#parkorner

He sat down at the opposite end of the bar, reached over to hook a fingertip into the edge of the bowl of Cocoa Puffs sitting in front of Pansy, and dragged it across the counter toward himself.

An enormous bow, purple with white polka dots, sat at the top of her head, crowning her blunt black bob. Her eyelids were shaded to match. Michael thought he smelled artificial grape, and wondered if it was her lip gloss.

"Why are you in my house, Minnie Mouse?" He poured milk over his cereal, then walked back to the fridge to put it away. Bent over again, he heard the distinctive sound of ceramic scraping across granite, and turned around to find Pansy with his bowl back in front of her and his spoon in her hand, chewing earnestly.

"Hey.” He gestured pointlessly at the bowl. “I was gonna eat that."

She waved at him. "Move on. I have a favor to ask you."

Michael pulled another bowl from the cupboard. "You mean besides letting you eat my cereal?"

She nodded, jamming a spoonful into her grape-flavored mouth.

"I need you to start fucking me after school."

Michael froze.

"Excuse me?"

As she waved her hand again, he fixated on her gleaming purple manicure. Each of her nails was a completely smooth oval.

"It's perfect. I checked, and cheer practice lines up almost exactly with robot group–"

"Robotics club."

"Fucking Legobots clubhouse, and mom doesn't get home until 6:15."

"My mom or your mom?"

"My mom. Your mom gets home at 5:45, so that’s another half an hour at my house, which we might need, I don't know. Anyway, like I said, you're right next door, it's perfect." She took another bite of Michael's cereal.

Carefully, deliberately, he set his new bowl down at his new spot at the island, and sat down.

Slowly, methodically, he filled it to the brim with Cocoa Puffs.

“Is this like a fake dating thing? Are you trying to get Draco back by pretending we’re sleeping together or something?”

Pansy shook her head. “No. It’s the opposite of that. We’re going to have real sex, but no one will know about it. And I’m still not talking to you at school.” She’d finished chasing the last globes of cereal around in her milk, and grabbed the box to top off her bowl.

Michael could feel himself glitching.

“Sex.”

“Yes, Michael.”

“With me.”

“Yes, Michael.”

He rebooted. “Why me?”

“It just makes sense. We’ve already seen each other naked,” she said. “Taken baths together. Slept in the same bed.”

“Yes, when we were two.”

He thought about the photo albums on the shelves in the TV room, and the series of photographs taken of her and Michael standing in a plastic pool in the backyard, arms looped around one another’s shoulders, wearing nothing but My Little Pony and Spider-man underpants, respectively, Michael squinting in the sun, Pansy in pink star-shaped plastic sunglasses, tongue out and hip cocked to one side.

“You can sleep with literally any guy at school. And not to be an asshole, like, get it, for sure, but my understanding is that you kind of do.”

She turned toward him with a look of unfiltered excitement and pointed the bowl of her spoon at him. “That’s exactly it. I don’t. But Cassius—”

“Cassius Warrington?”

“Mm hm.”

Cassius Warrington had graduated two years earlier, and now played college football in a very high-profile way.

“I’ve been texting with Cassius, and Daphne was messing around and said something to his sister who told Graham Montague who told Cassius that I’m incredible.”

Michael blinked. “Incredible at having sex?”

“Yes.”

His eyes narrowed. “Are you...not?”

“No! I’ve never done it.”

He looked down into the detritus of cereal powder floating in his now-brown milk, and suddenly short on appetite, dropped his spoon in his bowl.

“But I thought you and Draco, you know, for what, three and a half years…?”

He wondered why he’d felt the need to specify the half.

“His parents are so weird about all that purity stuff. He went down on me constantly, but that’s as far as it went. But no, I haven’t had intercourse.”

“So...you’re asking me to have intercourse with you, so you can have intercourse with your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend yet, but basically, yes.”

Michael suddenly felt defensive.

“Why would you think I’d want to do this?”

Pansy stared at him, then waved a hand down the length of her body.

She was all soft, flawless skin and dark hair and big eyes and long legs and…

Michael breathed out.

“Because I’m me,” she said. “And you get intercourse, Michael. Until I’m good at it.”

“Isn’t that a big deal, though? Like don’t you want to have feelings with whoever you have sex with for the first time?”

“That’s exactly the problem. What do you think of when I say ‘virginity’?”

“I mean, it’s a social and not a biological construct, and there are some pretty gross gender disparities—”

“Exactly. That’s why you’re perfect. I don’t want some guy who thinks putting his dick in me is the equivalent of typing ‘First!’ in the comments.”

“And you think Cassius will be? Why date him then?”

“He’s 6’5”. But you’re an analytical nerd, you’re fucking hot, you’re definitely not going to tell anyone, you’re single—”

“What makes you think I’m single?” He paused. “You think I’m hot?”

She only rolled her eyes. “And yes, the double standards are unbelievably fucking annoying,” she said. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Have feelings the first time?”

He swallowed, and pushed the cereal further away.

“I haven’t done it either.”

Pansy and her grape lip gloss stood up abruptly from the bar stool.

He wasn’t tall, exactly, and she wasn’t short, exactly, but when she and her tiny skirt stepped between his parted knees, something about the way she was still a little shorter than him while he was sitting down triggered a rush of adrenaline, and his gut promptly became a thriving butterfly preserve.

“Are you―what, like, right now?” he asked.

He’d been steadily leaning toward saying yes, but if he did, there was a lot of research he’d want to do between now and the actual opening ceremonies.

“No, fucking dork.” Pansy rolled her eyes, and patted her hands against his knees. “My parents are out of town next weekend, and Cassius is gone for an away game, so he’ll be too busy to text.” She smiled, and it was something less like the Cheshire smirk she flashed at her friends across the quad, and more like the way she used to look when they tore open their first Otter Pops in Michael’s back yard every summer, until they’d turned twelve and both moved on.

“We’re going to be so bad,” she said. “But that’s fine.”

“I hope not. I mean...if we...I’d try. Obviously. To not be bad.”

“It’s not like AP Calculus.”

“No, I don’t imagine it’s anything like AP Calculus.”

Michael glanced at her mouth, glistening and faintly purple, and Pansy’s eyes widened.

Fuck it, he thought.

He settled one hand at her hip and the other at the back of her neck, and then he kissed her.

They separated a full minute later, both breathless.

Oh, Michael thought.

“Oh,” she said.

“Next weekend?” he asked, hand tightening over her hip. “Like, what time?”

“I guess...” She stared at Michael’s lips, and her hips tilted forward. “Whenever.”

She crashes the tray onto the front counter of the cash wrap, then ducks below to flick the sound system on.

Seamus’ heavily abraded NOFX CD sits in the tray, so she pulls it out, tosses it on top of the player, spends five minutes flicking through one of several six inch-tall stacks of loose CDs, then drops the burned CD with “Theo’s” written on the top in Sharpie in the tray. The volume knob gets knocked back half an inch to the drawn-on black line indicating loud enough to numb either the entry to or exit from a day of working retail, but not so loud that mall security takes an interest.

Pansy mentally composes the passive aggressive note she’ll leave behind for Seamus when he comes in for the closing shift as she settles the cash tray in the till drawer, then slams it shut and makes a round of the floor.

She straightens the Nightmare Before Christmas display to New Order—Temptation—and by the time the playlist has hit Depeche Mode, she’s moved on to the Halloween merchandise table at the front of the store.

Someone who hears your prayers.

Pansy thrusts her hip to the right while she rehangs a knit sweater in Freddy Kreuger stripes, sending the pleats of her tiny, tiny Tartan skirt flying to one side.

Someone who cares.

She throws her hip to the left.

Then her head: her black bob flicked one way, and then the next.

Flesh and bone.

Her hips move, fishnets over skinny knees ...

I will deliver.

… Draco’s holey Rob Zombie baseball tee knotted above her navel and hanging off her right shoulder, red bra, red lips, black eyeliner thick.

You know I’m a forgiver.

She lays her hands flat on the table.

Your own …

Tips her hips back—

… personal ...

—then decides on a stripper dip to pick up a stray size sticker from the floor.

Jesus.

Upright, blood rushing from her head, she pulls the coil key chain off her wrist, and turns on the heel of one knee-high boot.

The moment she fits the key into the doors that open onto the walkways of the mall, she looks up at an audience of one.

His hair is a nameless shade of brown, wind-blown, like he bike commutes, and he’s wearing one of his many supremely unremarkable button-up shirts, untucked with the sleeves rolled up, over chinos and a pair of weirdly clean Nike Killshots.

He’s wearing a wry, dry smile, too, and Pansy flushes at the line she’s able to draw in her mind from the gate rolling up and open at the front of Diagon Alley Comics to the glass-paneled doors she’s drawing in towards herself on the other side of the tiled divide, and considers how much of the real estate of her ass she’s stripper-flashed him at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.

Someone to hear your prayers.

Michael, Assistant Manager: name, rank and serial number printed on the nametag dangling from the bottom of his Legend of Zelda lanyard.

Someone who’s there.

Not that Pansy gives a shit.