You were a million miles away, Mom says.
Thinking of your TV career, Dad says with a grin. Here is the news: Lori Wakeham is going to be famous!
It’s just a screen test, Daddy, she says, they might say no.
There’s no way they’ll say no. Look at you, you were born to be on television! I’ll tell you a secret – I always knew you were going to make it big.
Oh stop, Mom laughs, you’re embarrassing her!
Seriously, the day you were born, I looked at you and I thought, This girl’s got it. Star potential. Dad sits back and rests his hands behind his head. Something good may yet come out of all this, he says contentedly. And you deserve it too, after all you’ve been through.
She is back in her house. Mom and Dad are all excited because during the day the woman from the modelling agency called again, and a different woman from a different modelling agency, and a producer from a TV company who thinks she might be perfect for a new kids’ programme they’re making. Maybe Dad is right, maybe everything will work out after all. But tonight she just can’t concentrate on it.
She’s got this weird feeling in her stomach.
Dad is talking about some big deal going down at work, secret plans to take over another company.
‘Mouth closed when we eat, darling,’ Mom says. ‘No one’s going to let you on TV with a mouthful of chewed food.’
‘Sorry,’ Lori says.
It’s different to earlier. Then she just felt empty. This is a definite tingling, like something is alive down there.
Lilya comes in and clears the plates. Mom tells Dad about a new kind of tan you can have injected into your skin. ‘Maybe we should get Lori a salon session before her screen test…?’
And now worry beats into her head, she feels it strike her temples and cheeks with each fresh wave of blood and she bows her head so Mom and Dad won’t see. (What if the stuff leaks through her stomach into her womb?) (Don’t be a spa, it doesn’t work that way, you know it doesn’t!) (But what if it does?) (But Janine said it couldn’t happen just from a BJ.) (But Denise said it could.)
Oh fuck. Another crash of worry, now she feels sick and there are tears in her eyes and the Taste in her mouth and the tingling in her stomach gets stronger. Why is she only thinking of this now? Why didn’t she think of it before, you can get that magic pill that Janine got that time she was with Oliver Crotty?
‘It’s a kids’ show, they’re not going to want her waltzing in like she’s just arrived from St Tropez,’ Dad is saying. ‘They want the natural look. That’s what Lori’s got. Natural, fresh-faced, innocent.’
‘But I’m telling you, this is how they all look these days,’ Mom says. ‘What if she goes for the screen test and all the other girls have tans?’
Lori is trying to remember the sex talk they had in school and what they said about getting pregnant. But all she can remember are the diagrams of the Reproductive Organs, all that equipment secretly packed in there, coiled up on itself like a bomb in a suitcase, waiting, and those freaky horrible words, womb, uterine, fallopian, that sounded like the names of aliens not her own insides…
‘Well, let’s let her decide for herself,’ Mom says. ‘Darling?’
‘What?’ Lori says.
‘If you had the choice, would you rather be a model or a TV presenter? Modelling’s classier, I think.’
‘But TV has more exposure,’ Dad points out.
‘I don’t know.’ It’s all Lori can do to mumble.
‘I think it’s a waste of a girl with Lori’s looks to just plonk her on the television,’ Mom says.
In the average ejaculation there are roughly 350 million sperms, that is another thing she remembers. 350 million! It’s like an army, it’s like a whole country marching through her insides – taking her over, searching for the egg – and suddenly it’s like she can see them, in the great hollow cavern of her stomach, white slithery terrorists hiding in the shadows, waiting till nightfall to creep into other parts of her body, their tadpole-tails flickering almost too fast to see – oh God, stop or I’m going to –
And then Lilya comes in and sets a bowl down in front of Lori.
‘What in God’s name is this?’ she hears Dad ask from a long way away.
‘It’s tapioca pudding,’ Mom tells him. ‘Remember I was telling you, about retro desserts?’
‘Retro is right, I haven’t eaten this in twenty years.’ Dad digs his spoon into the white-grey mess and lifts it to his mouth.
‘It’s a bit runny…’
‘May I be excused?’ Lori says.
As soon as she’s left the room she starts to run. She makes it to the bathroom just in time. Hanging over the toilet bowl she hears Sister Benedict’s voice ring through her head, saying, ‘Though God can do all things, He cannot raise a virgin after she has fallen’ – she sees the nuns ringed around her, staring at her big belly, they are shaking their heads and whispering slut to each other…
And Mom not saying slut but thinking it, and Dad not saying anything just going red and then walking downstairs to the gym and doing bench presses for three hours, and the woman from the TV production company saying, I’m terribly sorry, no sluts. But she’s not a slut, she just wanted to make him like her, she just didn’t want him to think she was frigid or a lesbian! Her stomach is so sore, the muscles there are crying out, and she is crying too, the tears dripping down into the bowl like kids coming down a waterslide, and after she’s finished she can still feel the things in her stomach! They’re still there! And in the distance the intercom goes and she hears Mom and someone else go mumble mumble mumble and then Mom’s voice rings out, Lorelei!
Oh my God, who is it? She looks in the mirror, she is hideous, her eyes are all red and her cheeks too and her hair is straggly and there is snot everywhere – Lori! Mom calls again. Oh no, is it the producer? This is definitely God punishing her, though if he punishes her this way maybe he won’t make her pregnant – Just a second, she calls down, and scrubs her face in the sink so it looks like she’s just been washing not crying and blows her nose which some sick has got into and then puts on some lip gloss and goes downstairs.
But it’s not the producer or the woman from the agency. Instead it’s an extremely fat boy in a Seabrook uniform. Unless she’s imagining it, he’s giving her a really evil stare. In a cold Falcon Crest-type voice she says, Yes?