He She It

thirteen: sung-jin strikes again

"Here, have these."

"What the actual fu - oh. Oh."

Lilly didn't know what was funnier: the fact that Sung-jin (bless his confused, fatherly heart) took a late-night trip to the drugstore to ensure his daughter had sufficient means of contraception to have sex sixty times, or Mr Willner's face when he very nearly tripped over a pile of six boxes of premium femidoms.

Or, in fact, the story that Amara told next.

"So we got out of the restaurant, right, and her Dad wasn't there to pick us up yet so we were just waiting outside, and I'm like ninety-nine percent sure she was going to kiss me," Amara said, her voice dropping a few decibels towards the end. "In fact, no, she was definitely going to kiss me. And then - oh God, and then..."

"And then what?" Lilly asked, even though she was just as sure that the clearly traumatic end to Amara's date had had something to do with her deranged father. "Let me guess: Sung-jin strikes again?"

"Oh, he struck again, all right," Amara muttered, bending down to scoop the boxes into her bag. "And by struck, I mean he found Natalie's home phone number on the Internet, called her Dad and offered to pick us up, and then gave us a lesson on safe lesbian s ex all the way to Natalie's house."

"Staying safe is important, Ra," Lilly said, helping to cram the last box into Amara's bag and trying desperately, desperately hard not to laugh at her friend's impromptu sex-ed session. "You've got to know how to f uck without pushing your luck, you know?"

"He took three wrong turns, Lilly," Amara shrieked, "we drove for half an hour! He said the words 'lady loving' at least five times!"

"Actually, it was seven."

Natalie wrapped her arm around Amara's shoulders and grinned at Lilly. "I counted," she said, "it was actually very informative. Your Dad really knows his stuff, Ra."

"That's because he did two hours of research!"

"Your Dad watched lesbian por-"

"Shut up!" Amara said, clapping her hand over Lilly's mouth. "Just please, can we talk about anything other than my Dad's vast knowledge of lady loving before I throw myself into the nearest ocean."

Lilly was just about to offer up suggestions of other equally mortifying things to discuss in agaonising detail (such as the fact that she'd recently helped burn a notebook covered in 'Mrs Natalie Nicetits Khan' and questionably shaped lovehearts, or the time that Amara had started her period when she was home alone and been so terrified that she rang 999 and asked for an ambulance - both of which she was sure Amara was dying to tell her new girlfriend) when the afore-mentioned new girlfriend chose a conversation topic less likely to end in mortal embarrassment: Grace getting out of hospital.

"I'm thinking we should have a surprise party," she said, gesturing wildly at somebody across the hall. Lilly glanced over her shoulder and saw Eve, who was looking less like the Eve Lilly had watched master the art of high heels yesterday and more like an Eve who didn't want her classmates to know she was Eve.

(Which was understandable, of course, but Lilly couldn't help but feel the slightest bit disappointed, because it was rare to find somebody that pulled off skin-tight miniskirts quite as well as Eve did).

"Not a big one," Natalie said as Eve started walking across the corridor towards them. "Just me, you, you, Grace, and Ad-"

"Eve," Lilly interrupted, as Amara delivered a swift elbow jab to her girlfriend's ribs. "Right. It sounds fun."

"I heard my name," Eve said, stopping beside them. Lilly noticed she was wearing just the slightest bit of mascara and smiled to herself. "What sounds fun?"

"We're having a surprise party for Grace tomorrow night," Natalie explained, rubbing her side and wincing a little. "Be at her house for five o' clock with tuna or tinned tomatoes. Both would be excellent."

"Pregnancy cravings," Lilly added in response to Eve and Amara's raised eyebrows. "I snuck three tins of tomatoes into her ward the other night. Her piss is probably pure tomato juice."

"I'll let you test that theory, Lil," Natalie said. "So, are you all in?"

***

Lilly did not know what she was expecting to see when she jumped up from behind Grace's sofa and screamed 'surprise!' into Eve's eardrum, but it was most definitely not a fully-matured Ryan Kurosawa, complete with a 'you're having a baby!' balloon, a prosthetic leg, and the sort of smile that develops after years of continuously messing stuff up and charming your way out of it.

Nobody seemed to know what to do for a few minutes. Eve ducked back down behind the sofa, Lilly swore, Amara stared, and Natalie shrugged and went back to what she had been doing before Ryan had made a shock reappearance: blowing the femidoms up and twisting them into balloon animals.

"I forgot to buy balloons," she'd explained earlier when Lilly had walked in on her shaping one into something that vaguely resembled a giraffe. "These are the next best thing."

Personally, Lilly thought a floor littered in animal-shaped contraceptives would probably come across as slightly condescending, a silent: 'hey, maybe if you used one of these you wouldn't be throwing up your tuna and pissing every five minutes, dipshit,' which was certainly not the hey-it's-okay atmosphere she'd been aiming for. Natalie, on the other hand, seemed to find them both appropriate and hilarious - she'd been stuffing them down Amara's bra for the past five minutes, giggling as she did so, and didn't seem to show any signs of calming down anytime soon.

And so given that Eve was apparently comatose, and Natalie and Amara were engaging in what looked like the start of a very odd porno, Lilly took it upon herself to quiz Ryan on his sudden return in a manner that Sung-jin himself would be proud of.

That was the scene that Grace walked in on a little while later: Natalie clutching her stomach and wedging her artistic representation of a sausage dog between Amara's boobs, Lilly angrily confronting Ryan about neglecting his 'fatherly duties,' and reminding him that it was 'his good-for-nothing s perm that did this,' and Eve crouched behind the sofa clutching the hem of her skirt.

"Jesus," she said, "it's good to be back."

***

(idek but i thought we all needed some light comic relief bc i have the next four chapters planned out and it might get slIGHTLY heavy)

(and by 'heavy' i mean less bad femidom jokes and more on the actual issue this book is written about okay bYE).