BEND OVER THE BED,” Earl commands. He has changed from his NASCAR jumpsuit into a black leather vest and flannel kilt. Rubber prosthetics are attached to his ears so that they appear pointed. I am only to address him as the Elfin Warlord Sliverin, he says. I am completely naked except for a pair of faery wings tied around my back. My faery princess name is Labiamajora.
“Stay,” he says. Earl leaves me bent over the edge of the waterbed. I watch the green lava hypnotically separate and clump back together in the lava lamp beside the bed. When I hear him return, there’s a faint jingling. What is he planning? My inner guidette hides in her tanning bed.
“The Elf Council has found you guilty of stealing mead from our supply shed,” Earl says. “How do you plead?”
“Guilty,” I say, exactly as he instructed me prior to our “scene.” I try to turn my head to see what he’s going to hit me with, but he orders me to keep my face down and eyes shut.
“I’m going to roll a standard D-twenty to determine how many times to paddle you as punishment for your crimes against Elfkind,” he says. I hear him roll the twenty-sided die on the nightstand.
Gulp.
“After each blow, you are to count out loud. Do you understand?”
I nod. I feel him rub my butt cheeks with his palms, massaging them. It feels good. Why can’t we just give each other massages? I close my eyes and bite my lip, ready for the beating to commence.
WHAP! I feel the full force of a flat object paddle my left buttock. The telltale jangling gives it away: he’s using his tambourine. I was expecting to scream in pain, but I have skinny jeans that hurt my ass worse.
“Count!” he yells.
“Wait, Slytherin,” I say. “Time-out.”
“Time-out?”
“Am I supposed to count once for each butt cheek, or does it count as one time for the pair?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he admits. “How about we count each cheek separately. And it’s Sliverin, not Slytherin.”
“Okay,” I say. “One!” I almost add, “ha ha ha,” like the Count from Sesame Street, but I’m somehow able to contain myself.
“Good girl, Labiamajora,” Earl says. “The Elf Council will be pleased that you have accepted your punishment so eagerly.”
He swats me with the tambourine again. “Two!” I shout. It takes all my power not to giggle, as I just can’t get the Sesame Street Count out of my head.
Earl hits me a third time and I yell, “Three!” I finally let out a small giggle. Maybe if he was actually hurting me I would be able to contain myself. My butt barely even stings.
He ignores the laugh and hits me again. “Four!” I shout, immediately breaking down into uncontrolled laughter.
He hits me again, and again, and again. Every time he strikes my ass with the tambourine, I count out loud. And laugh. My voice gets weaker, and by the time we reach “seventeen,” I’m ready to tap out. I can’t take anymore. The pain from laughing is giving my abs a real workout.
“Count, Labiamajora,” he says sternly.
It takes all my willpower to gather myself. “Seventeen,” I say. I think I’ve finally contained my laughter, until a loud snort escapes through my nose.
“You think this is funny?” he says, paddling me again.
I’m laughing so hard that tears are running down my face now.
“Count!” he yells.
“I can’t,” I say weakly.
“Surely you know what number comes after seventeen? Or did they not teach you that at faery boarding school?”
“Yes,” I say, whimpering.
“‘Yes’ isn’t a number,” he says, smacking me again.
“Eighteen!” I scream. “Nineteen!” My legs buckle and I fall onto the floor in a fit of laughter.
When my breathing finally returns to normal, I pull myself up. Earl is lying on the waterbed, his head buried in his forearms. I sit down next to him and put an arm on his back.
“Get away from me!” he says petulantly.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I started thinking about the Count from Sesame Street, and then the tambourine was making that silly jangling noise, and you’re wearing those pointy ears, and . . . I couldn’t help myself.”
He lifts his head and stares at me with his gray eyes. “You think all of this is funny,” he says, waving a hand around the Dorm Room of Doom.
“You want me to be honest, I’ll be honest,” I say. “You act like there’s something wrong with you, like everything you enjoy is embarrassing or scary. News flash, Mr. Grey: This isn’t 1950 or whatever. Your sexual tastes aren’t as shocking or as deviant as you think. Neither is anything else you like. Maybe if you didn’t take your fifty shames so seriously, I wouldn’t be so compelled to laugh at them.”
“I’ve already told you: I can’t think of myself as ‘normal.’ This is all part of the identity I’ve built for myself. It’s how I survived my tumultuous upbringing. It’s how I survive day to day,” he says.
I sigh. If I move in with him, and admit my feelings, and have his baby (oops, keep forgetting about that!), I will have no choice but to submit to him and put up with this perpetual pity party of his. You can’t separate Earl Grey from his fifty shames. Why can’t I fall in love with someone relatively normal, like my ethnic friend, the brony Jin?
“I can’t handle this anymore,” I say, fleeing from the Dorm Room of Doom.
“Anna!” Earl yells. He doesn’t chase me down. I think this is what he wanted anyway: to scare me away. Well, congrats.
I call my mother from the Starbucks across the street. She’s still in town, and agrees to pick me up at once. After I hang up the phone, I realize I’m still naked except for the faery wings. Oh well—my mother the nudist won’t mind. The other customers in Starbucks aren’t quite as enlightened.
“What, like none of you have seen a naked faery before?” I shout.
A dozen people, men and women, shake their heads. “Not in Starbucks,” a teenage boy working as a barista says. “It’s the juxtaposition of the naked female body with the mundane, sanitized setting of a chain coffee shop that makes it exciting. Plus the wings are just weird.”
“Get over it,” I say.
Then I remember something Kathleen told me once that should distract the gawkers. “The Starbucks logo used to feature a topless mermaid,” I say. “Go stare at her double lattes.”
Everyone pulls out their iPhones and Androids and whatever the hell smartphones they have these days and begins googling images of the topless mermaid. When my mother pulls up out front, I slip out of the coffee shop unnoticed; everyone is too busy wanking to the old Starbucks logo. Thank God they changed the logo—there are enough bathroom masturbators at Starbucks as it is.