Amy was lying on her stomach on her bed, resting her upper body on her elbows, reading intently from the general anatomy book propped up against the wall in front of her, occasionally highlighting important points with a yellow marker. She looked at her watch. Eleven am -- time, she suspected, for her classmates to start showing up.

For several minutes, as if on cue, she heard growing murmurs and louder conversations starting in the hallway, and saw white-clad students walking past her door, looking for their own rooms. Amy got up to stand in her doorway to see the students arrive, most of them with bags, boxes, or suitcases of possessions, each girl comparing a slip of paper she was holding to the numbers above the doors.

One girl walking past caught Amy's eye -- the blonde from yesterday, Megan, the one who'd seemed... Amy wasn't sure "snotty" was the best word for it, but it was a close fit. Seeing her walking, especially in the skimpy school uniform, made her even more attractive than just seeing her face. She had big, high, perky breasts, the sort of well-defined abs that Amy was approaching but hadn't quite reached, hips that swayed sensuously, and beautiful long legs which were another thing about her that reminded Amy of Miranda. Amy felt a sudden rush of physical attraction to the girl, muted an instant later by memories of her performance yesterday. Today Megan had a sour expression on her face as she walked by, kind of a do-I-have-to-live-with-these-idiots look, which further solidified Amy's negative impression of her. Amy was relieved to see Megan walk past her and enter a room two doors farther down the hall.

Moments later, Amy recognized the brown-haired girl who'd also asked one of the questions at the orientation. Amy smiled at her. "Jackie, right? I saw you yesterday."

The girl smiled back. "Jackie Eason. You're...?"

Amy held out her hand. "Amy Cameron. Which room are you in?"

Jackie looked at her slip of paper again. "Room 27."

Amy pointed down the hall. "It's close to the end, down that way. I hope nobody has to triple up. There's only thirty-one rooms."

Jackie shook her head. "I heard seven girls decided not to come. It ended up being fifty-eight girls in the class."

Amy nodded. "I guess they know from experience how many will come back after orientation." She shrugged. "It seems weird, somebody not coming. After all that work to get in!"

Jackie nodded agreement. "I think it was partly that bit about the Honor Code, and violations and all that. You'd think they'd all have read about that in the handbook, and they knew they were going to be slaves here. But I think seeing the place and meeting everybody made it all seem... I don't know, more real. I can see some girls not being ready for that big of a step. Getting cold feet at the last minute."

Amy looked down at Jackie's feet and smiled. "Not cold, huh?"

The girl laughed. "Not a chance! I've wanted to be here since I was, I don't know, twelve. It was this or be dancer. I guess I decided I liked..." She giggled. "...this kind of dancing."

Another girl came up behind Jackie, looking at the room number over Amy's head. She grinned, happily, and said, "Hi, I'm Shawna. Are you Megan?"

Amy blinked. "No. Are you sure this is the right room?"

A puzzled look crossed Shawna's face, and she looked back down at the paper she held. "Oh, wait!" She laughed good-naturedly -- her whole personality seemed bubbly. "Eighteen. I don't know why I was thinking fourteen."

Amy smiled and pointed. "A little farther down."

"Thanks!" The girl grinned and shrugged. "See you later, I guess."

As the girl disappeared into the room two doors away, Amy shook her head, muttering, "Better her than me, I guess."

Jackie raised her eyebrows. "What?"

"Oh..." Amy hoped Jackie wasn't one of Megan's old friends. "That blonde girl, Megan. Did you see her yesterday? She's in that room. The one Shawna went in."

Jackie made a face. "Yeah, I remember her. Maybe she'll lighten up later. Anyway, it's nice meeting you, Amy. I'd better go down and see if I've got a roommate yet."

Amy smiled. "Sure. Talk to you later."

As Jackie moved down the hall, another girl was approaching from the other direction, doing the room-number-compare like all the others. She stopped in front of Amy. She was pretty -- well, they all were, of course -- a small, slender girl with short brown hair, lighter than Amy's. The girl looked nervously up at the room number over the door. "Are you..." She looked at her slip of paper again. "...Amy?"

Amy smiled. "Amy Cameron, yeah. I guess you must be my roommate." Amy backed away to give the girl room to come in.

The girl relaxed and followed Amy. "I'm Susan Fennel." She shook hands with Amy while looking around. Her gaze took in the two small beds, the meager shelf space, the television, the hanging platform folded up underneath it. In the far wall of the room, a window looked out on the Academy's courtyard, the great square area surrounded by the school's buildings. From the doorway the girl could see into the tiny bathroom on her right, just large enough for a shower, sink, and toilet. "It's not real big, is it?"

"Wait till our other roommates show up -- just kidding," she added hurriedly, seeing the look on Susan's face.

Susan suddenly saw the head on the shelf over Amy's bed. "Oh, who's that?"

Amy turned and smiled. "That's Miranda. I get a lot of inspiration from her. She's an Academy graduate. I saw her do her show."

Susan's eyes flew open wide. "Really? And you got her head??"

Amy nodded. "She was hanged at my house. My dad bought her." Amy preferred to leave Andrew out of the story.

"Oh, and he let you keep her because you were coming here?"

"Not... well, something like that, I guess."

"She's... I mean, wow, she's really pretty!"

Amy smiled. She loved hearing Miranda complimented. "Yeah. Everybody thinks that. Me too, of course."

Susan continued looking around. "I guess you've got that side of the room."

Amy nodded. "Is that okay? I've been here awhile."

Susan nodded absently. "I don't care. Really." She looked at Amy more closely. "I'm not remembering you from orientation."

Amy shook her head. "When I said 'awhile,' I mean I've been here for a month."

Susan's jaw dropped. "How did you manage that?"

Amy shrugged. "Long story. I just really couldn't stay at home. I haven't been in classes, though. I'll be starting from the same place you are."

Susan's attention was caught by the apparatus on the wall above her bed, matching the one over Amy's. "What's that?"

Amy turned to look. "Oh! That's the neck trainer. You must have read about that. You haven't seen one before, though. Let me show you how it works."

Amy climbed onto her bed, squatting down with her back to the wall at the head of the bed, and began unwinding the apparatus. "I've got some friends in the Second Year, and they showed me how to do this. I wasn't allowed to do any hanging, but this is safer. But you're still never allowed to do it alone."

Amy opened the wide, thick collar and wrapped it around her neck. In front, at its top, it bulged outward to make a shelf for her chin to rest in. In back, it pressed firmly against the back of her skull. "It doesn't squeeze your neck at all, and you can easily breathe with it on. It's made to hold up your head without the squeezing." With the support collar in place, Amy put her arms back against the wall, wrapped her hands around two handles next to either hip to support herself, and carefully straightened out her legs along the surface of the bed. Finally she eased herself down and let go of the handles. The weight of her upper body was now supported by the collar, distributing the force as tension in her neck muscles, her butt hovering a few inches off the surface of the bed -- that is, she was hanging by her neck, without choking.

Susan's eyes widened. "How long can you do it for?"

Amy grimaced and reached back for the handles, pushing herself back up. "Sorry, I can't really talk when I'm hanging in the thing. Anyway, I've got to where I can stand it for about ten minutes, maybe twelve. You know, we're supposed to start out doing it a half hour total every day -- in short pieces, like five minutes or whatever, just so it adds up to a half hour. You're supposed to break it up less as your neck gets stronger, like two fifteen-minute intervals, say. After a couple of months it'll go up to sixty minutes a day. It's not that big of a deal -- you can read or watch TV while you're doing it, so it doesn't take you away from other stuff you could be doing. You need to be able to do the whole sixty minute stretch at one time by the end of the year." Amy pulled her legs back, and removed the collar. "You want to try yours? I'll help you put it on."

Susan looked doubtful. "I don't really have to do it until tomorrow, do I?"

Amy blinked. "Have to? Don't you want to??" Amy wanted to ask "What else are we here for?" but didn't want to rush the girl. She understood how overwhelming it was to be starting a whole new life.

"Later, maybe." Susan put down her bag of possessions and sat on the other bed, looking uncomfortable.

Amy folded up the neck trainer and put it in its niche, and sat on her bed facing Susan, smiling at her, trying to put her at ease. Amy had felt like the little sister during her time here. This was her first chance to feel like a veteran. "Tell me some things about yourself. Have you tried hanging before? I still haven't yet." She gestured up at the neck trainer. "This thing doesn't count."

Susan smiled. "Oh, yeah. I used to do it at home. All by myself -- really stupid, I know." She grinned sheepishly. "Then I volunteered for the role of Janeen when our school drama club put on the play 'The Wrong Woman.' You know, she's the one who gets arrested for murder and hanged before they find out somebody else did it. The hanging scene was really cool. I was really hanged, and kicked for about half a minute before they pulled a curtain in front of me to end the scene, and then afterwards I'm stretched out on a carving table, dead, when they get the call to stop the hanging -- too late, of course."

Amy's eyes lit up. "Wow, you've even done a show! That must have really been fun. Of course, by the time you graduate, you can do it lots longer than that." Amy looked up at her shelf. "Miranda did it for thirty-one minutes."

Susan goggled at Amy. "Thirty-one! Are you kidding me?"

Amy grinned, always proud of Miranda's accomplishment. "See, when they tell you you can do twenty or twenty-five, always tell yourself, I can go longer."

Amy saw that Susan was looking down at her bed, obviously a little dismayed at its small size, as she had been with the room earlier. "We could get a bigger one for both of us later, if that'd be better."

Susan colored a little. "I guess this is a good time to tell you, I..." she hesitated. "You're going to be my roommate, so I guess I'd better tell you. I don't really like sex with girls much. I like men a lot better."

Amy blinked in astonishment. Even in the outside world, sex between women was the common form, since there were so few men. But here... "Uhhh, I wasn't really talking about sex, just trying to see what would make you more comfortable, but..." Amy waved her arm around to indicate their surroundings. "Susan, there's nobody but girls here!"

Susan nodded. "I know. I guess I am a little weird in some ways. Hanging is... well, it's the only thing that's ever made me feel really sexy. I mean excited-sexy. I just..." She shivered, obviously imagining herself dangling from the noose. "As far as sex, I can get by between parties. There'll be guys at the parties."

"Well, true. But you know they have women at the parties too. And whoever rents you at one of the parties, you have to try to satisfy them. You don't have to succeed, but you have to try. We get graded on that. What are you going to do?"

Susan shrugged. "When I have to do it, I'll do it. And I really think I'll do a good job of it. I'd just rather not do it when I don't have to."

Amy wondered if Susan was accustomed to doing anything she didn't have to. That didn't seem like quite the right attitude for a slave. Amy was about to suggest that doing well at anything required practice, but realized that would sound as if she was trying to serve her own purposes. Amy didn't feel a strong need to get Susan in bed. She was very happy with Linda and Laney, and knew she'd soon get close to the girls in her own class as well. Jackie seemed really nice, for example. Amy decided to let the subject go. "Did you eat anything yet? It's close to lunchtime, if you want to go grab something."

Susan smiled. "That sounds good. Oh -- do I need that meal card thing?"

Amy nodded. "You can't get food without it."

"And I just have to show that and I can eat anything?"

"Right. Obviously you don't want to overdo it. Weight is really important in hanging, and if you start getting above your ideal weight, they take the card away and replace it with ration tickets for healthy foods, in limited portions."

Susan stood up, smiling again. "I guess you must know where the cafeteria is. You can show me."

Amy stood and smiled too. "Sure."