A Better Kind of Brainwashing Pt. 02

She was trying to come up with a feasible lie for her fetish accessories, when her left heel finally gave in. It snapped and she fell forward with a cry, tearing one of her stockings in the process. Letting out a barrage of profanities, she tried to get to both feet without acknowledging the attention she'd drawn to herself.

It was too late though. People were pulling out their phones and filming her. She ignored them all as she hobbled a few feet, before kicking off the other heel before it too gave way beneath her. She'd just made it to the end of the block, the throbbing in her twisted ankle about to drive her mad, when a car pulled up in front of her, blocking the crosswalk.

"Hey, gorgeous? You need a ride?"

There was a young man inside, a well-dressed white man with a toothy smile full of suggestive intent. He thought she was a whore. She knew if she got in that car, she would have to pay for wherever he took her. And she hadn't escaped being sexually enslaved just to become some frat boy's bitch.

"Fuck off!" She yelled, slapping the hood of his car and hobbling around it to cross the road.

She was almost to the other side when she heard the siren. She tried to move faster, but fell to her knees when she heard the police officer yell "STOP WHERE YOU ARE!"

The white man had gotten out of his car and was holding his hands up.

"Put your hands behind your back." The police man said as he marched over to her. She did as commanded, too terrified to look him in the eyes.

"Did this woman hit your car?" The police officer asked, turning toward the white driver.

"Uh....yes! Yes, she did! She propositioned me and when I wouldn't pay for her skanky ass, she hit my car and cursed at me! Thank goodness you're here, officer. I-I was really scared for my safety..."

Frida glanced behind her at the driver in horror.

"That's what I thought." She felt the cool metal of handcuffs clinking into place around her wrists and then a steady hand dragging her upright. "Get in the back of the car, freak." The officer said, dragging open the back door of his vehicle.

Frida ducked inside just in time to avoid having her head smack on the edge of the car doorway, still in a state of shock regarding the events of the past five minutes. As she rolled into her seat, her legs naturally splayed, and she was sure the officer got enough of a glimpse under her tiny skirt to know she was commando.

She clamped her legs shut and stared at her the floor of the police car as he climbed into the driver's seat. A moment later she was being driven to the nearest precinct.

***

"What am I being charged with?" Frida asked, in a calm, almost emotionless voice, undercut by the tiniest little trembles of oncoming hysteria.

"Shut the fuck up." The officer said as he walked her to a cell. The iron bars slid open, and she saw she'd be sharing it with several other, less than desirable looking women.

Then she shoved her inside and slammed the door closed behind her.

"My kid walks dogs on that street, you low-life whore." The officer spat before marching away.

The other women in the cell exchanged looks and then in unison examined Frida with their eyes. Frida turned away, trying to shrink into an untaken corner and hopefully disappear altogether.

"So, did they get you for prostitution or public indecency?" One of them asked, a smart-ass looking young blonde in a low-cut top who was probably in for one of the crimes she'd just mentioned.

"Please don't talk to me." Frida begged. She just had to wait. She'd call her lawyer, and they'd clear the whole thing up.

Except...except...

Except it would be a matter of public record. It would make the newspaper surely..."Black hypnotherapist accused of public indecency." There would be a photo of her, in this get-up, on websites all over the nation. Her previous scandal would be dug up, proof of her incompetence plastered all over the city.

No one would hire her. Not as a hypnotherapist anyway. There would be plenty of skeezy tabloids offering pitiful sums for her exclusive. And maybe some porn sites too...

Frida felt like she was going to faint.

At least...at least she would be free. If she beat the charges. If not...well, prison was awful, a horrific thought. But she'd be out in a few years. Maybe sooner with good behavior. She might even get commuted down to community service if it really was only public indecency, they charged her with.

If she'd stayed with Barbie, she would have been her slave until the day she died, she was sure of it.

But what if Barbie found out? What if she saw the photos and the videos online and she was there waiting for her when she got out of jail? It would all be for nothing, her rebellion, her escape, crushed beneath that blathering voice and banal titter. Her mind, her most prized possession would once more no longer be her own.

"You think you're better than us, chica?" Asked one of the women, a slender latina covered in tattoos with a voice like a 60-year-old chain smoker. "Just because you can afford some fancy fucking outfit?"

Frida snapped in that moment. It was all too much, too much to respond to in a reasonable manner. "LEAVE ME ALONE!" She screamed, her eyes closed and her hands over her ears. She couldn't take it all anymore. She just wanted to go home...

The Latina was, unsurprisingly, not the least bit intimidated by Frida's hysteria. She stood up and, ignoring the attempts of her fellow prisoners to stop her, marched over to where Frida was curling into a ball.

She grabbed a knot of recently curled hair and dragged Frida off her seat. "I asked you a question, chica. You think you're better than us?"

Frida, her bare knees now on the floor of the jail cell, shook her head. It only caused the pain in her scalp to get worse.

The woman slapped her across the face, hard. "That's what I fuckin' thought! What are you stupid or something? You think you can just turn your nose up at me and my friends? You think we belong here, but you don't? Is that it, you stupid bitch?"

Frida sobbed, her whole-body trembling with the release of terror and despair. Again, she shook her head, trying to summon the courage to pull free of the woman's grasp, and failing to do so. She considered begging her other two inmates for aid, but were they going to risk their own skin for her? Unlikely. And if she made too much of a ruckus surely the police would come back. And that might be worse than this insane woman.

"Are you fucking listening to me? What are you brain dead or something?"

"Like, what the hell are you doing?"

Frida felt the pain in her scalp disappear and her eyes opened as she slumped to the floor of the cell. Slowly, she raised her head enough to look through the bars, up at her familiar savior.

***

Frida had been graduated early and started college when she was still eighteen. She'd hoped, prayed, that the immaturity, the bullying, the racism and the homophobia she'd witnessed in high school was behind her. She'd hoped that university would be a place where she could finally be herself, have a girlfriend, have a life, without worrying about her nagging mother hanging over her shoulder.

She couldn't have been more wrong.

Frida's grades had been good enough to get her a scholarship at Miskatonic. But after uprooting her whole life in the name of higher education, she'd quickly discovered just how many of her ivy league classmates had bought their way in. It might have been Massachusetts, not Mississippi, but rich white people were the same no matter where you found them. No, their racism was so overt. They didn't talk about the good old days as much. But they demonstrated their dominance all the same. They invited her into their circles so that they could laugh at her behind her back with their friends.

'Everyone come see the black girl who wants to be a professor!' They'd been thinking.

The women had been worse than somehow worse than the men too. Of course, the frats had sexually harassed her for her race and her "sexy Southern accent." But the women, those sorority sisters who were so convinced of their own sensitivity, took every opportunity to exercise their social leverage over her. First, they considered her a threat, afraid she would steal their boyfriends with her black body. Then they discovered her sexuality. They'd needled it out of her, using her own social anxiety against her.

And as soon as they knew, everyone on campus did too. Somehow the sexual harassment got worse, her sexuality serving only to further intrigue her brutish admirers. But what had been more awful, were the girls. Suddenly, every pretty blonde girl on campus knew just who to come to if they wanted help with their assignments. They would bat their eyelashes and bite their lips and they would giggle and grin as Frida dutifully set about doing their homework for them.

She ended up "tutoring" so many of her classmates that her own grades took a hit for it. She didn't WANT to help all those ultra hot bitches. But she worried that if she didn't, if she refused their flirtations or asserted herself against their requests, they would turn on her, and with the same bullying she'd experienced in school, humiliated and dehumanize her in front of her classmates and her professors.

It was only when she'd met Frankie that she'd finally gained the courage to say "No." That had only lasted so long. Although Frida had prided herself on her newfound resilience and rebellion against the implicitly racist norms of academia, she'd found that her courage closed more doors than it opened.

Ten years after graduating with a PhD, she'd found herself being bossed around by pretty white ladies just as much as before. First by junior colleagues, using her to further their own careers until they ended up her superiors, sending her on wild goose chases while they enjoyed fatter paychecks and more flexible hours. Then even by her own students, who's overt sexuality she often found terribly distracting.

Between "supporting her fellow women in the workplace" and "tutoring girls in her class who needed the extra support", she'd quickly burnt herself out, sacrificing all free time and much of her sanity to trying to do what she thought was right, what she'd been told was proper.

The awful part of it was that if she'd been white, making friends with all those rich girls and ambitions academics would probably have helped her career. But she wasn't. And it didn't.

Again, Frankie had to shame her for becoming such a push-over for her to realize what she was doing was wrong. It was after that horrible night, when Frankie brought her to tears again and again where she'd resolved to go through with her hypnosis experiments. She'd wanted to change the world, to be able to infiltrate the subconscious of those casually racist and rabidly xenophobic and peel back the layers of hatred and fear. She'd wanted to make the world a better place, her campus a safer place for girls like her.

It took being hypnotized by Barbie today for her to realize how little of the human mind she'd ever truly grasped. Thoughts and memories were indeed moldable, intentions could be subverted, motivations rewritten.

But not without the consent of the participant. If a person became less racist, it was only because they wanted to be that way. And if a lonely black lesbian became the maid of a beautiful blonde, it was because she'd wanted it.

"What's your name?" Barbie asked Frida's assailant as a female officer stood beside her, unmoving, with a blank expression on her face.

"Hey! Fuck you bitch! It's none of your fucking business!" The latina snarled.

Barbie's look of concern disappeared, replaced with that chillingly fake smile. Then she leaned forward, pressing her cleavage to the cool metal of the bars. "I think, I like, asked, like, a question?" She said, her voice slowly and smoothing with sugary intent. Frida's heart rate accelerated at the sweetness of that impossibly seductive tone. They made her want to roll over and spread her legs for Barbie, even with all these women watching.

The latina frowned. She looked at Frida and then back at Barbie. Frida herself was too scared to look up at her would-be owner, but she stole a glance at her assaulter instead and saw the glaze overcoming her eyes as she stared at those brimming bosoms with a bar between them.

"I don't..." The latina began. "I don't have to tell you shit..." She said. But uncertainty had crept into her weathered voice.

"Hey, I like, totes don't want to press charges on you for attacking my friend." Barbie said. "But I would like, really, really like it if you could like apologize to her and maybe help her up..."

The woman struggled for a moment. Then she leaned down, and taking one of Frida's hands, roughly brought her upright.

"Oh, thank you like, so much! You're like so kind! You totes shouldn't be in there! Like, what did you say your name was again, I like, am so sorry for making you repeat it! I'm like, a total airhead."

"It's okay..." The woman said, her eyes growing more befuddled as her grip on Frida's hand disappeared and her voice grew more distant. "I'm Selina." She sounded even more uncertain than before though.

Barbie's grin grew more monstrous and whatever feeble defenses the inmate had erected collapsed like a house of cards. "But I just call myself that for the street cred...my actual name is Gabriella."

"Oh, that's like, such a pretty name, I have no idea why you wouldn't want to use it. It's like, way too long though, for like, me to remember properly, so why don't I just call you Gabby?"

Gabriela whined at having her name so easily taken away but was unable to summon up whatever fury that had just propelled her to attack Frida.

"So, like, Gabby, why are you, like, arrested or whatever?"

Gabriella withered. "I-I would rather not say."

Barbie's smile must have somehow grown wider. Frida could hear it in her voice. "It's just us girls here. You don't have to worry."

Gabriella wined again, like she was struggling to keep the words from leaving her mouth. She failed. "I was high, and I got picked up for public urination..." She admitted, her whole body seeming to shrink into itself as her confidence was peeled away, truth by truth.

"Oh, that's like, super embarrassing!" Barbie said with a laugh. "So, can you like, not hold your bladder or something? You must be like, the worst person to like, share a cell with, right? Because you like, just can't help messing yourself, can you?"

Gabriella shook her head desperately, her eyes wide as the suggestion of Barbie's words implanted itself in her mind. Suddenly her legs were crossed and her thighs tightly pressed together.

"So, I guess you're just like, a scared little girl who like, totes needs to go back to kindergarten?" Barbie said. "Don't worry like, I'm sure, like, they totes won't laugh about your potty problems at rehab!"

Gabriella squirmed and whined, her mind growing ever untethered from her increasingly disobedient body.

"Don't worry, I'm like, super rich, so I'll like, totes pay for your legal bills. And I'll like, sponsor your probation or whatever. Just as long as you like, go get all your tattoos removed and promise to like, stay away from all that nasty, like, drugs and stuff. Ooh! And I'll get you all dressed up in a nice pink outfit! That way all your nasty old friends won't like, bother you anymore!"

Gabriella couldn't take it anymore. She dove over to the toilet in the corner, struggling to get her pants off in time while Barbie cackled at her misfortune. "Oh, you're like, all super-shy now! Don't worry, I'm sure your like, roommates or whatever here, totes won't like, mercilessly tease you about like, what a total loser you are..."

Barbie made eye contact with the two other women in the cell who must have already been under her spell from the moment she appeared, judging by how complacent they'd remained for the entirety of Gabriella's dressing down. They nodded in unison and then cruel smiles seemed to creep across their faces.

"You girls should like, totes make Gabriella feel okay about her like, terrible substance abuse problems. Just like, look after her like she's a helpless child until she's gone like, completely cold turkey, okay?"

Again, they nodded, turning their gazes to Gabriella as she ripped her pants off just in time to completely soak her thong. As the tears started to roll down her shocked face, the two women stood up, walking past Frida as if in trance and standing to either side of the sobbing Gabriella.

Soon they were cooing at her, stroking her hair and pressing her wet face to their breasts as they smushed her between them both while she continued to helplessly mess herself.

Then Barbie turned to the officer, who unlocked the cell without a word. Frida barely had time to get up before Barbie was upon her, diving inside the cell without regard for her own safety, and smothering Frida's face between her breasts.

"Fri-Fri! I'm like, so sorry!" She said, she rubbed Frida's face back and forth between her breasts. "I like, don't know how we like, got separated or whatever, but I like, promise it'll like, never ever happen again!"