The Thrill of It Read Free Page A

side pocket in my purse and hand her a thumb drive.
    She takes it, looking at it with disdain. It’s part of the routine: I give her a thumb drive every time and every time she regards it like a diseased object. “Hmm. You couldn’t bother to print it out?”
    “I don’t have a printer.”
    She snorts, then slips it into her vast purple purse. “I want this book done soon. One more month at the most. You need to work on the next chapters. And make them tawdry. Make them sordid. Make them as lurid as they can be.” I inhale sharply. This woman is sick. “Then, give her the redemption she doesn’t deserve,” Miranda adds in her cool, calculating voice.
    I stand up, eager to play even a lowly two of clubs in the form of leaving first. “I’m late for my British lit class.”
    “You can expect a followup from me sometime this week.”
    “Sometime, like anytime?”
    She shrugs smugly. “Perhaps any day of the week.”
    Rule Number Three: Know when to bluff.
    “If you don’t tell me the day, I’ll tell my mom everything.” She may hold most of the cards, but the thing about blackmail is everyone has something to lose. Including Miranda. I don’t want my mom to know about the book she’s forcing me to write anonymously, but she doesn’t want my mom to know she’s making me write it either.
    She purses her lips. “I’ll email you.”
    “I can’t wait.”
    As I scoot out of the pew, she grabs my wrist and her pink nails dig into my skin. I fantasize about brandishing my field hockey stick and whacking her upside the head. There’d be a brilliant gash across her forehead. Blood would ooze into her blue eyes and leave a sticky trail in her blond hair.
    “Don’t. Sass. Me,” she says in a low hiss, determined to have the last word.
    I yank my wrist from her, clamp my lips together and let her have what she wants. My silence.
    I leave, but I don’t go to British lit, because I don’t have classes today. I have a dinner at my mom’s house. It is date night with a new man, and so she needs me there. She always needs me. And I need her.

Memoirs of a Teenage Sex Addict…
Page 3…
It’s been my mom and me as long as I can remember. I don’t remember much about my dad, so this story won’t be about him. All my memories are of my mom, starting with how unhappy she was after my dad walked out when I was six.
My mom was miserable for more than a year. She cried late at night, deep tears that could fill rivers and overrun their banks. She thought I was asleep, blissfully in dream land and unaware of her pain. But I heard her phone calls with friends, her “what did I do wrong” pleas, and her desperate, endless self-doubt. She missed the bastard, against her better judgement.
She tried to hold it together during the days, but I’d still find her crying in her cereal, or wandering aimlessly around the apartment, sniffling, and missing, and hurting.
“ Don’t cry, mom,” I’d tell her, and she’d wrap me in a tight embrace.
“ I won’t, darling. I have you to make me happy.”
After endless days and nights like that, she started to heal, to let go, and eventually the sobfests died down.
Then she was ready to start over. To carve out her new happy.
Dave was the first after my dad. I was in third grade, and Dave spent many nights at our house. He had a son one year older than me. Sometimes, when Dave visited in the evenings, my mom told us to play together. She and Dave wanted to chat and have some time alone.
“ I’m happy again,” she’d whisper to me before she closed the door to her room. “Isn’t it great to see me happy?”
“ Yes, mom.”
“ You’ll play with Dave’s son. That would make me so happy right now.”
His son was nine, I was eight. We played Monopoly.
Technically, I count Dave’s son as the first time my mom set me up with someone. Not that anything happened with him. But that’s how it all started, and this is the story of how I became a high-priced virgin call girl by the