“Hey, Danny,” Emmie said, smiling, when he sidled over to her location. She blushed a bit, as she always did when Danny first approached, but Danny did not notice. He never did.
“Hey,” he returned. “Did you see that Mindy Snow was in here.”
“Uh ... yeah,” she said. “I just gave her her prescription.”
“Oh ... I guess that makes sense. Is she sick?”
“No,” Emmie said slowly. “At least not as far as I know. It was her pills.”
“Why does she need pills if she’s not sick?”
“Her birth control pills,” Emmie said carefully.
“Ohhh,” Danny said, nodding. “Of course. That’s actually a good thing to know.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
Danny looked around for eavesdroppers and then lowered his voice. “She just invited me to her house.”
“What?” Emmie said, her smile turning to a frown in an instant.
“Swear to God,” Danny told her. “She talked to me in the aisle while I was stocking and the next thing I know, she’s giving me directions to her house and telling me to come there as soon as I get off work.”
Emmie’s expression darkened a bit more. “Why?” she asked.
He hesitated for a moment and then decided that Emmie was a good friend, and he could tell her anything. “I’m pretty sure she wants to ... you know ... have sex with me.”
“Have sex with you?” Emmie asked, incredulous, angry. “What makes you think that?”
“Because she told me: ‘I really would like to fuck you after you get off work today. Come up to my house and we’ll make it happen’.”
“She said that? Seriously?”
“Serious,” he confirmed. “Ain’t that some shit?”
“You’re not going to do it, are you?” she asked.
He looked at her as if she were mad. “Of course I’m going to do it,” he said. “This is Mindy Snow!”
And so, he did it. He drove up into the mountains after work and was taken for a three-hour tour of Mindy’s bedroom that left him limping, sore, with multiple abrasions to his penis, and intermittent bleeding from his anus after Mindy crammed three fingers up there during the height of the most incredible blowjob he had ever imagined, let alone had.
He finished the job of lighting the fuse on a bomb that would explode two years later by describing the encounter to Emmie the next day in heavy rated-R detail (he left out the part about the fingers in the butt and the rimjob Mindy demanded he give her and the bites on his nipples), completely oblivious to the knife he was putting in her heart.
Three months later, Danny got a job working at Burbank Airport as a baggage handler. He never played football again. He never went to school again. He never saw Mindy Snow again (except on the big screen or his VCR). He never had a romantic relationship with Emmie, or even realized that she desired one, and he never spoke to her again after his last shift at Lister. He would always have a fond memory of the day he fucked Mindy Snow, and would often tell the tale to friends and coworkers, not a single one of whom believed him.
As for Emmie, she developed a white-hot hatred for Mindy Snow and had been burning with anger and resentment ever since. In her mind, she had been just about to enter that long-sought romantic relationship with Danny when the slutty bitch came along and snatched him away from her at the last second. She did not contemplate the fact that Danny had never been invited to her house again. Mindy Snow had ruined her shot and she hoped Mindy Snow would burn in hell for it.
That resentment and hatred was still burning quite nicely, with plenty of fuel remaining, when the reports about Mindy’s pregnancy began to play in the media and the newspapers. The slut had struck again, this time to one of her favorite actors (she often masturbated to the thought of Greg Oldfellow cuddling with her while they were naked) and, by extension, to her all-time favorite singer, Celia Valdez. She fumed with each new report that she read, not having any problem whatsoever believing that the slut was trying to run some sort of scam. After all, she had experience with what she was capable of. When the Condom-Gate stories began to appear, with the dueling question of whether Greg Oldfellow had been given a condom by Mindy and with Mindy insisting that there was no condom and that she had been, in fact, on birth control at the time, Emmie realized she had access to a significant piece of information.
She was still working at the Lister as a pharmacy technician (and she was still single, her only sexual encounter of her life having taken place in high school during a kegger). During a lull in pharmacy customers on the very same day that Greg Oldfellow and Jake Kingsley (who Emmie had masturbated to on more than one occasion as well) were playing a round of golf at the Mojave Springs Country Club, she logged into the prescription database she had access to as part of her job duties. She did not know Mindy Snow’s date of birth off the top of her head, but there was only one Mindy Snow in the database, so it was not hard to look up the information she sought.
“Well now,” she said, an evil smile on her face. “This is very interesting.”
She used the ‘print screen’ function and churned out a hard copy of the database entry. She then used the Xerox machine in the corner to make three copies of it. She stowed all the copies in her purse.
At the time, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as HIPAA, was still six months away from being signed by President Clinton. Nevertheless, Emmie knew that what she was contemplating was illegal and unethical. But then, so was scheming to get yourself pregnant and ruining the marriage of two of her favorite celebrities. Mindy Snow was a slut, and she needed to pay for what she had done. Emmie would see to it that she did.
That night, when she got home to her simple one-bedroom apartment in Santa Clarita that she shared with Frick and Frack, her two cats, she picked up the phone book and found the number for the Los Angeles Times. It took her nearly thirty minutes of sitting on hold and being transferred around before she finally was able to talk to a human being she could tell her tale to. That human being was Frieda Clause, the on-duty secretary for the entertainment department.
“I’ve got documented information on Mindy Snow and her birth control pills,” she told Clause.
“What kind of documented information?”
Emmie told her. Clause gave no indication whether or not she was impressed by Emmie’s claim. But she took her number. And less than fifteen minutes later, Bernadette Tapp called.
Less than an hour after that conversation, Emmie was at the nearest library, faxing a certain document to a certain Los Angeles fax number.
This headline was so juicy it was printed above the fold in the next day’s edition of the Los Angeles Times.
RECORDS SUGGEST THAT MINDY STOPPED BIRTH CONTROL IN APRIL
The article, under the byline of Bernadette Tapp, citing an ‘anonymous source within the pharmacy industry’, revealed to the readers that pharmacy records from ‘a regional pharmacy chain’ show that Mindy Snow put a ‘hold’ on her prescription for Progestin C+, a common birth control pill, on April 19th, 1995, nearly a month before she reported for primary photography in Chicago for the film Us and Them and long before the purported sexual encounter with Greg Oldfellow that allegedly led to Mindy’s pregnancy. Putting a hold on a birth control prescription, it was explained, was common when a woman was trying to conceive a child, with the expectation that the hold would be lifted and the prescription resumed after the child was born. The hold, as of the date the document was printed, was still in place.