up again the next day? Yesterday, Mistress Zero had only run her marker over the previous day's number thirteen, as she'd done the day before that and the day before that. And as she'd do later this morning.

Thirteen took her earrings out. She took off her rings, bracelets, and watch. She unfastened her platinum pendant. All of these things were placed in a utilitarian metal cup that each girl had in her locker for such items, and Thirteen wondered -- not for the first time -- why she bothered to put jewelry on in the morning, in the first place.

With one notable exception among USF's mailgirls, there seemed to be two schools of thought as to how the girls should dress in the morning. The first held that, since they would be stripping the moment they arrived at work, it didn't matter what they wore. These girls -- and they were increasingly in the minority -- arrived each day in something like yoga pants or lounge wear, comfortable sneakers and lightweight sweatshirts.

The other school, and the one that Thirteen was now firmly encamped in, felt the need to overcompensate for their actual work uniforms by putting themselves together as if they were going to real, normal jobs on Wall Street. It didn't matter if they had to get up even earlier than they already were. It didn't matter if they showered and did their hair at home only to have to repeat the exercise here in the locker room a short while later. Thirteen liked getting dressed in the morning, she liked the normalcy of the routine, she liked being able to pass as any other girl commuting to the office. The style had gravitated more and more towards "vampish" though, and there were any number of unspoken rules among the mailgirls themselves that they all followed, even if Mistress Zero had nothing to do with them. Only skirts and dresses were worn, for instance. There was also a fine line between "flirty" and "slutty," and it was a "no-no" to cross from the former into the latter. Short skirts were acceptable, to a point; tightness, on the other hand, was far more important.

Thirteen, like most girls, had started in the first camp -- sweatpants and jeans, t-shirts and casual shoes -- almost as if the way she dressed was itself the first stage on the twelve steps towards becoming a full-blown mailgirl. Embarassment. Depression. Nihilism. But then, eventually, came acceptance, and a desire to fit in with the mores and habits of the girls before her. And, before she knew it, Thirteen was spending an alarmingly high percentage of her stipend on business-wear that she'd put on only for the commute to work, and then again for the commute home.

And then, outside of those two schools of commuting wardrobe, there was Number One. She hadn't been assigned her number for any specific reason, only that she'd just happened to be approached to volunteer just an hour or so before Number Three and the original Number Two. But something about the number had set her apart, even if it was just in her own mind. She alone commuted to and from work in-uniform -- naked, except for a cropped, tan, summer-weight trench coat.

Given that her locker was more-or-less in the center of the locker room, Thirteen really had her choice as to whether she would shower on one end of the room or the other. Girls tended to gravitate towards the shower block closest to their lockers, but they weren't slavish towards doing so. There were eight showerheads for twenty-four girls, and they all needed to shower around the same times as one another in the morning, over lunch, and in the evening. In practice, then, the girls showered wherever there was an open spot. If there wasn't one, and they weren't willing or able to wait, they typically joined one of the other girls and shared.

Number Twenty-Three had joined Twenty-One in the shower block on Thirteen's end of the locker room, and both Fifteen and Sixteen looked to be following behind momentarily. On the other end, Two and Three were both still finger-deep in their own sex (hence, the moaning Thirteen had been greeted with that morning) under a single shower head. One and Twelve had just begun their respective showers alone. And Five was just getting out. Thirteen chose to cross to the other side of the locker room and take Five's place, counter-intuitively preferring to shower as close to the masturbating pair of girls as possible. The logic went that, when one girl or another was touching herself, no one in the audience on the other side of the mirror glass was going to pay one lick of attention to the other girls nearby.

Twelve had taken the showerhead closest to the two masturbators, however, and only One's presence under the far left showerhead had kept Five from sliding any further away from them when she'd been showering. Like the toilets leading to the service elevators, there were no partitions, no shower curtains, and no privacy; the shower blocks themselves were open to the room beyond. But it wasn't as if the locker room filled with steam each morning; not only would that steam have fogged the view the USF employees had of the showering mailgirls, but it would have meant the mailgirls would have been allowed a simple creature comfort as warm water.

Cold showers were universally acknowledged as a solution for getting too aroused, but you couldn't tell that to the two girls with their fingers inside themselves at one end of the shower block. Such was a fact of life in the locker room, as the girls dealt with the confusing feelings of arousal caused by their current vocation. Full-blown lesbian love-making was a punishable offense, at least here in the building, but Two and Three (a couple since before Thirteen had joined the program) managed to stay on the right side of the line by keeping their hands to themselves. It wasn't exactly uncommon for two girls to be diddling themselves side by side, but the amount of eye contact and the proximity with which Two and Three were doing it was rare. More common sights included girls washing one another's backs or shampooing one another's hair, sharing a brief and friendly peck on the cheeks or even lips as a quick hello, or playfully slapping someone's ass. Mostly, though, this was reserved for the generally more upbeat end-of-the-day shower than the somber and dutiful early morning shower with the work day still ahead.

While Thirteen was content to let them continue on with their ministrations without interruption, Two grunted out a quick, "Hi" as Thirteen stepped into the shower just a few feet to her right.

"Hi," Thirteen offered in a non-committal tone. She felt the frigid water fall over her as she turned the shower on, and ducked her head under it quickly.

It wasn't that Thirteen was above masturbating in the locker room; that ship had sailed long ago, and she could likely count on at least one session of self-pleasure before the end of her shift today. But she'd gotten herself off earlier that morning, as she had every morning since sometime in early July, and Thirteen had just enough self control (or, at least, she told herself that she did) that she didn't necessarily have to climax before her shift began. It was an utterly pointless line in the sand, given the behavior of the girls around her, and the predictability of her own expected behavior a bit later in the morning. And she had failed to live up to that morning conviction already once in the last week -- losing a battle of wills with herself, and succumbing to resignation and rationalization. But in a life defined by control and surrender, Thirteen comforted herself by knowing she could at least try to exert control over this.

Beside her, One reached for the communal shampoo. Thirteen glanced back towards the metal desk, and -- after confirming that Mistress Zero still hadn't arrived -- decided against going through the show of shaving her pussy. She was already completely bare and stubble-free, having shaved at home that morning. But it was still a calculated risk, if Mistress Zero were to be watching on the other side of the glass. It wasn't necessarily a requirement that the girls shave every morning, only that they be completely hairless when their shifts began. Often, even when unnecessary, Thirteen still went through the exercise, as it was easier to make a show of the act than to be subjected her mistress's inspection.

Showering in cold water was another hardship that Thirteen had first learned to endure, and later to prefer. It woke her up in the morning, and cooled her down after running around the building at the end of the day. Even in her own apartment, Thirteen had started showering without warm water. It was, admittedly, still nerve-wracking to shave her intimate areas in cold water. But Thirteen couldn't deny that it left her with a closer shave, and she was oddly proud of how smooth her pubic area was, both visually and to the touch.