The Kings Of Cool

175

That night

She was fourteen and

The quarterback was really agg.

Aggressive.

And he wanted to fuck O.

Not even subtle about it-the boy’s idea of technique, of charm, was to get her down the beach away from the party and say “I want to fuck you.”

“Yeah, no.”

O would come to a time in her life when she was pro-fucking-her friend Ash would say that O handled more packages than UPS-but not with this jerk, not, like, ten minutes after he handed her a beer and thought that was his ticket to the show, and plus She was fourteen years old.

“I’m going back,” she said. Meaning back to the beach party they walked away from, the party Paqu didn’t want her to go to.

“After,” Quarterback insisted. He was seventeen and next year’s starting quarterback, and they were already talking USC and the NFL draft so he was getting used to getting what he wanted.

He grabbed her by the wrist.

O was, like, small. Petite, her mother called her, gamine. Whatever the fuck that meant, because Paqu was in a French phase, probably because she was doing this wine importer from Newport Beach and kept yapping about moving to Lyon because Paris would be cliche, n’est-ce pas?

Yeah, right, O thought-Paqu is going to leave Orange County about the time Michelle Kwan or some other anal-retentive anorexics do their triple axels in hell. Paqu is never going to get more than a ten-minute drive from her gyms, her spas, her plastic surgeons, shrinks, gardeners, or her OC (that’s Orange County, but yes, Obsessive Compulsive works, too) pals, not even for Marcel or Michel or whatever the hell he appelles himself, it just ain’t gonna happen, but what really had O angry about the situation she was currently in is that it was exactly the situation Paqu warned her about if she went to parties with boys she didn’t know.

“Do you know what happens to girls who go to parties with boys they don’t know?” Paqu asked.

“They get knocked up and have daughters like me,” O answered, “who go to parties with boys they don’t know and get knocked up and have daughters like me. It’s le circle de la vie.”

Paqu was nonplussed.

Then again, it is very hard to pluss Paqu.

“I married your father,” she said.

Briefly, O thought.

“Anyway,” she argued, “I know him. He’s a junior and he’s going to be the starting quarterback next year.”

Paqu heard that-she understood status. Still, Ophelia was only a freshman, and the boy was a junior. She forbade O to go to the party, but then went to a party of her own and O simply left the house and went down to the beach, where she found the party around a bonfire and also found Quarterback, who soon took her away from the party and down the beach where they could be alone.

Anyway, O was small and Quarterback was big and all weight room, protein powder, supplements, maybe testosterone the way he was acting-anyway, he was strong and wouldn’t let go and she couldn’t rip her wrist away so she was thinking Fuck me.

Not, like, wanting him to.

Like, wanting him not to.

Quarterback offered her an alternative. “At least blow me.”

He started to push her down to her knees.