Men, Women & Children (3 page)

Brooke and Allison had a short discussion about the likelihood of Hannah and Chris having sex before their eighth-grade year came to a close. They both seemed to think it was unlikely that this event would come to pass, but neither was willing to rule it out completely. And if they did have sex, Hannah and Chris would be the first among their peers to have done so, which was significant to both Allison and Brooke. Despite not being ready to have sex, Brooke confided in Allison that she had always thought she and Danny would be the first couple to have sex among their peers. They had been together longer than any other couple at Goodrich. To allow Chris and Hannah to have the distinction of being the first of their peers to have sex seemed wrong somehow to Brooke. Allison agreed and added that all of her dedication to a strict diet over the summer was done to attract a boy this year and she hoped that it would pay off.

Brooke did not discuss the fact that the competitive nature her father had instilled in both her and her little brother since birth made her incensed at the thought of Hannah beating her in anything, including being the first girl to be sexually active. It wasn’t that Brooke had any desire to become sexually active. The opposite was true. She knew she wasn’t ready to enter that phase of her life and even thought that doing it in the eighth grade was somewhat clichéd. She had seen enough episodes of
Tyra
,
Dr. Phil
,
Oprah
, and other talk shows dealing with teen pregnancy and prostitution to have developed an idea that sexual activity before the age of sixteen or seventeen was nothing she was interested in. But she could not ignore the desire to at least perform oral sex just to have done it at least once so that Hannah Clint would have nothing over her. Brooke had never received a grade below A-minus on any report card, test, or assignment. She was the captain of the Olympiannes and was determined to be the varsity cheerleading captain at North East High School by her junior year. That right was most normally reserved for a senior, but Brooke had resolved to achieve this rank as junior and was fairly certain that she would be able to attain her goal if she worked hard enough at it.

This ultracompetitive mode of thinking led Brooke to believe that, as the captain of the Olympiannes and the best-looking girl in the school, she should be the best at anything that any of the Olympiannes did, including being sexually experienced.

I
n the south parking lot of Goodrich Junior High School, Hannah Clint emerged from the building and got into her mother’s fourteen-year-old Mercedes. Her mother, Dawn, said, “I bought you some underwear. We got a request from a subscriber so we have to do a quick shoot tonight.”

As Dawn drove back to her mother’s house, where she and Hannah had been living since Hannah was born, she looked at the leather armrest where her initials were monogrammed. This car was the last piece of her old life, the last real reminder of what she had left behind.

Dawn had once lived in Los Angeles. She had aspirations of becoming an actress, just like her mother, Nicole, had been. Nicole had a moderately successful career as a character actress in the 1950s. She appeared in only a handful of films, but her career gave her the chance to socialize with various people who were prominent in the entertainment industry and even become romantically involved with some of them. When she was in her early thirties, she was involved with three different men, any one of whom could have been Dawn’s father. Upon becoming pregnant, she made the decision to move back home with her parents and have the baby. Once Dawn was born, Nicole had difficulty imagining herself moving back to Los Angeles in an attempt to pick up where she had left off. So she stayed in her hometown and raised her daughter by herself.

When Dawn graduated from North East High School, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her own dream of becoming an actress. She was not met with the same early success as her mother, having been cast in a play or student film once or twice a year, but nothing substantial. As an attractive young woman, she had engaged in relationships with several men who subsequently expressed their intent to marry her and raise a family, but she wouldn’t allow a relationship to stand in the way of her career goals.

On her twenty-eighth birthday, she was celebrating by drinking with some friends at Bar Marmont. She began to think about the fact that she was getting older, about the fact that even the inconsequential auditions she forced herself to go on were generally filled with girls ten years younger than her, about the fact that maybe her lifelong dream was over. That night a television producer of moderate success bought her a drink, convinced her to give him her telephone number, and took her out to dinner the following week.

After a little more than a year of dating, they moved in together. A few months later he sold a show to CBS and in celebration he bought her a Mercedes with monogrammed seats. The show required an actress for the small role of an attractive, but slightly older, next-door neighbor. He promised Dawn that if CBS were to order the pilot to be produced he would give her the role. CBS did order the pilot to be produced, and he was true to his word, but the pilot didn’t test well and the show was never ordered to series. Dawn was unimpressive in her minor role and, as a result, drew no new attention from agents, managers, or network or studio executives.

Two weeks after the pilot was officially rejected by CBS she became aware of the fact that she was pregnant. Her boyfriend reminded her that he had always maintained he never wanted children and said that he would have nothing to do with the child if Dawn elected to give birth to it rather than abort. He told her he would pay whatever amount of child support was required of him by law, but would in no way be a father.

The combined emotional trauma of the failed pilot, and the subsequent disintegration of the longest relationship she had ever had, led her to move back in with her mother in her hometown, just as her own mother had done. Hannah was born nine months later, and although the living arrangement was initially supposed to be temporary, the three generations of Clint women had lived under the same roof ever since that day.

At an early age Hannah told her mother and grandmother that she, too, was very interested in acting. Nicole, having more years of insight into what the pursuit of such a statistically improbable goal can do to a person psychologically and emotionally, warned Dawn to encourage Hannah’s interest in other areas. But Dawn, having been so close to some success of her own in this area without really getting what she felt was a fair shake, saw in her daughter the opportunity for another chance.

Because her child support checks were moderately substantial, Dawn never needed to have a job. She devoted every waking hour to making sure her daughter would find the success as an actress she had never had—that even her mother, who had acted in legitimate studio films, had never had. She enrolled her in acting classes, singing classes, dancing classes. She stayed up nights with Hannah, coaching her with techniques from countless books about acting, dancing, singing, and auditioning for jobs in all three of these fields. She was so willing to do anything to give her daughter the experiences in life that she was unable to achieve that she found herself locked in a relationship based on casual sex with the local community theater director, whom she found repulsive, just to ensure that Hannah would be cast in every production.

It was this fervent desire to help her daughter that gave Dawn the idea to create a website for Hannah. In the beginning it was no different from any other aspiring actor’s website. It listed contact information, displayed headshots, a résumé, and a few video clips from various productions Hannah had appeared in. It wasn’t until the summer before eighth grade, when Hannah began developing breasts, that Dawn had the idea to put a few images of Hannah in her bathing suit on the website, hoping that she might be able to get work in print ads for summer fashion.

A few weeks after uploading the first two images of Hannah in a one-piece red bathing suit, the site received its first e-mail—a request asking if a few more images of Hannah, this time in a two-piece bathing suit, could be posted. The e-mail went on to request that the photos of Hannah be taken lying down or bending over.

Curious, and also excited that the site had generated interest in Hannah, Dawn replied to the e-mail asking its sender if he was an agent or manager interested in representing Hannah or a photographer looking for models. The sender replied that he was neither an agent nor a manager nor a photographer, just a self-proclaimed fan of Hannah’s.

Dawn then realized that the person e-mailing her might very likely have a sexual interest in her daughter. But the person hadn’t yet asked for anything illegal. Dawn told herself that posting more photos of Hannah in various bathing suits wasn’t a bad thing if it generated further interest, no matter where the interest came from. She also recognized that there might be an opportunity to turn the website into a business, to make some money. She e-mailed the sender asking if he would be willing to pay a monthly fee for access to a private section of the website that would feature the photos requested. The sender replied by explaining that he would gladly pay a monthly fee of twelve to fifteen dollars to have access to such photos and also to be able to request certain outfits or poses once or twice a month.

Despite being fully aware of the fact that what she was about to do was, at the very least, exploitive and possibly bordering on criminal with regard to the treatment of her own child, Dawn quickly set up a PayPal account and hired a web designer to build a members-only section on her daughter’s website. She had a talk with Hannah to make sure she had no reservations about wearing some more revealing outfits on this section of the site. Hannah explained that she was proud of her body and understood that if she was to be discovered by a director like Darren Aronofsky or Paul Thomas Anderson and they wanted her to participate in a nude scene, she wouldn’t hesitate to oblige them. This, she reasoned, was just practice for any such feature-film roles that might come her way in the future.

After four months of the member’s-only section going live, Dawn had eighty-seven subscribers each paying $12.95 a month to see her daughter in bikinis and underwear in various poses. Dawn split the money with Hannah and told her not to tell anyone about it, including her grandmother. Hannah felt there was a salacious element associated with what they were doing and decided it was better to keep it a secret than to tell her friends at school. She liked doing it too much to risk being discovered and shut down. Hannah felt like she was famous every time her mother got an e-mail asking for a new pose or new outfit or just asking how she was doing or what her favorite color was. Even though her mother would never let her answer any of the e-mails or interact with any of her subscribers, she considered herself to have fans, and she viewed the experience as a type of training for what her life would be like when she had real fame, which was an inevitability in her mind.

As they got out of the Mercedes, Hannah said, “Do you think we could put up a video blog for the subscribers? Just like a little one-minute thing I could do every week? Like talk about my life and stuff? I think they’d like that.”

Dawn said, “We’ll see. Let’s just stick with the pictures for now. Here.” She handed her daughter a matching set of Hello Kitty bra and underwear along with a pair of Hello Kitty knee-high socks.

Hannah said, “Socks? What for?”

Dawn said, “To wear with the underwear,” and shrugged at her daughter, offering no further explanation.

chapter

four

A
fter school, Chris Truby did his homework; ate dinner with his mother, Rachel, and his father, Don; watched an episode of
Two and a Half Men
with them; and then told them that he had a difficult science test the following day that would require him to put in multiple hours of studying if he was to make a decent grade. And certainly he would need a good night’s rest as well, so Chris retired to his bedroom earlier than usual, leaving his parents in the living room.

Don looked at his wife. She had started a new job as an accountant for a nationwide collections agency six months before. The job offered no opportunity for exercise or movement beyond picking up the phone, typing on a keyboard, and making occasional trips to the bathroom or her car. Don could easily notice that Rachel had put on weight, maybe as much as eight or ten pounds, as a result of the job’s sedentary nature.

Don’s physical attraction to his wife had waned over the years of their marriage due to the combination of her aging features and his overfamiliarity with her body. But no matter how unattractive she had become to him, the basic need to engage in sexual intercourse spurred him to try to initiate some form of physical intimacy on a regular basis. Despite his frequent attempts, the last time Rachel had been willing to have sex with him was more than a month and a half ago.

With Chris headed off to his room for the night, Don leaned over to his wife and said, “Hey, what do you think?”

Rachel said, “About what?”

“About, you know . . .”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah—it’s been almost two months, Rachel.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

“The last time was after that barbecue at your sister’s house. Chris was at a friend’s house.”

“Really? How do you remember that?”

“How do you not?”

“I don’t know, I guess my new job is just making me tired.”

“It’s still early tonight. We can do it and you can be asleep by nine.”

Rachel looked at Don. She knew she wasn’t satisfying him and she didn’t know exactly why, but the idea of sex with her husband was almost completely unappealing to her. She didn’t know if it was because they had been together for so long, or because she knew she had gained some weight and felt less attractive, or because, like Don, she found his aging body and face less appealing than they once had been, but she certainly knew it was not for any reason having to do with her job, which was the excuse she used most often. Despite the fact that it was the last thing she wanted to do that night, Rachel said, “Okay, but it has to be quick.”

Don said, “It will be.”

“I mean really quick.”

“Okay.”

As Don inserted his penis into his wife’s vagina, all he could think about were the images of the porn star Stoya. Since discovering her on his son’s computer he had become mildly obsessed and had purchased memberships to several websites that featured her movies. It wasn’t just that she was incredibly beautiful that aroused Don, it was that she genuinely seemed to enjoy having sex—something Rachel hadn’t seemed to do in a very long time.

Don looked down at his wife’s uninterested face and felt his erection softening inside her. Not wanting to waste what he assumed would be his only chance to have sex for at least the next month or two, he said, “Roll over.”

Rachel said, “Why?”

“You know, for doggy style.”

“Why? Just finish like this.”

Don felt his erection dissipating a little more with each passing second that the negotiation continued. He said, “Please.”

Rachel said, “Fine,” and rolled over onto her stomach, propping herself up on all fours. Don stroked his penis a few times with his eyes closed, thinking of Stoya and what her face looked like when she was being entered from behind. To Don, she looked happy—and, more than her perfect body, her willingness to engage in any sexual position or to accept a penis in any orifice, Don found her happiness to be her most appealing trait. It was that image of Stoya, smiling and then biting her bottom lip as she was penetrated from behind, that Don kept in his mind as he gripped his wife’s hips and slid his penis into her, imagining the same expression on her face that Stoya had in the countless videos he had seen.

Rachel closed her eyes and tried to imagine anything that would help her enjoy this. She wanted to feel attracted to her husband again. She wanted to feel desire for him. But it seemed that time in their relationship might have passed for her. As he thrust into her and grunted, she thought of their wedding night. She tried to remember how happy she was then, but couldn’t conjure the emotion she used to associate with the memory of that day. Then she felt Don ejaculate in her vagina and slide his quickly shrinking penis out of her.

She said, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

Don said, “Okay,” and lay back in their bed, wondering if he would ever again have sex with a woman who enjoyed it.

A few feet down the hall, Chris wasn’t studying for his science test. The test never existed. Instead he was downloading from a variety of torrent websites various collections of pornography depicting women over the age of fifty. While he waited for these videos to download he masturbated to a three minute and forty-two second video of a transsexual receiving a prostate massage from a man, which resulted in a massive ejaculation. This was the first time he had masturbated to transsexual pornography.

A
few miles away, Allison Doss walked through her front door, dropped her book bag, and entered her family’s kitchen, where her mother, Liz, her father, Neal, and her younger brother, Myron, were all eating. She had always considered her family to be overweight, and they were. She, too, had been overweight, until halfway through her seventh-grade year. On the first day of school that year, an eighth-grade boy named Gordon Hinks had given Allison the nickname “Muffin Top.” She was surprised at how quickly she became accustomed to the emotional pain and torment she suffered. Her daily ritual involved crying in the girls’ locker room for a few minutes before the start of school every day. She made no attempt to remedy the situation until a boy she was mildly obsessed with, another eighth grader and friend of Gordon named Brandon Lender, said exactly this to her: “I’d fuck you if I could find the hole.”

The statement itself, combined with the importance it carried for Allison, coming as it did from her first romantic interest—a boy she drew pictures of in her notebook, whose last name she fantasized about having as her own, with whom she countless times imagined sharing her first kiss—led her to go home that night and skip eating dinner. Instead she retreated to her room and sought dieting advice on the Internet. She came across a posting on the website Everything2.com called “How to Become a Better Anorexic.” The article outlined various dieting strategies to curb hunger pains, such as eating as much celery as possible because it contains no calories but causes your body to burn them as it is digested, or making sure the water you drink is as cold as possible so your body has to expend a few extra calories heating it. As well, this posting listed several links to pro-anorexia websites like Ana’s Underground Grotto, which encouraged girls to become anorexic by allowing other girls to post photos of themselves that highlighted their hipbones, ribcages, and, in some cases, spines. These photos were commonly referred to within the pro-anorexia community as “thinspiration.”

Allison found that the physical pain caused by hunger was just as easy to accept as a constant in her life as the emotional pain that came with being overweight was before. Over the next six months she created her own account on the Angels of Ana website and frequented sites like the Art of Reduction, Thin2be’s Diary, and Hungry for Perfection. Although she had never met any of the people she communicated with on these sites, she felt they were her friends and she valued their advice and interaction far more than she did the guidance of her own family, who knew nothing about her treatment of food and eating.

Allison’s mother, Liz, worked at Marie Callender’s and always brought home pies. As Allison walked through the kitchen, Liz said, “Honey, I got a peach cobbler,” which was Allison’s favorite. The smell of the cobbler was almost more than she could deal with as she walked through the kitchen. She could feel herself begin to salivate and a slight tingling sensation in the back of her mouth became apparent.

Allison said, “Thanks, Mom, just leave it in the fridge and I’ll get some later. I have to go get started on some homework.”

Allison’s father and brother said nothing as she went upstairs and logged on to Angels of Ana to look at pictures of girls who were thinner than she was and read postings about how to ignore cravings of favorite foods.

A
few blocks away, Brandy Beltmeyer stood behind her mother, Patricia, who sat in her room at her computer doing what she called her “weekly check.” This check consisted of Brandy being forced to give her mother the passwords to every website on which she had an account. Patricia would then log in to each of these sites, including her daughter’s Gmail account, Myspace page, Facebook page, and her user account on Syfy.com. Patricia would read through every interaction her daughter was engaged in on each of these sites and question her if she found anything that seemed out of the ordinary. This was all done to protect her daughter from Internet predators.

As Patricia scrolled through the comments on her daughter’s Myspace page, she came to one, posted by a male user named DILF whose age was listed as twenty-eight, that read, “U R HAWT.”

Patricia said, “Who is this DILF guy?”

Brandy said, “I don’t know, just some guy. I can’t help it if some random guy finds my picture and thinks I’m cute.”

Patricia said, “Well, I can,” as she deleted DILF’s comment. This garnered an eye-roll and sigh from her daughter. Patricia stood from her daughter’s computer chair and said, “You know this is to make sure you’re safe.”

Brandy said, “I know.”

Patricia said, “I love you.”

Brandy said, “I love you, too.”

Patricia left her daughter’s room and went downstairs, where her husband, Ray, said, “You clean up her Internet or whatever?” Since he was in high school, Ray had worked in a local sporting goods store that was originally owned by his grandfather. His older brother now owned the shop, and Ray was next in line in the event that his brother wanted to retire. They used the same bookkeeping methods that were popular with their grandfather. There had never been a computer in the store. Ray still felt computers were unnecessary on many levels and refused to even create an e-mail account for himself.

Patricia laughed and said, “Yes, honey, I cleaned up her Internet.” Then they settled in to watch a syndicated episode of
According to Jim
, which was their favorite show.

Upstairs, Brandy logged on to a Myspace account that she kept secret from her mother. Her username and identity on this account was Freyja. She decided on the name after doing a search on the Internet for “sexy goddess.” She was directed to a page devoted to Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and sex. Freyja was believed to have been pulled in a golden chariot by a pack of wild cats. Brandy liked cats. Brandy donned gothic makeup and took pictures of herself in her bra and underwear with her phone and then uploaded them to this account, erasing the photos from her phone immediately after uploading. She gave incorrect information about her age and location and, despite the fact that she had yet to experience her first kiss, filled the blog section of her Freyja account with fictitious descriptions of sexual encounters and sexual preferences that she assumed men would want her to have, including bisexuality, a predilection for anal sex, and the need to be choked or spit on.

She communicated daily with her 5,689 friends and regularly made new ones. There were a few whom she communicated with more frequently than others. Dungeonmax, GothGod1337, and LovelyPallor were among them. They talked about a wide variety of subjects, mainly sexual, most of which Brandy knew nothing about, but could quickly research with a rudimentary Google search and then regurgitate, in some cases copying and pasting various bits and pieces of other blogs she would come across directly into instant messaging conversations. She was not overly interested in losing her virginity or performing any kind of sexual act at her age, but she found it an easy way to get the interest of moderate to large numbers of people who would engage in instant message conversations with her about a wide variety of subjects.

Brandy had invented her Freyja identity in the seventh grade, when her mother and father moved to a school district that forced her to go to Goodrich instead of the junior high school her grade school friends attended. As an alternative to making new friends at Goodrich, Brandy found it easier to find meaningful and entertaining interactions with people online. She still maintained a friendship with her best friend, Lauren Martin, and saw her on most weekends.

She worked very hard at keeping this secret from her mother, resetting her browser’s history, cookies, and caches every fifteen minutes or so just in case her mother should come in and demand a surprise check of her computer, which she had done in the past. She also kept this Myspace page a secret from her classmates, assuming that knowledge of its existence would find its way back to her mother if any of her peers found out about it.

Freyja had eighteen new messages, many innocuous, two requesting nude pictures, and one from an obese married woman in gothic makeup from Tucson, Arizona, calling herself Lady Fenris and offering a ménage à trois with herself and her husband, who were both disease and drug-free.