‘---what a sullen bunch---‘

This is for WriterzBlocked, although you maybe had to have been there to really get it.
It is dedicated to Katie McN, and les filles, Katie R and Claudette; laissez les bon temps rouler, chères…

**********

It wasn’t like it was all Vondie’s fault or anything, but still …
Jeez.
I mean, we were awful close; had been ever since the first grade at Holy Sisters, where we were the guests of honor at the school’s first-ever double paddling. Rumor had it that Sister Agatha had even had that three-foot birch rod made especially for us, ‘cause her bursitis in her shoulder started bothering her so bad from all the lickings she’d had to administer to the two of us separately. So there we’d be, Vondie’n me, bent over Sister’s desk side-by-side, and Vondie’d look at me, and I’d look at her, and it was all we could manage most times to keep from just busting up right there while Sister was switching our behinds. 
Right from then, you couldn’t hardly ever find the two of us apart. We shared just about everything, borrowing each other’s clothes and stuff, right down to our ‘unmentionables,’ even that trés bizarro stuff that Vondie gets online from someplace called the ‘Tramps Treasure Trove dot com’ or some such – although what a girl like Vondie would want with underoos with a slit in the bull’s-eye was a bit more than even I could fathom. After all, it wasn’t like we were working girls or anything, not like that Susie Normand. That girl’d do just next door to anything for the price of a new outfit from Georgiou’s. Although I had to admit, I was a little jealous sometimes of Susie’s collection of angora sweaters. 
But still, a girl has to have some principles.
So as I was saying, Vondie’n me was always very generous with one another, and shared almost everything: our lipsticks and our perfume and our ‘feminine paraphernalia’ and such, and some even more personal items, if you get my drift. We’d always been more like sisters than best friends, really, except without all the hitting and backstabbing and stuff that sisters do like hiding your diaphragm on Friday night in the freezer next to the Reese’s Pieces. Or like my sisters, anyway. 
We’d even swapped boyfriends once or twice, just for a lark. Well, and to see what else we could find out about each other too, I guess. But we never let a guy, or anything else come between us since we were six years old. And we never had a secret that we didn’t share with the other.
So it was a real surprise, I can tell you, to find myself absolument tout la nu on a Friday night in the natatorium (that’s ‘swimming pool,’ for the knuckle-draggers in the crowd) behind the gym, and the center of attention for Vondie and her new boyfriend Freddie Markle and a select group of a dozen or so of our most intimate friends and acquaintances. And a few other assorted assholes, as well. I could feel the tile at the edge of the pool, cool and slick underneath my little bare tootsies, and the smell of chlorine was rising up around me like swamp gas, nearly choking me. That’s how I knew I was poised right on the edge of the swimming pool.
It was about the only thing that I knew for certain, at the time.
“She’s fakin’ it…no way she’s hypnotized,” Daryl McClellan was squeaking in that reedy voice of his that made you want to reach out and grab his balls and squeeze them real hard and yell ‘When’s your voice gonna change and quit hurtin’ my ears, you limp motherfucker?” Only I couldn’t yell, because my voicebox seemed to have wandered off into a different area code, and I couldn’t grab his balls, even if I’d wanted to, ‘cause my arms was both held straight out from my sides so that I looked just like some kind of stupid statue of the maudit Redeemer, as if I was about to fall back into the pool and make a damn’ snow angel, only outta water. And while I was still able to send messages to ‘em – my arms, I mean – they all seemed to be coming back marked ‘undeliverable’ for some reason or other.
Now, I normally don’t make a big fuss about being the center of attention; Saint Agnes knows I don’t mind guys – and the occasional girl – checking me out. If you want to know the truth of it, it always makes me feel kinda special, like my skin was glowing or something. Like I was Brittany in a flash new music vid, y’know? I’ve been told I look a lot like her anyway, and I’ve got a real nice bod, if I do say so myself. It’s just that I usually like to be the one making the call on the ‘where’ and the ‘who’ when I decide to show it off so unencumbered by habillement, as my aunt Eugenia from Lutcher would say. And you couldn’t really get much more unencumbered in the way of habillement than I was at the present moment. 
As in, zippo. Zilch. Skin-city.
“No, she ain’t,” I heard someone else say at the periphery of this little gaggle of sweaty-palmed, goggle-eyed adolescent voyeurs. “Lookit her eyes…she’s zapped!” One or two others giggled, a little bit nervous-like, it sounded as if to me. But then, I wasn’t sure my ears were working any better than my arms and legs were, right at that particular instant.
As if to settle this point once and for all as to who was in charge, Freddie Markle made a little gesture with his left hand; I may have been the only one who saw it, and I’m still not sure I even did. But the next thing I know, my right knee is lifting up, like its connected to a maudit Dieu string or somethin’, coming right up to my chest till it nearly touches my tittie, like I was doin’ my flag-twirler high-step at the fifty yard line during halftime of a Tigers’ game. I felt my ears burning, and I wanted to scream at him to go and commit an act of monogenesis with himself, the fat, pimply fuck. But all I seemed capable of doing at the time was balancing there on the ball of my left foot at the edge of the pool, my knee up to my nipple, damned near, my arms spread wide, and this goofy smile plastered all over my face. I felt like the maudit hood ornament on some expensive damn’ foreign car.
I swore dire, if silent, oaths of blood vengeance against Freddie Markle and my tramp former-best girlfriend Vondie. Everyone else just laughed.
Freddie and Vondie – her actual Saint’s name was Yvonne Desirée, but that got bobbed to ‘Vondie’ tout suite once we started going ‘round together on a regular basis  – were a relatively new item on campus, and frankly, I hadn’t quite got the hang of the two of them as a couple just yet. Vondie was drop-dead, homecoming queen gorgeous, with long auburn hair with these real coppery highlights, you know? And the kind of body that made grown men fall to their knees just about whenever she came into sight. She’d had the lecherous eye of pretty nearly every guy between the ages of puberty and senility crawling over her lovely bod at one time or another almost from the time that she slipped on her first trainer bra. 
Yep, Vondie could’ve had any guy in three parishes without hardly workin’ up a glow; and HAD had a fair number of ‘em, though I don’t like to gossip about my best girlfriend. Freddie Markle, on the other hand, was a pudgy, loathsome, doughy-looking kid with watery mud-brown eyes, an underslung jaw and a bad complexion, who didn’t really smell all that wonderful either, although far be it from me to speak disparagingly about the less-fortunate among us. 
I’d asked Vondie about Freddie once or twice, but she’d only smiled, kind of sly, like she’d just cadged the last beignet off of the plate. Then she’d show me those big, Shirley Temple dimples of hers and say real offhand-like: “Handsome is as handsome does, darlin’,” or “Still waters run deepest, Brie chère,” which I frankly thought she had lost her mind, since Freddie Markle was just about as far away from ‘handsome’ as a pet pig is from Brad Pitt, and he hardly ever held still. Which was another thing that you couldn’t hardly help but notice about Freddie. He always looked as if he was just about to pee in his pants, or at least whenever I was around him, anyway. He was that fidgety. But whatever, I thought. She is my best girlfriend, after all, so I just kept my opinions to myself.
“Can I touch her?” 
This voice sounded an awful lot like Jack Deloitte’s. Jack was captain of the football team – the quarterback, naturally. He didn’t hang out much with our crowd, and when he did show up we always had the feeling that he was kind of slumming, if you know what I mean. Sort of like seeing The Donald and his latest blonde fuck machine show up at the Gramercy carnivale to watch the geek biting the heads off of chickens. That sort of a thing.
“I dunno,” Freddie seemed to hesitate for a minute, unsure of himself, like he maybe had seen the pictures that were runnin’ through my mind of his fat, naked self on a spit turning real slow over a big fire, and was beginning to have some serious second thoughts about whatever the fuck it was that was going on here.
“Why of course, Jack, darlin’,” I heard Vondie simper. “Brianna’s always wanted to run a post pattern with you anyway, sugar. If she’s told me once, she’s told me so a dozen times. Ain’t you, hon?” Vondie smiled and winked, fluttering her eyelashes at me like some kind of ditzy sorority airhead from Baton Rouge. I managed to fling a drawer full of cutlery in her direction via my eyeballs, which seemed to be about the only things in the package that were still working for me. She just laughed again. 
I coulda killed her. Cheerfully.
So here comes Jack Deloitte, the All-American Boy, and movie-star handsome, like a young Redford only with more going on in the eyes, if you know what I’m saying. And in the Dockers, too, although I must candidly admit that I have never had a real good look at ol’ Bob’s package, except on the silver screen, and after all what can you really tell in only two dimensions. And of course, I’m standing there in the altogether like some kind of stupid mannequin in a display window at Madelyn René’s, and I can feel myself getting damp under my arms, and I can smell myself a little now, too, and I’m thinking ‘SHIT! SHIT! SHITEROO!’ And I’m starting to get more than a little wet somewhere else now as well, which is really a surprise to me, since I’m not normally the first one to tip their hand in this type of a pas de deux, if you catch my meaning.
But then, by this time I’m starting to catch on that there isn’t anything very normal about any of this that I can make out.
Just then Vondie steps up to me, just as bold as brass, and runs her fingers real light-like along ma petite roulement gelée, and I cannot for the life of me tell you how I managed to stay on my feet…er, foot. But I did, even while I was making those stupid little noises like I always do when I start to get a little passionnant. Ugh. I despise being obvious. Anyway, Vondie seems to be enjoying this, and so she dips her fingers into my little pot au feu just a teensy-weensy bit further. 
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no fugitive girl from the Isle of Lesbos or anything, but we’ve done this before, Vondie and me. You know how girls are, and we’ve spent a LOT of sultry summer nights sleeping over at each other’s houses, and getting familiar with les choses de filles. But I never in all my life felt anything like what I felt when Vondie fluffed my muffin like that. I nearly passed out on the spot. It was all I could do to keep from falling into the damn’ pool.
Or maybe it wasn’t me that was keeping me on my toes and out of that water. Maybe it was Freddie Markle. I just looked over at him, and glared. Then Vondie pinched me again, in that real personal way that she knows perfectly well just drives me up the wall every time. After that, I sorta forgot about Freddie again for a little bit. 
Then I heard a zipper bein’ run up or down or something, somewhere, and Vondie steps back sudden-like and I’m face to face, in a manner of speaking, with Jack the Giant Killer’s Magic Staff. Or whatever the fuck it was in that fairy story. Pole-vaulting came fleetingly to my mind, for no earthly reason that I can recall.
Le bon Dieu et la Vierge Bénie, was all I could think of at the moment.
Next thing I know, me’n Jack are both up on the three-meter diving board, as naked as the day we popped into this world of sin. How we got there I’ll never know, but I suspect Freddie and that whore of an ex-best girlfriend of mine are at the bottom of this, too. Jack Deloitte has me around the waist, and he’s holding me head pointed down toward the Antipodes, and snacking on my moist little crumbcake whilst I play sword-swallower with his rather enormous épée. 
This was actually going pretty well, and I was starting to get into it a little bit, almost starting to feel normal, except of course for the audience, which was a little larger than I was used to, when I heard Vondie say something to Freddie. Then Freddie says something, and I don’t really know what it was, but all of a sudden I am dead certain that the thing I’ve got in my mouth is NOT Jack Deloitte’s ‘damselle-dowser, but a real-live, honest-to-Saint Ursula snake, with beady little eyes, and a forked little tongue, squirming around in my mouth and tryin’ to make its viper-ish way right on past my tonsils and down my damn’ throat!
Well, I gave a little scream, as you might well imagine, which seemed to amuse almost everyone, except for myself, of course. It especially seemed to tickle Jack Deloitte, who I guess was appreciating the effect that all of my hollering and carrying on was having on the maudit snake. And I’m just about ready to bite the damned reptile in two, and just see what-all we end up with, when Jack all of a sudden yells ‘Geronimo!’ and springs off the damned diving board backwards, holding me tight around my waist, with his face buried in my muff and me just about to dismember him!
I don’t really recall too much else about the evening’s festivities after that, except getting wet, and then I was sitting on the side of the pool, coughing up a little bit of chlorinated water mixed with some semen or snake venom, one or the other. I do remember pulling my legs up real quick out of the water, in case that snake had been a cottonmouth, and was out there somewhere in the pool on the prod for me still. And Freddie Markle was crouching next to me, and saying something in my ear, real soft and quiet-like, and I don’t have any better recollection of what all he was saying to me at that moment than I do of anything else that he said to me that evening. All I really remember about Freddie Markle that particular night was those damned muddy bayou-brown eyes of his. 
Next thing I knew Vondie was beside me, wrapping a towel around me, and helping me to my feet. I just sort of stood there shaking and shivering like some stupid wet retriever or somethin’, while everybody was laughing fit to bust a gut. I just shivered some more, and in between shakes I wondered why I was the only one who’d gone swimming at this pool party. Vondie just laughed and laughed.
“C’mon, Vondie,” Freddie smirked at her finally. “Time to pay up. Remember what you promised me, if I hypnotized Brianna for you…”
Vondie swiped at her eyes, tears still streaming down her cheeks as she nodded, then collapsed in gales of helpless laughter again. “Later, bébé,” she gasped at him. “I’ll get to you later, honest, I promise darlin’…”
She laughed so hard that I figured she wet herself. Had to of. I just sort of stared, still too messed up to think much of anything. I brushed the wet hair outta my eyes, and blinked kinda stupid-like, like some dumb horse that does tricks at the state fair, or somethin’.
“God, you were amazing, Brie honey,” Vondie said to me, when she’d finally stabilized her slutty self enough so that she could take a deep breath, and talk again. “I swear, I thought I was gonna have a my-oh-cardial infarction when you and Jack did that backwards half-gainer while you was fellatin’ the blanc mange outta him, sweetiepie. Jeez…”
I just gave her a blue-lipped smiled, and shook some more.
After most of the others had drifted away, and I’d dried off and got dressed, Vondie came over to speak to me again, while Freddie went to get his mama’s Honda Civic from the parking lot.
“Brie, chère, I hope y’all aren’t too upset with me, darlin’?  It was just a ol’ dumb bet, and anyway I just knew you’d have a good time with ol’ Jack if worse come to worse, ma fille douce …” 
She reached out and touched me softly on my shoulder.
I just smiled at her, this thin little smile like I have sometimes, all teeth and no eyes, y’know the kind I mean? After all, it wasn’t like I didn’t know where Vondie kept her diaphragm; we were always going through each other’s purses for a spritz of Entré Nous, or some tic-tacs, or whatnot. I fingered the sharp point on the stickpin of my little pearl-and-onyx scorpion brooch, and allowed myself to speculate for a minute or two as to whether their kid would have Freddie Markle’s eyes. 
I smiled again, a little bit wider this time. 
It’s never too smart to mess with a triple Scorpio, chère. I guar-ahn-TEE.

All rights reserved MEB © 2003