“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal,” Ben says, lacing his fingers behind his head and tilting his face to the sun.
“To have sex with a deer, or with a cartoon character?” Chon asks.
“Both,” Ben says. “And may I point out that Bambi is an underage animated ungulate? Not to mention a male?”
“Bambi is a boy?” O asks.
“Again, Bambi is a deer, ” Ben clarifies, “but, yes, he’s a boy deer.”
“Then why are so many girls in Playboy named Bambi?” O asks.
She likes Playboy and is grateful that Stepfather Number Four keeps them in his “home office” desk drawer so Paqu Paqu is what O calls her mother, the
Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe — doesn’t see them and get pissy because she is an older version of the centerfolds who is constantly attempting to airbrush herself via expensive cosmetics and more expensive cosmetic surgery.
O is pretty sure that the National Geographic Channel is going to do an archaeological dig on her mother in a futile quest to find a single original body part, a private joke that explains why O gave Four a pith helmet for his last birthday.
(“Why, thank you, Ophelia,” a puzzled Four said.
“You’re welcome.”
“What’s it for?” Paqu asked, icily.
“To keep the sun off your vagina,” O answered.)
“Girls are named Bambi,” Ben says now, “because we are culturally ignorant, of even pop culture, and because we crave the archetype of childlike innocence combined with adult sexuality.”
His parents are both psychotherapists.
Ben, oh Ben, O thinks.
Hard body, soft heart.
Long brown hair, warm brown eyes.
“But that’s me, ” O tells him. “Childlike innocence combined with adult sexuality.”
Short blonde hair, thin hips, no rack to speak of, tiny butt on her petite frame. And yes, big eyes-albeit blue, not brown.
“No,” Ben says. “You’re more adult innocence combined with childlike sexuality.”
He has a point, O thinks. She does view sex mostly as play-a fun thing-not a job to be performed to prove one’s love. This is why, she has opined, they’re called sex “toys” instead of sex “tools.”
“ Bambi is a proto-fascist piece of work,” Chon snarls. “It might as well have been shot by Leni Riefenstahl.”
Chon reads books-Chon reads the dictionary — and also hits the Foreign Films/Classics section of Netflix. He could explain 8 ^1 / 2 to you, except he won’t.
“Speaking of gender ambiguity,” O says, “I told Paqu that I’m thinking of becoming bisexual.”
“What did she say?” Ben asks.
“She said, ‘What?’” O answers. “Then I wussed out and said, ‘I think I want a bicycle.’”
“To pedal to your girlfriend’s house?” Ben asks.
“To pedal to your girlfriend’s house,” O counters.
She could play for either or both teams and would be heavily recruited because, at nineteen, she’s drop-dead gorgeous.
But she doesn’t know that yet.
O describes herself as “poly-sexual.”
“Like Pollyanna, only way happier,” she explains.
She would consider going LTG Lesbian Till Graduation — except she isn’t in school, a fact that Paqu points out to her on a near daily basis. She tried junior college for a semester (okay, the first three weeks of a semester), but it was, well… junior college.
Right now she’s just glad to have her guys here. As for ODB, they can have any women they want, as long as one of them is her.
Check that, she thinks They can have any woman they want as long as I’m the one they love.
The pain of it is
The pain of it is
Chon flies out tonight
This is his last day on the beach.