They pointed out to their husbands her terrible outfit in the school photo and said they would never let their kid have their picture taken like that.
Little O went with the grocery cart to return all of Joe’s empty Pepsi bottles. Because it put him in a cheery mood, Joe’s favourite thing was to drink Pepsi. The store owner handed Little O the change and let her choose a chocolate from the fishbowl on the counter. She always chose the mint one. When she bit in, it was like there was a piece of winter hiding in the middle. The owner felt guilty that that was all he could give her. He had never seen a child who went about her errands so effortlessly. He told his wife that Little O would be a saint in two hundred years. His wife rolled her eyes.
A group of girls sat on the swings in their skirts. They looked like bells ringing back and forth.
Little O never hung out with other girls. She didn’t know what had happened first. Had they started rejecting her or had she decided that they weren’t worth her time? There were times when the boys wanted nothing to do with her. There were times when they needed her to leave them alone.
She went into the second-hand store. She tried on a pile of underwear and some bras in one of the changing cabins. She felt happy. She was all alone with her reflection and she felt as if no one else in the world existed. She knew what the reflection was going to say. It was sweet and kind and said, “I love you.”
She didn’t want to go home because Joe was in a foul mood. She wandered around and decided to stop into the pet store. The boy who worked there was the son of the owner. That’s why he was able to be there by himself. He sometimes let her sit next to him behind the cash. It made her feel as if she was his wife.
She imagined him standing in front of the stove, heating up a can of pasta for the two of them to eat. They would laugh about who had the idea of making pasta into the shape of trucks. Their lips would get a pretty orange colour from the toxic tomato sauce.
You could hear the doves cooing in their cages. Little O thought they were making the sounds of babies crying. They made her think of her own future little baby that she would treat so well. She would be so good to her little girclass="underline" she would dress her in fancy baby clothes with frills and buy her those hard cookies that are impossible for anyone other than a baby to bite into.
She gave the boy across the street a haircut. All the tufts of hair fell down around him, like some birds had been shot out of the sky and now were falling and falling. It looked terrible. And later in life, when women were yelling at him that he was a loser, that he wasn’t any good, that he didn’t do anything for anyone on earth and that he had never come close to making anyone happy, he would close his eyes and remember this haircut.
Because it was when he was having this haircut that he had been able to know for absolute certain what it was like to feel free of doubt.
Little O refused to be ashamed of the fact that she put her hand under the covers and touched herself. She imagined the security guard at the department store making her go into the backroom and have sex with him for stealing a pair of neon shoelaces.
She would not be one of the cowardly girls who said that it was only men who were dogs, that boys were perverts, that men couldn’t be faithful. Because these were wonderful attributes. They belonged to people who would not be judged by their imperfection, who knew that this was merely one small part of their identities.
The ones who weren’t afraid of others knowing that they were perverts were the ones that were going to rule the world. Little O would not be chaste.
Mrs. Thibault came home one afternoon and found Little O tied to the tree in her yard with a skipping rope.
“Will you please untie me?”
She untied Little O and she walked away without looking back. Mrs. Thibault wanted to ask her so many questions. She would have to spend the rest of her life wanting to ask Little O those questions. There were questions that she would never know the answers to.
Little O brought Joe’s awful black cat to the vet. It was always messy looking and out of sorts, like a kid that had just had a turtleneck pulled off its head. Her arms were covered in scratches and the scrawny cat hissed at everyone. The vet asked Little O why she didn’t go ahead and have the crazed animal put down. Little O said that it made Joe happy, and the vet saw that that was the most important thing for her. He gave her the flea medication for free and called her Mademoiselle Teresa.
Little O told Zachary that if he put money into the photo booth, she would take off all her clothes and let the camera take pictures of her in the nude. You could hear the machine gulp as it swallowed each quarter. He could see half her naked body beneath the curtain as the flash went on and off. He thought that he was going to faint.
Little O and Jack were doing their homework for art in the library together. He was obsessed with grey pencil crayons. He thought that real artists didn’t use bright colours. He showed her how he was colouring in a tree all grey.
Little O agreed with him that it looked much better that way. She would go along with every wrong little idea that a boy would have. She did this because she was encouraging them to follow their dreams, however idiotic those might be. She liked stroking their tiny egos. This is what women were supposed to do. They were supposed to believe in the dreams of their men as if they were God.
Jack suddenly loved Little O madly. It was the first time he was falling for this stupid pleasure.
Sometimes she wanted to live on a little planet where she was the only girl. On this planet, she would have seven husbands. They would be so demanding that she would have no time whatsoever for herself.
She would have seven beds to sleep in. Very much like Snow White and the seven dwarfs. She would have so many dishes to wash. She loved washing dishes in the evening.
She liked to read Tintin comic books. She imagined Tintin telling her that he loved her passionately. She pictured taking off her clothes on one side of the bed and Tintin taking his off on the other. She and Tintin would be dressed in underclothes and stand at the sink, brushing their teeth together. She imagined them both looking in the mirror — giggling at finding each other in the reflection together.
She let Tobias draw all over her arms and legs with a ballpoint pen. He drew everything that he knew how to draw until she was completely covered. He illustrated her with panthers and ninjas. She liked the way it felt. As if he was a doctor with a scalpel slicing through her anaesthetized body.
“There!” he said, when he was done. “Now no one will have you except for me. Now no man will look at you.”
He went into the pantry and gave her a can of No Name diet lime soda even though he knew that he wasn’t supposed to give these to his friends. She slurped from it while trying not to get the carbonated bubbles up her nose, making an awful lot of noise with that can.
She told him that he must be a millionaire because he had a chandelier in his living room. His family lived in a four-and-a-half in a big building and the chandelier came with the apartment. It was small and made out of brass and some of the light bulbs didn’t glow.
He wondered if it was true. Maybe he was rich and he didn’t even know it. Everybody was envious of him, but he just hadn’t noticed before. Little O told him that she didn’t love him for his money though; she loved him absolutely for himself.
The mother thought about how Little O was unsupervised all the time. She knew where her child was at any given time during the day. And there was Little O, sitting in their living room with nobody in the entire world having any idea whatsoever where she was. The world simply couldn’t work that way. It would all run amok. It was like a social experiment that was going to lead to bloodshed or total chaos. The mother looked at Little O as though she were Robespierre, with her skinny legs crossed on the couch.