Boundaries

In one of the faux log cabins of Camp Chrysalis Applejack once again sat in embarrassed silence, feeling like a child being lectured about some terrible thing they had done. The camp should've felt like paradise. Out in the country, pleasant water features, fresh air, yet everything felt. . . Cold, stilted, threatening. She couldn't put her orange finger on it, but something felt subtly wrong about the whole place.

Maybe it was her fellow campers. So many of them seemed to be in some state of mind between soullessly hollow and surly. Their eyes seemed sunken, gray, listless. They trudged around everywhere they went not seeming to care where they went or what they did. Applejack sat in a circle with a dozen other campers listening to the coordinator of the camp Ms Chrisy, as she had introduced herself with the same off putting sense of wrongness that everything else had evoked.

Applejack kept telling herself that she was being silly, but she just couldn't get over the fact that the business casual attired woman just didn't seem to sit right with her. She looked pretty, pleasant, compassionate and caring, but the troubled girl couldn't help but feel that it was somehow a ruse, a mask to lure one into a trap. Applejack blinked with embarrassment when she realized that she had been called on to speak but had been lost in her thoughts. She shook her head and cleared her throat in embarrassment. "Ahem. I'm sorry, Ah was a mite distracted. What'd ya say?"

Ms Chrissy smiled what should've been a reassuring, warming smile, but again it made the farm girl squirm in her seat. It was like the deceptive sunlight of a cold winter's day that shines but does not warm. "I said." She repeated in a voice like the song of a glass harp, beautiful but thin and hard. "Please Ms Applejack, tell us what brings you here with us today?"

The embarrassed girl broke out in a cold sweat. She glanced around the ring of faces and felt like one on trial, the other campers her jury, the long sharp woman her judge. She had to clear her throat more than once before she began. "Uhm, howdy. . . Y'all, uhm. Ahem. Well, uh. I just. I mean, me and mah uh." Gulp. "Girlfriend. Uhmm. She was uh." This was the single most embarrassed the poor Girl had ever felt. She felt eleven pairs of cold, dead, vacant, gray eyes boring into her soul, and one pair of sharp merciless green eyes pinning her in place. She slammed her eyes shut and blurted out the rest of her explanation. "Touchin on me. . . More than I wanted."

Ms Chrisy bobbed her head in a gesture that was supposed to be an understanding and sympathetic gesture, but the predatory smile on her face seemed to have all the cruelty of one gloating in triumph. "Ah yes." She hissed. "We see this all the time here. Someone who uses love just to get into someone's pants." Applejack reeled as if stung. She was torn equally between rage at accusing the girl she loved of such duplicity, and the nagging doubt in her heart that the counselor was exactly right.

The twelve campers all spoke in disconcerting unison. "We don't owe anyone our bodies or our hearts."

The farm girl's stubborn nature felt the need to stand up for the one she loved, but she didn't know quite where to begin. "Well, now, hold on there. It ain't like that. Rainbow ain't just after. . ." She blushed and couldn't finish her sentence.

The camp counselor rose and strode towards the blushing girl as smoothly as a predatory animal stalking its prey. "Ms Applejack really." She squatted beside the softly trembling teenager and took both of her freckled orange hands in her own. The hands felt ice cold to the touch and the razor sharp nails pressed like talons against her skin. Ms Chrisy's face came uncomfortably close to Applejack's own as she spoke.

"Applejack. No one has a right to your body if it makes you feel uncomfortable. This. . . Rainbow girl, has made you feel ashamed, made you feel helpless, made you feel like your feelings don't matter. Are those the actions of someone who loves you?"

Applejack wanted to flee, wanted to retreat, wanted to be anywhere but there, but those piercing green eyes pinned her in place like a pair of hunter's spears. They seemed almost to glow with a fell light. "Well, I mean, no, but. . ." She couldn't think straight. She felt her feelings and doubts and worries swirling around in her thoughts like a whirlpool. Tears started to her eyes. Could Rainbow really have been using her? Was she just after sex? "No!" She said with an uncertain defiance. "Ah'm tellin you that ain't it! Rainbow's just. . . Well she's just a little handsy is all." It sounded weak even to her.

Applejack flinched as a flash of anger appeared on the counselor's face for the briefest of moments. Quickly however the mask of cordiality resumed its place. The counselor once again gained that same mocking smile of knowing better than the poor confused child. "Oh, campers, what behavior is Ms Applejack here exhibiting?"

Again the grim chorus rang out in dull unison. "Enabling."

Ms Chrissy gently but firmly raised Applejack to her feet and led her to a series of large green tubes against the wall. "Ms Applejack. I want you to do something for me. This is called a sensory deprivation chamber. It shuts out all the noise and distractions of the world and lets you hear what's in your heart."

"Listen to your heart." Came the uncanny call from the monotone choir.

Applejack had absolutely no desire to enter the chamber lined with what looked like green, almost plant-like fleshy padding, but the counselor, once again with an irresistible strength that belied her thin frame, coaxed her into the chamber. "Now, I want you to think about this Rainbow girl of yours, and really think about how she treats you." The door didn't seem so much to shut, as to slither closed like a carnivorous plant swallowing her whole.

It was a rather claustrophobic experience for the farm girl, so used to wide open spaces, sunlight, and free air, but eventually her breathing slowed and she began to lose herself to the stillness. Her mind wandered and eventually she saw the Rainbow hair and cocky grin of the girl she loved. The smile that stole over Applejack's freckled face quickly turned to a grimace of annoyance when the image in her mind's eye of her girlfriend's cocky grin turned into a lewd smirk.

Again and again the confused girl tried to think of all the little moments that had made her fall in love with the rambunctious girl, but every time she did it was as if the love she felt in that moment was torn away from her, leaving only the discontent behind. She remembered when Rainbow had put an arc in a song that she had written without telling her she was going to and smiled warmly. Then just as quickly the love was gone and only the memory of Rainbow grinning back at her as she played and shaking her hips remained.

Applejack tried to remember their first kiss, how it had felt the heat in her heart spread slowly all the way down to the tips of her fingers and toes, but then she remembered how the moment came to a screeching halt when Rainbow had tried to get some tongue. She squeezed her eyes tight and clenched her fists. "It ain't like that!" She hissed to herself defiantly. She thought of Rainbow's apology, how genuinely sad and meek she looked. She thought of how low the usually brash and boisterous girl that she loved so much had been brought by the thought that her girlfriend doubted her respect for her.

She remembered when she'd taken the plunge and admitted it to herself and finally to Rainbow that it was more than like, or even like like, it was love, deep, warming, distracting, floating, wonderful love. She flinched inside the tube as she felt a sudden sting in her hand, and a soreness in her wrist. She felt hot tears burning her eyes, she was gritting her teeth so tightly together that they felt like they would break. She remembered how the sweet, meek, humbled, apologetic girl had slipped her hand up her shirt, after she had just said she wouldn't touch her without asking first.

The chamber slid open and Applejack flopped out of it gasping for breath between sobs. Two taloned claws seized her face and lifted the weeping girl's face to look into the eyes of a monster whose glut had been satiated. Suddenly the gloating beast became the pleasant sympathetic face of the camp counselor smiling kindly down at her. The woman pulled the girl into a gentle hug and Applejack cried deeply into her shoulder.