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Day 20. This morning I came to my senses and took my medicine. I realized I must have done some pretty bad things. I figured I'd wait for Mr. Pound, and when he came I'd confess to him. He could make it easy for me. He was my friend. I waited all day, but he didn't show.

  About six I called the downtown police station. Mr. Pound had told me that he still had friends on the force. I figured I could ask around and they could put me in touch with him. It took forever to get in touch with homicide. While I waited I cursed myself for not having got his number. Then I got Detective Blick. I asked if he knew Mr. Pound.

  "Mr. Clarence Pound?" he asked.

  "I'm not sure of his first name. He is a retired policeman. He had told me he still had friends on the force."

  "Let me guess, he told you that he tried to make detective but 'political forces' kept him from making the grade. He also said that he was a vigilante, bringing criminals to justice who had escaped their just desserts."

  "Well, yes," I said.

  "I am sorry to tell you this, sir, but Clarence Pound is a retired postal worker with some severe personality problems. Every few months he stops his medication for a while and gets to thinking he's some super-cop. If he's been bothering you, let me know and we'll pick him up and take him to his doctor."

  "No. He hasn't been bothering me at all. Thank you."

  I hung up as he was asking "Who are – "

  Mr. Pound is some kind of nut. I'll have to be ready for him.

Day 21. I slept in the studio and he broke in. I woke up and saw him looking at my paintings. He had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

  "They're blank," he said. "All of these canvasses just painted white."

  "No," I said, "They're very subtle. You must study them carefully."

  "They're blank. You're some kind of nut."

  "No, you're the nut. You're an ex-postal employee. You're not a cop. You've never been a cop."

"That's not true." He pointed the gun at me.

"It is true. You're not a cop."

  Suddenly he sat down. Just sort of collapsed. He didn't say anything for a long time. I thought about going over and taking his gun away.

  Then he began to talk in a low monotone. He explained who he really was and everything became clear to me.

  He is Mr. Carlos Pound, owner of a very important gallery in New York. Today we are putting my paintings into a U-Haul van. We will drive up to New York, where he'll host a one-man show for me.

  I bet we make quite a splash.

Independence Day – Fourth Of July – Fireworks Begin
 

I was waiting in the hallway so I could be first to hear the doorbell, but Mother still beat me to the door. She held the spy clam gingerly, like finger cymbals, and its green light blinked to signal readiness. The spy clamshell was gray textured aluminum that looked both comical and scary; in fact, it was always that way at my house – you never knew whether to laugh or cry.

  I said, "Oh, Mother!"

  But she said, "Ginny, we have to know," and opened the door.

  Jason took a step forward. He shrieked when the spy clam opened and its foot reached out, grabbing hold of his skin, to measure his temperature, blood pressure, and psychological profile. His freckles began to sweat – I never knew freckles could sweat – and though he stood as tall as the doorframe, he slouched enough that Mother looked bigger by comparison. He checked me out, as if trying to decide if I was worth dealing with
her
. I had already promised to make it worth his time, but I could tell he was having second thoughts.

  Mother glanced at the readout, her eyes narrowing as the foot slowly retracted. The clam snapped shut, and a faint buzzing sounded. She already knew what Jason was thinking – she didn't need a spy clam for that. He was seventeen, same as me. He was thinking about things a seventeen-year-old thinks about and what would happen next. Mother was forty and was thinking about
then.
Her then, and all the trouble she'd gotten into.

  She punched the ready button on my cattle-prod pants and said, "Okay. I guess you can go out with John."

  "Jason," I said.

  "Whatever," said Mother.

  The prod pants fit like oven mitts, wired and preset to a maximum of stun. Wearing them made me feel huge, like I was a girl Michelin Tire Man. The pants had made Mother, their inventor, rich. Millions of units were in use across the globe, and so far there had only been five fatalities, from heart failure. Mother had used the profits to develop the Smart Twat and a lot of other weird surveillance technologies, most of which she tested on me.

  It was the hot part of the afternoon, and I was boiling inside my pants. I could smell my own body odor above the sweet scent of deodorant and baby powder. Mother didn't care that it embarrassed me to sweat. God, she was crazy. No wonder the CIA had rejected her application.

  I couldn't wait to get out of the house.

  "Later," I said, clutching my purse and hoping she didn't search it.

  "Nice to meet you, Mrs. Vuoto," said Jason.

  "Ms.," Mother said.

  "Whatever," said Jason, and I rushed him out the door and into his van.

  The seats smelled a little sour, like summer sweat and brake fluid. I unrolled my window. The whoosh of air released the scented evergreen from Jason's paper tree air-freshener across the seat. We drove off.

  "Did you get the tickets?" I asked.

  Jason reached in his shirt pocket and fanned out two stubs.

  Our alibi was going to the movies – a S
tar Wars
marathon. That gave us time to fool around, eat, and even actually see a few episodes after, if we felt like it. Jason drove past the lumberyards, out of town, and onto the Mackenzie Highway. The thick trees shrouded the road, their shadow lowering the temperature enough that I stopped sweating. He passed the Leeburg Dam and drove over a narrow bridge. He turned left and eased the car onto a gravel road leading to the river. He parked. Once the engine was off, I heard the drone of flies and mosquitoes and I rolled up the window to keep them out. I began to sweat again.

  Jason was all over me while I was still trying to figure out what to do in response. It wasn't easy knowing how far to take things. My pants emitted a warning beep, followed by a test buzz.

  He pressed against me and thrust his tongue into my mouth. He reached beneath my shirt to fondle my breasts. In a minute I stopped caring that Mother was, no doubt at this very moment, watching the readouts that showed what we were up to. Jason pushed me back against the seat. As his hard crotch rocked against me and my breathing quickened to match his, I felt a tingling begin at the base of my spine and radiate outward. I thought I was having an orgasm, my first, but too late recognized that the tingling announced an impending discharge of electricity.

  My pants came in a jolt of sparks and current and heat. I shrieked in shock as Jason shrieked in pain, then rolled away. Damn it! I could have dry-humped until morning!

  "What the fuck?" he asked, drooling, his hair disheveled and eyes red and watery.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "Really sorry."

  He drove me home. We didn't speak. I never saw him again.

Merck Prescription Information, advertisement in the
Journal of the
American Medical Association
(
JAMA
) – Brief Summary (for full prescribing information see professional information brochure): S.M.A.R.T. utilizes technologies of lie detection, laboratory testing, and skin and mood sensors to detect the presence of HIV, STDs, and changes in EEG and cognitive abilities that suggest the presence of stress and deceitful behavior.

Hiroshima Day – August 6 – The First Bomb Drops
 

I got off restriction and immediately got a date with some guy named Billy that I once met at the mall. Mother had retrofitted my cattle-prod pants with a tracking device, but I thought I had figured out a way to outwit her. Billy was my test drive. I couldn't wait to get out of my pants and hit the road.

  I stocked my backpack with supplies and said I was going to the library. When I got there, I ducked into the bathroom, broke open the instant hot pack, and exchanged my cattle-prod pants for a pair of jeans. I duct-taped the hot pack an inch below the thermostat and GPS sensors in the crotch, carefully placed the pants in my backpack, then carried the backpack over to the information desk.

  "Can you hold this for a while?" I said. "I forgot my library card and need to run back home and get it."

  "Sure," said the librarian.

  I gave her my pack, which she set under the counter, where it would be safe until I reclaimed it before the library closed.

Excerpt from the September 20
Times Picayune
front page:

  Republican Senator Hieronymus Bartholomew Bush of Jefferson Parish resigned yesterday after allegations that he had fathered three illegitimate children by three different women. Senator Bush's legislative career has been marred by controversy since it was revealed that his election was financed by the five-million-member Chastity Party, whose members helped to vault him from a relative unknown to a figure of national prominence. His campaign platform promised a return to family values, and he successfully sponsored several bills that provided tax waivers and tuition vouchers for teens who tested positive for virginity. Senator Bush recently spearheaded national legislation banning the sale of condoms without prescriptions. His attorney had no comment on the latest allegations.

  Ginny had never listened to her warnings. Seretta was doing everything she could think of to protect the girl but, evidently, that wasn't enough. What was the point of being a parent if you couldn't use your experiences to prevent those you loved from suffering hurt and pain? It was time to get serious, to take drastic action before Ginny did something she'd regret forever.

  It was time to activate Ginny's S.M.A.R.T.

From
Get Your Hands Off My Body: The Ginny Vuoto Story
, by Ginny Vuoto as told to Kitty Kelly:

  People have made fun of me since that first article in
Nature
, where my mom detailed how she invented the Smart Twat and how I was going to test it. Sure, I'm embarrassed, but I try to think about it like it's all happening to someone else and not me.

  My mom doesn't mean to be a monster, but she is. Some things should be private. We all need the chance to make mistakes, just like we need the chance to succeed because of our own efforts. And that's why I think they should never have made the Smart Twat legal. Because even if it does "save" us from ourselves – and from guys – we don't learn from our experience. All we do is react to some mechanical device, and where's the lesson in that?

  I know there are lots of problems in the world, and people feel like they have to do
something
. And I don't really have an answer to teen pregnancy or HIV. Maybe everyone just needs to lighten up. The world keeps changing. Morals change along with the times. Maybe we live in a world where every girl is just going to have a baby before she drives a car and that's that.

  I really think the world is going to end because of war or global warming or some horrible disaster, so anything that happens to me doesn't really matter anyway.