SPH-THEMED EROTICA STORIES

There have to be thirteen of them.

Sigma Beta Chi has never known why. It is simply in the agreement, the way the date is in the agreement, the way it has been since the house on Lorimer Street was built. Thirteen pledges come over on the Friday before bid night. Not twelve. Not fourteen.

If they cannot field thirteen, the chapter finds a thirteenth, and they always find him, and Odessa Fontaine has never once had to explain why she cares.

She has been house mother at Theta Pi Gamma for eleven years.

That is what the paperwork says.

—

She was in the kitchen at four, her sleeves pushed up, the girls setting up around her, and she was watching all of it the way a woman watches a pot she has put on herself.

She was a handsome woman, and she knew the exact size of it.

Fifty, or near enough that nobody had ever thought to count. Black hair down her back, heavy through the hip and heavier through the chest, and she wore the kind of dress that does not announce anything and does not have to. When she came into a room, the girls straightened up without deciding to. When she entered a room with a man, the man found out something about himself.

She did not flirt. Flirting is for women who are not certain. What she did was stand a little closer than she needed to and let her voice drop half a step, and then wait, and it had worked on every living thing she had ever tried it on.

“Miss Dess, we have a problem with the chairs.”

“There is no problem with the chairs.”

Sydney Ambrose had a clipboard. Sydney Ambrose had a clipboard the way some people have a nervous system. She was the president, she was twenty-one, and she had run every event that house had put on for a year and a half without once appearing to enjoy a minute of it.

“There are eleven, and there are supposed to be twelve.”

“There are supposed to be eleven, because I said eleven, and one of you is going to stand up all night, and it is going to be you.” Odessa did not look up from the bowl she was drying. “Somebody has to be able to walk down the line.”

Sydney wrote “walk down the line” on her clipboard, then looked at what she had written and did not ask.

—

Aubrey Doyle came down the stairs two at a time in a dress that was doing a great deal of work.

She had never in her life had an unexpressed thought. She was already mid-sentence when she hit the landing, talking to nobody in particular.

“…and I said if you are going to pretend you’re not coming down for this, at least lie better, because she spent forty-five minutes on her eyes and she has never once done that for chapter meeting.”

“Who?” said Naomi.

“Everybody.”

Naomi Whitlow was a sophomore. Nineteen, pre-med, and she had brought her own pen. She had also brought a notebook, which Odessa saw but said nothing about.

“Are we recording the numbers?”

“Oh, honey,” Aubrey said. “We are recording everything.”

“I just mean if there’s no record it’s only opinions.”

“That’s exactly right,” Odessa said, and Naomi looked up, surprised to be agreed with. “Write down every one of them. Soft, then hard. Both columns. I want the difference between the two.”

Naomi’s pen stopped.

“Both?”

“Both,” said Odessa. “The difference is the interesting part. It always is.”

—

Camila Ocampo came in through the kitchen with a case under each arm and put them down hard enough to make a point.

“I want it on the record that I think this is gross.”

“It’s on the record. You put it on the record last year and the year before that.”

“Because it’s gross.”

Cam was twenty-one, and the only girl in that house who ever argued with Odessa to her face, and Odessa liked her the best, and had never once said so, and never would.

“You know what it is.” Cam folded her arms. “It’s the same thing they do to us with a different hand on the tape. We rank them; they rank us; everybody gets a number; everybody feels like garbage on Sunday. We’re calling it tradition because somebody did it in 1868.”

“Eighteen sixty-eight,” Odessa said. “That’s right. You’ve been reading the composite.”

“It’s on the wall.”

“It is.” She hung the towel on the oven door. “Come out on the porch a minute.”

—

It was still warm. The magnolia was doing what it does in September: dropping things.

“Go on,” Odessa said. “Ask me why I’ve never shut it down.”

“I’ve been asking you that for two years.”

“You’ve been telling me. Different thing.” She lowered herself into the chair with the cushion. “Ask.”

“Fine. Why?”

“Because I counted.” Odessa looked out at the yard. “How many times a week does a girl in that house get looked at and graded? By a boy at a bar. By the camera on her own phone. By her own mother. I stopped counting at a number that made me want to put my hand through a wall.”

“That’s not an answer, that’s a grievance.”

“Then here’s the answer. How many times does any one of you get to be the one holding the tape?”

Cam didn’t say anything.

“Once. One night a year, and it’s tonight, and I built it that way on purpose.” Odessa let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “Now. You’ve had two years of telling me it’s gross and I have never once argued with you, and I want you to notice that, because I’m not going to argue with you now either.”

“Then what?”

“I’m going to make you an offer.” She turned her head. “Stand next to me tonight. Not by the window with your arms folded. Next to me, at the top of the line, where you can see all thirteen of their faces at the same time.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Because you have never once in your life gotten to be the reason a man was nervous,” Odessa said, “and I think you’d be extremely good at it, and I think you already know that, and I think it’s what actually scares you.”

Cam looked at her for a long moment.

“That’s a hell of a thing to say to somebody.”

“It’s Friday,” Odessa said. “Go put ice in something.”

—

She got the girls in the living room at seven and gave them the whole of it.

“Nobody is measured alone. That’s the first and only thing that matters. They come in together, they line up together, they stay in that line the entire night, and every single one of them gets to watch every single other one of them get taken apart.”

Aubrey made a noise.

“One at a time is a doctor’s office. All thirteen at once is something else, and something else is what we’re doing.” Odessa took her wine off the mantel. “They will be shoulder to shoulder. They will be able to see down the line in both directions. That is the entire architecture, and I have been refining it for a very long time.”

“How long?” said Naomi.

“Longer than you’ve been alive, sugar. Second thing.”

She held up two fingers.

“We do it twice. Soft first, all thirteen, in order down the line. Then we get them hard, and we do it again, and we rearrange the line.”

The room went quiet in a way it had not gone quiet yet.

“Rearrange,” Sydney said.

“By rank. Tallest number stands at that end, smallest at that end, and every time a number changes, they move, and they move themselves, in front of each other, and they know exactly why they’re moving.” Odessa smiled at the girls. “The soft order and the hard order will not be the same. They never are. And the boys who go down the line are going to have to walk past the ones who went up.”

Naomi said, very quietly, “That’s mean.”

“It surely is.”

“Like, actually mean.”

“Naomi.” Odessa crossed the room and crouched down in front of her chair, which took a knee she was going to hear about later, and put a hand on the girl’s ankle. “There is not one boy coming through that door tonight who has not, at some point in his short life, stood in a room with his friends and put a number on a girl who could hear him do it. Not one. I’d stake this house on it.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“No, honey,” Odessa said. “It makes it fair. Right is a whole different conversation, and we are not having it tonight.”

She stood up.

“Third thing, and then I’ll let you at them. You may touch. You need to, or you won’t be able to do the work. Anything else you’d like to do with your hands, you ask me first, in front of everybody, out loud.”

She let that sit, and then she smiled, and the smile is the thing people remember about her.

“And I want to be plain, because we’re all women in this room and I am too old for a lot of coy nonsense. You are going to have thirteen cocks in this house in an hour. You are going to hold every one of them. Some of you are going to like that a great deal more than you expected to, and that is the correct outcome, and I do not want one girl in here apologizing for it tonight or at brunch on Sunday.”

Sydney went scarlet.

“Sydney.”

“Ma’am.”

“You especially, sugar,” Odessa said warmly, and Sydney looked at the carpet.

—

They came at eight.

Thirteen of them, freshmen and one sophomore who had failed to pledge the year before and was trying again, and every last one of them of age, because Odessa checked in the front hall, personally, one at a time, the way she did every year. She was not unkind about it. She was not flexible about it either.

She let them get a drink in them and get loud. That mattered too. Then she went and stood at the front of the living room and said nothing at all, and the room came down in stages, the way it does.

“Good evening. I’m Miss Dess. This is my house.”

“Good evening, ma’am,” said somebody, and got laughed at, and she let it go.

“In about four minutes I am going to ask you to take everything off below the waist, and you are going to stand in a line right there along that wall, all thirteen of you, and these young women are going to measure every one of you twice and rank you against each other out loud. Five of you get a bid. Eight of you go home.”

Somebody made a sound that was meant as a laugh.

“Now the part nobody ever believes. You don’t have to do this.”

She waited, and looked at them one at a time, which took a while, which was the point.

“There’s a door behind you. Walk out of it right now and nothing happens to you, tonight or ever. Nobody in this house will mention it, and if anybody in that fraternity mentions it, you come to me, and I want you to understand that when I say I’ll handle it, I am not being sweet.” She let that land. “I have watched men leave. Four of them, over the years. They were fine. One of them is a judge.”

Nobody moved.

“Then you’re here because you want to be,” Odessa said. “Hold on to that. It’s going to be the only comfortable thought you have for the next two hours.”

—

She had them strip all at once.

That was deliberate, and it was the first cruelty of the night, though none of them would have called it that. One at a time, a man gets to be brave on his own. Thirteen at once and they had to watch each other do it, and half of them were watching the wrong way down the line before their belts were even off.

Then they were standing there. Shirts on, most of them. Nothing else.

Thirteen young men against the wall of a sorority house living room with eleven girls in chairs in a half circle and one girl standing.

Nobody said a word for a good ten seconds.

Then Aubrey said, “Well, hello,” and the room came apart, and about six of them laughed, and about seven of them did not.

“Hands at your sides,” Odessa said. “Not in front. We can all see it, honey; the covering up is just editorial.”

She walked the line once, slow, before anybody touched anybody, with her hands behind her back and her eyes going down and up.

“Look at all of you,” she said. “Thirteen boys who have spent four years talking about this in a locker room, standing in a sorority house with your cocks out, hoping. Isn’t that something.”

Somebody laughed. Somebody else didn’t.

“Chins up. You’re not in trouble.” She stopped in front of the tall one and let herself look at him for a good three seconds longer than was necessary. “You’re being appreciated. There is a difference, and by the end of tonight every one of you will know it.”

“Two of them know it already,” Aubrey said. “Third from the left, and the big one on the end.”

The whole line moved. Every one of them looked, and then looked away, and then could not help looking back.

“They surely do,” Odessa said, without turning around. “Josh. Hands at your sides. I have told you once already, and there is not one person in this room you are fooling.”

—

They started at the left end and worked down.

Sydney had the tape. Naomi had the notebook and two columns. Cam stood at the top of the line where she could see all thirteen faces at once, exactly as instructed, and Odessa watched her discover what that was like.

“Number one,” Odessa said. “Say your name.”

“Uh, Josh.”

“Josh. Where are your hands?”

He put them back at his sides.

Sydney knelt. She put the back of her hand against his thigh first so he’d know it was coming, then took hold of him, and he made a noise, and Aubrey said “that’s the sound” in a stage whisper, and three girls lost it.

“Four and a quarter,” Sydney said.

“Louder, sugar. The gentlemen at the far end can’t hear you.”

“Four and a quarter!”

“Thank you.” Odessa moved down. “Number two.”

—

It went like that for a while, and for maybe twenty minutes it was genuinely funny.

Aubrey did commentary the whole way down the line, and it got worse as it went on. She had a bit going about a boy named Trevor who, in her professional opinion, had the exact energy of a golden retriever, which she then extended into a great many other observations about Trevor.

Trevor took it beautifully. Trevor was going to dine out on this until he was forty.

The one at the far end, who had gone very pale and very quiet, got a different treatment, and it was Odessa who did it, and it was the first thing all night that made Cam’s arms come uncrossed.

“You,” Odessa said. “Look at me. You’re allowed to be enjoying yourself, you know. Everybody else is.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Are you?”

He thought about lying. She watched him think about it.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Good boy,” Odessa said, and moved on, and he stood up straighter for the rest of the night.

—

Naomi read the soft column out loud when they got to the end, because Odessa told her to, and the room got very quiet again, because a list read aloud is a different animal than a list written down.

Then they rearranged.

“Biggest at that end, smallest at that end. You know your own number. Move yourselves.”

Nobody moved for a second.

“Gentlemen. There are thirteen of you, and you all know exactly where you go. The longer you stand there, the longer this takes.”

They moved.

It was the single ugliest and most riveting thing that had ever happened in that living room, and Odessa stood in the middle of it with her wine and let it take as long as it took. Boys shuffling sideways past each other, not looking at each other, working out the order out loud in low voices. What’d you get? Four and a half. Okay, you’re that side of me.

The tall one, who had clearly assumed he’d be at the top end, wound up ninth and could not get his face to do anything at all.

Aubrey said, “Oh, honey, no,” and it landed like a slap, and Odessa let that go too.

—

“Now,” Odessa said. “The interesting part.”

She walked the line slowly with her hands behind her back.

“You are all going to get hard. That is not a request, and it is not a punishment. It is the second half of the measurement, and you are going to do it standing exactly where you are with your friends on both sides of you.”

“How?” said somebody, strangled.

“Figure it out. Use your hands, use your imagination, use the eleven women in this room who are about to watch you do it.” She got to the end of the line and turned around. “You may not finish. Not one drop. Any man who finishes before I say so is out of the running, and he can put his pants on and sit in the kitchen and think about it.”

That last part completely changed the temperature in the room.

“You’ve got five minutes,” Odessa said, and sat down.

 

 

Odessa had watched this particular five minutes something over a hundred and eighty times, and it had never once stopped being the best part.

There is nothing else like it. Thirteen boys in a row with their fists on their own cocks in front of an audience, trying to get there fast and terrified of getting there first, every one of them stealing looks left and right to see how everybody else is doing and hating himself for looking. The ones who got there first had to stop and stand there, aching, while the slow ones caught up.

The room got loud. Not laughing loud. The other kind.

“Slower, number four, you’ll be sorry.”

“Somebody help number nine, he’s having a hard time, and it’s breaking my heart.”

“That’s it. There he goes. Look at that.”

Odessa walked the line while they worked and she said things to them, low, one at a time, close enough that only the boy and his two neighbors could hear, and every man she stopped in front of got worse the second she got there.

To the pale one at the end she said, “You’ve thought about a woman my age before. Haven’t you?”

He could not answer.

“That’s all right. You’re not the first, and you will not be the last, and it is a perfectly good thing to want.” She put one finger flat in the middle of his chest, which was the only place she touched anybody all night, and left it there a moment. “Keep going, sugar.”

He nearly finished on the spot, and she moved on before he could.

The girls did not stay in their chairs. She had never required them to.

Aubrey walked the line like a foreman. She got right up next to the golden retriever and said something to him too quietly for the room, and whatever it was, his knees went.

Tenley, a sophomore who had spent the first hour with her hand flat on her own sternum, got up and stood in front of one of them and just looked at him, close, and did not say anything, and did not touch him, and he made a noise like he’d been hurt.

Naomi did not get up. Naomi sat with her notebook in her lap, her pen still, her mouth slightly open.

And Cam, at the top of the line where Odessa had put her, said, out loud, to all thirteen of them at once:

“You know you’re going to be thinking about this for the rest of your lives.”

The sound that went down that line was not a laugh.

Odessa looked at her and thought, “There you are.”

—

The second measurement took longer because Sydney’s hands were unsteady and the boys could not hold still.

The numbers changed. Of course they changed.

The tall one who had come ninth soft came second hard, and the walk he took up that line, past nine of his friends, with everybody watching, was a thing Odessa would think about fondly for years.

Two of them went the other direction. One of them went from third to eleventh and had to walk the whole length of it. Aubrey started a slow clap, and Odessa let her have three claps, then said “Aubrey,” and Aubrey stopped.

“Read it,” Odessa said.

Naomi read the hard column out loud in a voice that kept losing altitude, and both orders, and the difference between them for each man, which was the number Odessa actually wanted.

—

“Top five, step forward.”

They stepped forward.

“Congratulations, you’re Sigma Beta Chi. Now stand still and do exactly what I say, because you are not finished.”

She had the bowl brought out.

It is cut glass, the size of a punch bowl, and it has been in that house since the house was built. The girls have used it for sangria at every mixer for as long as anyone can remember. Sydney carried it in with both hands, set it on the low table in the middle of the half circle, and had no idea in the world what she was holding.

“All thirteen of you. Not just the five.” Odessa stood behind the bowl. “The eight of you who didn’t make it, you especially. Come here.”

They came.

She put them in a ring around that table, close, hips almost touching, thirteen of them facing in.

“Hands on yourselves. When you go, you go in the bowl. Not on the floor, not on my table, and not on each other, and if you miss you’re going to be the one who missed and everybody will know.”

Somebody laughed, and it came out wrong.

“Ladies,” Odessa said. “Help them.”

—

She let the girls loose, and she stood back, and she watched.

They went at it like women who had been waiting a long time and had only just found out they were allowed.

Aubrey worked the outside of the ring with both hands and a running commentary that had stopped being funny and turned into something else about twenty minutes ago. She got two of them at once, one in each fist, and looked over her shoulder at the room and said, “Am I allowed to be this happy?” and nobody answered her because nobody could.

Tenley got behind the tall one, put both hands flat on his chest from behind, and told him, into his ear, exactly what she wanted to see, and he made a sound like something tearing.

Sydney did not use her hands at all. Sydney stood in front of the boy who had come ninth soft and second hard and told him to look at her, and kept telling him, every time his eyes went anywhere else, and she was still telling him when he went off over the rim of the bowl and down the inside of the glass.

“Good boy,” she said, and did not appear to know she had said it.

Cam walked the ring the way Odessa walks the line.

She did not touch a single one of them. She said one sentence to each man as she passed him quietly, and Odessa watched thirteen young men come apart, one at a time, in her wake, like a row of streetlights going out.

The first one went about four minutes in, and the sound the girls made was enormous; after that, it was a cascade, and Odessa stood with her hands folded. She watched thirteen young men empty themselves into a cut glass bowl in the middle of her living room while eleven women laughed and shrieked and told them how they were doing.

It took perhaps a quarter of an hour altogether.

The last one was the pale one from the end of the line, and by then everybody in the room was watching only him, and he had to do it in front of all of them with nowhere to hide, and Odessa said, “Take your time, honey. Nobody’s going anywhere,” in a voice like warm milk, and that finished him.

Nobody missed the bowl.

They never do. She has never entirely understood why, and she has stopped asking.

—

The boys went home at midnight, loud, arms around each other, five of them Sigma Beta Chi and eight of them with a story, and every last one of them already telling it.

The girls cleaned up around one. Somebody had put the playlist back on. Sydney sat on the arm of the sofa for forty-five minutes without her clipboard, which Odessa had never seen.

Cam came and stood next to her at the kitchen door.

“You were right.”

“About which part?”

“You know which part.” Cam’s voice was doing something. “I’ve never. In my entire life. Nobody has ever been nervous of me.”

“I know it.”

“I liked it so much I feel sick.”

“That’ll pass,” Odessa said. “The liking it won’t.”

Cam looked at the living room, at nine girls and a bowl and the lamp still on.

“Same time next year?”

“Oh, honey,” Odessa said. “Every year.”

—

She sent them all up at two.

Then she did her walk, the way she does every night. Front door, kitchen door, the door onto the side porch. The burners. The coffee pot. The girl asleep on the sofa, who got a blanket and no comment.

Then she carried the bowl back to her own two rooms behind the kitchen and shut the door.

—

There is a particular thing you have to do with wanting.

That is the part nobody in eight generations of that house has ever worked out, and it is the reason the ritual is shaped exactly as it is, and it is why she has never let anyone change one detail of it.

It is not the material. Anyone can get the material. Any woman on this earth can get a bowl of it inside of an evening if she is not particular about how.

It has to be produced under a very specific set of conditions. It has to come out of a man who was measured. Who was ranked, out loud, against his friends, and made to walk up or down a line, and told exactly where he stood by women he wanted to impress. It has to be full of striving. It has to be full of ache.

Thirteen of them, in one room, at one time, all wanting the same five places.

That is the recipe. She did not invent it. She was taught it, in a different language, in a country that has had four names since, by a woman who was already old when Odessa was young.

Odessa was young a very long time ago.

—

She set the bowl on the table by the window where the moon could get at it.

Then she took her time getting out of her dress because there was nobody in those two rooms to hurry for, and because getting ready has always been part of it.

She is a good-looking woman, and she has been one continuously since before the Civil War, and she has never once pretended otherwise to herself, whatever face she wears in the kitchen. Heavy in the hip. Heavier in the chest. A soft belly she has never bothered to flatten, because the working does not care and neither does she, and thighs that still hold. Her breasts are large and low, and she has liked them for a very long time.

She stood naked in the middle of her own floor and looked into the bowl.

Thirteen of them. It filled the bottom third of that cut glass, and then some, thick and clouded and still warm from the room it was made in, and the smell came up off the surface the way it always does, and she stood there and breathed it in and felt the entire night sitting in her chest at once.

The words are short. They are always short. She has never once needed a book.

Then she knelt, and pulled the table close, and put both hands in it.

—

It goes into the skin. That’s the full scope of the work, and there isn’t a more elegant way to say it, so she doesn’t try.

She started at the throat, because it always wants to start high. Both hands full, drawn up the sides of her neck and under her jaw and back into her hair at the temples, and the first heat of it went through her like a swallow of something strong on an empty stomach.

Then down, and she did her breasts properly, which takes a while.

Both hands, palms full and sliding, working it in over the top, underneath, and across, lifting the weight of herself, setting it down, and going again. Her nipples came up hard under her own slick hands and stayed that way. She did not hurry one second of it. She has never hurried that part in two centuries, and she was not about to start.

And she thought about where it came from, because that is not incidental. That is half the working.

This is the tall one. The boy who came ninth soft and second hard, who had to walk the whole length of that line past nine of his friends with everybody in the room watching him do it, and whose face when he understood he was moving up was the single best thing she had seen all autumn. He went off looking straight at Sydney because Sydney told him to. He is in her hands right now. He is going into her chest.

This is the pale one. The one at the end who could not answer her. Who had thought about a woman her age and could not say so out loud, and who came apart at the end with the whole room watching because she told him to take his time.

This is the loud one, the golden retriever, who took every joke Aubrey made and grinned through all of it. She worked him into her belly with the flat of both hands, in slow circles, and she was smiling when she did it.

She did her hips. She did the tops of her thighs and then the insides of them, and by then she was not being especially clinical about any of it, and by then she had stopped pretending she was.

It got warm going in. It has never once been anything but warm.

She got a hand between her legs somewhere around the ninth of them, still slick with the rest, and she went on with the working with the other hand because the working does not stop for that and because there is no reason on this earth it should. She has had two hundred years to get good at exactly one thing that is only for her.

She thought about thirteen young men in a ring around a glass bowl in her living room, hips almost touching, hands on themselves, going one after another after another while eleven girls told them how they were doing.

She thought about the sound of it.

When she came, she made no noise at all, out of a habit older than the house, and she held still through the whole of it with her palm pressed flat against herself and her forehead down on the edge of that table.

—

And then the rest of it did what it does: it found everything.

It went into the ache in her left knee that had been there since March, and it took it, cleanly, the way you lift a splinter. It went into the small brown spot on the back of her hand that had come up over the summer, and she watched that spot fade the way a stain fades under water, in about four seconds, and be gone. It went up into her shoulders and set something right that she had been carrying without noticing.

Her skin drank all of it. That is the only way to describe it, and it is accurate. It went from slick to damp to nothing in a few minutes, and the bowl came up empty and dry as if it had been washed and put away.

It went into her hair.

She was on her knees on the floor of her own two rooms, her hands still slick, and she felt it go up into her hair, and she knew exactly what it was doing, because it does it every September.

She got up and went to the mirror.

The grey was gone.

She had let it come in over the last year, at the temples, the way you would, because a woman of fifty is supposed to have some, and because eleven years in one house is a long time to look identical and the girls are not stupid. She had been careful about it. She had been careful about it for two hundred and six years.

It was black again—all of it. Jet, and heavy, and shining like something wet, and her mouth was full again, and the line that had been coming in at her throat was not there.

She stood in front of that mirror for a long time and looked at herself.

Then she put on her robe and went to stand at the window that looks out at the magnolia, where every serious conversation in the history of that house has happened, and she thought about the composite on the wall in the front hall. Eighteen sixty-eight. The founding. Nine girls in high collars.

She is in the back row on the left. Nobody has ever once looked closely enough to notice, because nobody ever looks closely at a composite that old, and because who on earth would think to.

She had liked those girls. She liked these better.

—

In the morning, there would be forty cups in the sink, a girl crying in the upstairs bathroom about something unrelated, and somebody would need a ride to the airport.

And in a week or so she would go to the drugstore and buy the box with the grey in it, the way she does every October, and she would start putting it back in a little at a time so that by spring she looked like a woman of fifty-one.

Then fifty-two.

Then, in a few years, she would leave. She would give her notice, cry a little, and let them throw her a lunch, and she would take a position at a different house in a different state, and in ten or eleven years, a girl on that porch would ask her why she had never shut the thing down.

And Odessa Fontaine would count. And she would give her the true answer, which is the same one she gave Camila Ocampo, because it has always been the true answer.

There is not one word of it that is a lie.

That is why it works.

 

The End.

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