Everyone's Favorite Girl (21 page)

I’m not going to tell you about the family we found in there.  They deserve their privacy, and what we learned from them was enough to fill a book in and of itself.  All I’ll tell you is they were very helpful.  Even before we drugged them, they were very helpful people.

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No Fucking Epilogue-

WITH THE help of Mr. Shriver’s attorney, and the labor of Sean’s guards, I destroyed all evidence that anything criminal had ever taken place at Your Favorite Girl, Incorporated.  This was a massive, expensive effort.  We had to bring in outside labor, which brought with it the unfortunate necessity to drug the workers and make them swear to keep secret anything they come across.

The attorney happily signed over all bank accounts, stocks, and assets to Patton and me, though he was quite puzzled about the fact that we weren’t married. 
You wouldn’t believe how much money we ended up with.  Wealth beyond comprehension.

We
bought an island a mile off a tropical coast.  I won’t tell you where.  We’ve all lived in secrecy so long, we’re more comfortable that way now.

We brought all the
remaining Favorite Girls with us.  Judy, Kate, and Liu, too.  The island has a huge mansion, plenty of room for everyone.

They’re all
grown up now, the girls.  Even the babies.  They’re all so happy.  It didn’t take anything to brainwash all the bad personality traits out of the Vampire Girls and Glow Girls—nor to build confidence in the Frogs.  It did take a while for Patton to remove all their devices, and for a while we debated on what to do with them.

In the end, we only kept one drug.

We didn’t need the Love Drug or the Loyalty Drug anymore.  Not for this bunch.

We certainly didn’t need the Libido Drug.
  Over a hundred of the prettiest, most delicate young women in the world discovering and exploring their sexuality at the same time, the way normal girls do only in a consequence-free environment where no one associates nudity with shame.

Yes, in the end Patton and I decided the only drug we wanted to keep around was Longevity, and when each girl turned eighteen, we began to administer it to her monthly—that was all it took.  We froze each girl at a state of fresh, full development with excitement and fervor and curiosity and innocence.  Here Patton and I don’t need a television.  All we need is the open beach, where we can watch the girls frolic like wild creatures, naked and beautiful and happy to fall to the sand with one another for unpredictable moments most associate with privacy and locked doors.  All inhibition abandoned here in this remote and exotic place young men with adventure in their hearts dream of finding.

We decided not to administer the Longevity Drug to the Doll Girls.  Theirs is a miserable condition that not even Patton can cure.  We’re giving them comfortable lives—all of us working in shifts to bathe, feed, and care for them—but one day they will all die.

But not the rest of us.

The rest of us will live long, happy lives.

We’re basically a nudist colony now.  We play on the beach naked, we have dinner naked, we make love openly and passionately, wherever, whenever, and if someone wants to stop and watch, he or she is welcome.

He or she, you ask?

We have
dozens of Favorite Girls, and each of them grew up anticipating a husband.  I couldn’t very well spend my life with Patton and watch all those innocent young women suffer with loneliness, could I?

Patton took some convincing, but eventually he saw things my way.

It took Judy six months to create a clone of Patton for each and every Favorite Girl.

The girls were given new born babies to raise themselves, with Patton acting as father to
over a hundred infants, and after eighteen years every Favorite Girl had herself a Favorite Boy.

Even Kate finally got herself a Patton.

Things are much better now that we have plenty of strong young men to guard the shores.  We’ve been discovered a number of times, mostly by small boats that creep up in the night.  I’m pretty sure word of us has spread somewhere, because for a while we were getting pretty regular visits.

One night, a
few of the Favorite Girls who happened to be on the wrong part of the beach were raped by a group of drunk men who stumbled off a boat onto what they’d obviously expected to be a sort of lost paradise of virgins.

Deviant that I am, I’d kept a few vials of the Loyalty Drug when Patton and I agreed to destroy it.  I’d feared a day like this, and having the capacity to brainwash someone meant those rapists got to live.  Not an ideal thing, if you ask me, but it was better than bringing murder to our island and investigations after that.

We’re strong now, and in all our time here no one has died an unnatural death.

Flora and Melissa, my younger, prettier clone, came to me yesterday and asked me to promise that if the world stopped being cruel then we would share Longevity with it.

“That’s never going to happen,” I said.

“Anything’s possible,” Flora said.

“Yeah,” the younger Melissa agreed.

I looked at her.  “You really think the world can change, Melissa?”

“Absolutely.”

Melissa had grown up around the Floras.  She didn’t have my cynicism, my bleak outlook, my perspective on the world.
  I painted in dark shadows while she painted in bright colors.

“I’m sorry to say I disagree, girls.  Every boat that shows up here is another example of how horrible the world is.  They don’t deserve to change.”

Flora dropped her head and dug her toes in the sand.  All she wore was a ragged, sand-stained white t-shirt.  From her belly button to her dirty toes she was naked.

Melissa had a yellow mesh fabric wrapped around her to form a skirt, but she was topless.  I always felt more naked around her.
  Though we were both secure in our youth, I was still five years older physically.  I envied her.

“So you’re not
gonna promise?” Flora said.

“See?  I told you she wouldn’t,” Melissa said.

I made the promise to spite my younger self, and the two of them nodded quickly and sprinted away, as if this were just a small part of a much larger plan.

They’ve been hanging out with Judy
and Kate a lot lately.  The five of us are having dinner tonight while Patton and some of the boys hang out on the beach.  Guy’s night sort of thing.

Maybe
Flora and Melissa have some idea to propose.

I wonder what they’re
serving for dinner.

I do know one thing, and it’s something you need to know.  I owe everything to Judy.  The Loyalty Drug was what saved us, and it was her invention.  She bailed me out big time. 
I’m the lucky benefactor of a
deus ex machina.
  The only thing I ever accomplished was staying alive.  I stayed alive long enough to be saved.  I persevered.  Everything I ever did, I did for my own survival.

I don’t know what the girls are going to ask me tonight.

But I bet I say yes.

THE END