“Russ lives on a reservation,” I explained.
“Oh, be still my beating loins,” Lottie said, fanning herself.
“You’re turned on by guys who live on reservations?”
“I’m turned on by TANNED guys who can probably build their own fires and tell me hot stories about the history of willow trees looking all sexy by the fire they built.”
Evie and I raised our eyebrows at each other.
“I’m pretty sure Russ said he spends most of his time inside, playing his video games…”
“Oh, screw him then. Go for the Adonis.”
“Kyle?”
I tucked my hair back to stop it sticking to my neck in the midday heat. I was on my lunch hour, cramming in time with the girls before the dreaded canoeing later. I’d hardly slept, despite being so tired. I’d already spent the morning playing gross “trust” exercises, involving the children launching themselves into the air with their eyes closed, relying on us to catch them. As a result of my tiredness, I couldn’t control my facial expressions.
“Amber, you’re blushing!” Lottie screeched, pointing at the screen. “You’re blushing AND nervously biting your lip. You fancy the Adonis guy!”
“I don’t,” I protested, sounding like someone who’d farted trying to pretend it wasn’t them. “We just work together.”
Evie’s face got closer to the screen. “You really are red, Amber.”
“Yes, well, it’s ten million degrees out here.”
“Jealous! It’s rained here all week… Do you like him, Amber?”
Was there any point pretending I didn’t?
“Everyone likes him,” I admitted. “He looks like…well…that. He was bloody Prom King. He’s won a scholarship for smartness. He cares about everyone and oozes joy and loveliness wherever he goes. He’s like a litmus test for sex drive.” I thought about it. “Male and female sex drive, basically.”
“But do you like him like him?” Lottie pressed. “And since when the hell have you known what a litmus test is?”
I looked away from the webcam and mumbled.
“What was that, mumbly?” Evie asked.
I sighed and looked back up.
“I said, I don’t really know him. And there’s no point even if I do like him. He likes someone else.”
My friends, bless them, gasped in outrage.
“Who is this cretin?” Lottie demanded.
“What makes it worse is she’s, like, everything I hate about girls – all rolled into one girl.”
Lottie narrowed her eye-linered eyes. “What do you mean everything you hate about girls?”
“Chill out, let me explain. She’s like – well – she’s a cheerleader, for one.”
Evie’s mouth opened. “A real one? You mean, they’re, like, real?”
Lottie nudged her. “Of course they’re real. Did you think they weren’t?”
“I thought maybe they only lived in movies about high school. I mean, think about it, if they are real, that’s pretty damn weird, right? Like, they’re a group of girls who exist in every American school, whose sole purpose is to wear tiny clothes and cheer the achievements of men. That. Is. Screwed. Up.”
“Exactly!” I said, pointing at the screen. “And she is one. Her name’s Melody, and she always goes on about how ‘sexual’ she is.”
Evie pulled a face while Lottie furrowed her eyebrows.
“And what’s wrong with being sexual?”
“Oh, CALM DOWN, Simone de Beauvoir. I’m just trying to paint a picture.”
Lottie was “sexual” too, I guess. Well, she liked sex. But it didn’t bother me the way it bothered me in Melody. I stumbled on my words, trying to figure out why.
“I wish you’d stop telling me to calm down. You know how I feel about that phrase.”
“God, I’m getting all my feminism wrong today,” I moaned.
Evie smiled. “Go on…you were complaining about her sexualness…?” Lottie scowled again.
“Stop stink-eyeing me, Lottie!” I said. “I know girls are allowed to like sex. But Melody deliberately shoves it in everyone’s faces…” She didn’t look convinced, so I galloped on. “Like, the other night, at dinner, before the kids arrived, she said, really loudly, ‘Oh, I know I’m just going to get so horny this summer, stuck in the middle of a forest.’ I mean, who says that?! And then, of course, all the guys looked round and she pretended to be embarrassed.”
Evie nodded. Lottie looked a tiny bit won over.
“And I know you’ll probably yell at me for this too – but she wears actually no clothes. Like, well, minimal amounts of clothes, showing off her insane figure. And, yeah, it’s hot. But it’s not THAT hot. She actually wore a bra the other day instead of a top – again, before the children arrived.”
I thought about Kyle, the way he’d danced with her by the fire – the way his hands held and rocked her hips.
“And then we had to do this campfire performance thing – where we all put on a show. My group and I did Monty Python—”
“Which one? Which bit?” Evie butted in, the film queen.
“The Knights who say Ni? Holy Grail?”
“Nice one.”
“I know…and totally non-sexual – because, well, because it’s CAMP. But Melody and her friends did a strip show to The Pussycat Dolls, and then brought boys up to lap dance them.”
Lottie held her hands up to the webcam. “Wait wait wait wait wait wait. You say she lap danced to The Pussycat Dolls?”
“Yes.”
“In public?”
“Yes. In the middle of a circle of twenty plus people.”
Lottie let out a long sigh. “Christ, she sounds like a NIGHTMARE.”
Finally! Finally she was getting it.
“I told you!” I punched the air and accidentally knocked the old webcam off its perch. “Whoops.” I bent down to get it.
Lottie’s voice was still banging out of the speakers.
“I’ve literally just finished reading a book about girls like Melody. It’s amazing…” I got the webcam back up. There was hardly any Evie visible – Lottie had got all close up in her excitement. “Basically,” she continued, “Melody is what this book calls a Female Chauvinist Pig.”
“A what?” Evie’s voice said from behind her.
“A Female Chauvinist Pig. Like a male one, but female.”
“I got that much,” said Evie. “But what does it mean?”
“Right, I’ll explain… Hang on, I need cheesy snacks. I cannot lecture on women’s equality without a stash of cheesy snacks…”
God I wanted cheesy snacks. For the eightieth time I wished I could climb through my screen.
Lottie disappeared and then reappeared with a coating of neon orange around her mouth. She was still crunching cheesy Wotsits as she started talking.
“Right,” she said. “This Melody sounds like a Female Chauvinist Pig.”
“She’s too stick thin to be a pig,” I butted in.
“Shh, I’m in intelligent mode.”
“You’re always in intelligent mode,” Evie pointed out. She had a slight orange tinge around her mouth that made my heart happy – because she never would have been able to have that and not notice it a year ago.
“That’s because I’m very intelligent. Now, I’ve been learning about this thing called ‘raunch culture’. It’s basically this very clever thing that’s happened which makes women strip off all their clothes and make men happy by shagging them all the time, in the misguided belief that this behaviour is liberated.”
“Huh?”
Lottie always used words that were too long. She sighed, as she often did whenever she tried to explain stuff to us. “Okay, so there was the female sexual revolution right? The pill got invented and women could boff anyone they wanted without getting pregnant. It was all free love and sharey sharey sex, and AIDs hadn’t happened yet. And finally, women weren’t forced to only have crappy boring missionary sex with the guy they married when they were seventeen—”