Fluffy Read online

  My hair looks damn good. Of all the times to have perfect hair.

  And I am facing Will Lotham’s suit-covered crotch. Will’s bent down, his face in an unfortunate freeze frame of intensity that makes him look like he’s a Dom ready to go in for the kill.

  Perky’s text after the pic: Our high school valedictorian is a porn star. We need to name the new high school swimming pool after you. We’ll call it Double Dip Mallory.

  Where did you get that picture? I text her.

  Ah, you’re up! Got it from Fiona, she replies.

  And where did she get it? I start to hyperventilate. Air won’t get into my lungs. Tiny white dots appear in my vision. I can’t black out. I can’t.

  Wait. If I black out, I won’t have to feel any of this.

  Hyperventilation is highly underrated.

  I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this, I read, and start to reply to Perk.

  Until I realize it’s from Mom.

  I’m sorry. It’s a long story, I type, realizing that I use that phrase a lot these days.

  I’m sure it is, Mom replies. Just know that we love you no matter what, sweetie, and we’re going to do whatever it takes to cure you.

  Cure me? I text back.

  Of your porn addiction. I’ve spent the last hour online, doing searches. It turns out this is a thing. Mom adds a heart, then a shooting star, to her text.

  Mom, I’m not a porn addict, I reply in a blind panic. Besides, that’s not how porn addiction works. It’s not about making porn.

  No one ever thinks they are. The first step is admitting you have a problem, sweetie. She adds a poop emoji.

  The only problem I have is unemployment, I snap back.

  You don’t need a job, Mallory. You need help. We can move you back into your old room while you go to twelve-step meetings, she responds.

  For what?

  Porn addiction! Haven’t you been reading? Oh, no, is this part of it, too? Is there some cognitive decline we need to know about? She adds another heart, as if that will somehow make up for her basically suggesting I'm losing my faculties.

  There are twelve-step meetings for that? And no, my brain is just fine! Aside from bursting inside my skull at this conversation. Mom, I swear I am not a porn addict. I’m a house fluffer. I went to a job and it turned out they were filming pornography there, I try to explain.

  A few dots, and then: Mallory, this is your dad.

  Hi Dad, I reply. My shame is complete.

  You’re not a porn addict? he types. Bear in mind, my father has his own phone. He could text me separately. But I routinely get texts from Dad on Mom’s phone. They also share the same Facebook account. You know the type. Their name is SharonandRoyMonahaninAnderhill.

  No, Dad, I am not, I reply, ready to pull out the big guns and use ALL CAPS.

  I told Sharon! I tried. She wouldn’t listen. I told her you have some perfectly reasonable explanation for being featured in a threesome picture with a naked porn star covered in oil and our old high school quarterback playing with a dog's chew toy, he writes back.

  My eyes land on the item in question, sitting on a table by the front door. In the bold light of morning, it looks less like a pet novelty and more like what it is. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.

  That’s what Dad took away from that picture? That?

  I take it back, Dad. I am a porn star. Mom figured it out, I fake admit. Might as well give in. They’ve broken me with their earnestness. The CIA could give up waterboarding if they just hired Sharon and Roy Monahan to turn their Earnest Parenting laser beam on prisoners.

  I told her you were too shy to do it. You’d sooner eat broken glass than do what it looks like you’re doing in that picture. Not my daughter, he adds.

  I smash the pillow over my face. Self-smothering is a thing, right?

  MAL! Meet us at Beanerino in an hour. Fi and I need to help you through this, Perky’s text says.

  You mean you want me to give you a blow by blow of what happened, I reply.

  YOU BLEW THEM BOTH? she types back.

  No, I did not blow them both! I hurriedly reply, clicking Send before realizing I sent that text... to my dad.

  If I eat the entire pillow, I can choke to death and be put out of my misery, right?

  Uh, thanks for that level of clarity, Mallory. We’re glad you feel comfortable sharing with us. This is Mom again. Your father is feeling a bit faint, Mom replies.

  Mom, there’s a missionary at my door. I need to go talk to him, I lie.

  Mormon? she asks. I have no idea why.

  Does it matter? Gotta go.

  I shut my phone down. All the way. Which means this is bad. Worse than bad. If my mother has seen that picture on social media, it means everyone has.

  Everyone. Because once something reaches the Facebook feed of SharonandRoyMonahaninAnderhill, you know it’s oversaturated.

  All I can do at this point is to do what Perky said. Meet her and Fiona at Beanerino. If anyone can come up with a strategy for managing this, it’s Fiona, who is a one-woman anti-shame campaign.

  And if anyone can make me feel better about becoming an accidental porn-star-by-proxy, it’s Perky.

  “I told you to keep that damn phone charged!” Perky scolds as I sit down with a tray covered in gluten-free pastries and not-disgusting pastries and better-than-orgasmic coffees at our favorite table at Beanerino. This place used to be a fast-food restaurant, so there’s none of the hipster ambience of some of the smaller, hand-roasted batch coffee shops that have popped up in the suburbs, but it has clean bathrooms and a drive-thru, two features you can’t overlook.

  They cater to the SUV-driving mommy crowd who stop between Pilates classes and salt therapy, listening to self-help audiobooks titled Busy Is Just Another Word for Failure and Apply Your MBA to Parenting: Ten Steps to IPO Your Kids and Leverage Their Success.

  With the word Their scratched out on the cover and Your handwritten in.

  “You wouldn’t have gotten into this mess if you’d listened to me,” Perky pronounces in a sing-songy voice. She has a way of making me feel shame without shaming me. Pretty sure she’s secretly my mother.

  “It’s not my fault!”

  “Low battery life is a function of poor planning. Proper planning prevents porny people, Mal.”

  I pause, mid-sip. “I am holding a one-hundred-forty-degree beverage. Don’t test me, Perk.”

  “How is it? We’re using a new Malabar and we’re worried weirdos like you will ruin it with your heavy-cream requests.”

  “I like zero carbs in my coffee. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Then drink it black. It's that good!”

  I shudder.

  “You ever try to froth heavy cream?” she huffs, as if we’re talking about micro cardiac surgery for preemies.

  “That barista in Florida on Spring Break did it. Mastered it. Had it down to a science,” I taunt.

  “She was Norwegian. Pretty sure her technique involved some weird hygge ritual.”

  But I got under Perky’s skin. Always do when this topic rolls around.

  “If anyone can do it, you can.”

  “Quit rubbing my nose in my inadequacies. Let’s talk about yours! Turns out you did become a porn star. Fi and I were right back in high school,” she says, pulling away before I can hit her.

  “Are you two done? Because I’m patiently waiting to look at your porn,” Fiona announces as she arrives in a whirlwind of color and essential oils. If a Himalayan salt lamp were a person, it would look like Fiona. All earth tones and soft lighting, she’s made a complete reversal of her hardcore butch look back in high school. Her hair is now dyed a pale peachy blonde, long and flowing down her back, all her piercings grown in, tattoos of fairies and stars and butterflies dotting her shoulders.

  Big change from the shaved head, bound breasts, flannel, and henna tats all over every surface of her exposed skin, seventh grade through twelfth.

  “You’re
not supposed to like porn, Fiona. You look like a preschool teacher in an ashram,” I grumble at her.

  “Don’t joke. There was an ad for that on Craigslist the other day. I nearly applied.”

  Perky makes a throat-cutting gesture at Fi. “Now is really not the time to bring up job openings on Craigslist.”

  Fiona suppresses a laugh and gives me a doe-eyed look. “You seriously applied for a fluffer job?”

  “I thought it was a house fluffer job,” I say for the thousandth time, my teeth gritted.

  “Only you, Mallory.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You worked for the Tollesons for all those years, straight out of college. A Mormon couple running a real estate business. You come out and dance and party with us, but you’re so goody-two-shoes. You limit yourself to two drinks. You–”

  “Only when we’re in public,” I protest. “If we’re hanging at your place or Perky’s, I party down.”

  “Drunk Trivial Pursuit is not exactly living on the wild side.”

  “You like Drunk Trivial Pursuit!”

  “I do, I do,” she assures me. “But c’mon, Mal. You live in a bubble. Always have.”

  “Do not! Just because everyone else knew what a fluffer was on a porn set doesn’t make me a weirdo! Plenty of people have no idea what that term means.”

  Perky stands and walks over to the coffee counter where Raul, the barista for this shift, is cleaning out a frothing pitcher. Long dreadlocks flow down his back, looped together by a multi-colored scrunchy. Raul is the size of a linebacker with the heart of a cuddly teddy bear. When he smiles, those whiskey-colored eyes light up and spread sunshine throughout the coffee shop.

  Too bad he’s taken.

  “Raul!” Perky calls out. “You know what a fluffer is?”

  “Perky!” I hiss.

  “Is that some kind of sandwich?” Raul asks, genuinely puzzled.

  I really love him.

  “You know,” Perky says, snort-laughing. “Come on.”

  “No. Really. What’s a fluffer?” Raul says without looking at her, wiping down the gleaming Pavoni espresso machine that was imported from Italy. It’s big and shiny, glistening as it rises up to make all my fantasies come true.

  And now I’ve triggered memories of Beastman gleaming and, uh, rising up.

  “Porn,” Perky says, drawing out the word, as if there’s a secret code she knows and Raul just needs to hear the right word.

  Raul’s eyes widen, the whites turning into cue balls. “I know you didn’t just say porn, right?” His Brazilian accent is light, but when he's surprised or upset, it deepens. His dad, Thiago, opened Beanerino about four years ago, and the coffee is divine.

  Raul isn't hard on the eyes, either.

  Perky’s face goes slack. “Oh, my God. You’re serious. You don’t know what a fluffer is.”

  “Remember the conversation we had in sexual harassment training, Perky? How my father told you to stop with the depraved innuendos?”

  Fiona and I share a look.

  And then we lean closer to them.

  “I’m not harassing you!” Perky sputters.

  “No, of course not,” he says, nose flaring. “You’re just starting a casual conversation about pornography with me in a work setting.”

  “I’m not on shift!” she protests. “And I was just trying to prove a point.”

  “That you’re utterly inappropriate, have no boundaries, and crave constant attention?” Raul replies calmly.

  As Perky sputters, Fiona murmurs, “Wow, he figured her out fast.”

  “And that was just during her first training shift,” he mutters, turning back to the machine.

  “Never mind,” Perky fumes, flouncing.

  “See?” I gloat. “Not everyone knows. I’m not a weirdo.”

  “You’re a weirdo, all right. And this proves nothing,” Perky insists.

  “I think it proves that a certain percentage of our generation knows what these dirty terms mean, and a much larger number has no idea because they aren’t addicted to porn.”

  “You know what, Mal? I love when you showcase your nonjudgmental nature like this.” Perky rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her coffee.

  “I’m not being judgmental. I'm defending myself. Just because I don’t spend my days on Urban Dictionary keeping up on all the newest terms doesn’t mean I’m weird.”

  “You keep saying weird. Must mean you have a deep fear of it.”

  “If that were true, Perk, I wouldn’t be your friend.”

  Perky grabs my laptop and opens it, clicking on a browser window and typing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Proving a point.”

  She taps my screen. “Here we are.”

  Horror turns the coffee in my mouth to poison.

  “We’re in public!” I hiss. “You can’t watch porn in public!”

  “Says who?”

  “Says everyone! It’s indecent! Isn’t it illegal, too?”

  Fiona shakes her head slowly. “You are really holding onto some outdated notions, Mal.”

  “I think not watching sex videos in a public place isn’t some nineteenth-century ideal. I mean, if they had sex videos then… I just–what if someone sees?”

  Perky opens a second window and types “Mallory sex tape Beastman spit.” She hits Enter.

  “That is a horrible search term!” I practically scream.

  But it works. The first link is to the porn-industry gossip blog Spatula sold the picture to.

  “Oh, God! My entire social media presence is ruined forever.” I swallow my coffee like it's laudanum. I’m single-handedly reviving “the vapors” as a medical condition.

  Perky gives me a look and snorts. “Poor baby. That must suck so much, having one picture of you circulating among the thousand people here who give a shit.”

  “I know it’s nothing like what you went through four years ago with Parker, but come on. This sucks, too.”

  “Until your breasts become a meme that’s spread more often than the Ermahgerd girl, just stop.” Right after college, Perky fell in love with Parker Campbell, an assistant DA who loved her right back.

  Until he leaked sexy pictures of Perky’s naked boobs with two dogs humping behind her head and the meme went viral.

  No one could prove it was Parker, of course. And it didn’t help that Persephone had changed her nickname to Perky in the worst confluence of events ever. She dumped him, he begged her to come back and claimed to know nothing about the photo leak, and to this day, she won’t admit she still pines for him.

  But yeah, what she went through is worse than this photo of what looks like me in a threesome.

  With Beastman and Will.

  “Anticipatory anxiety is real, Perky. You already know what the worst is that can happen. I’m a sitting duck,” I sputter. A million thoughts crash through my mind as I look at the article with the picture of the three of us, front and center.

  Most of them come down to this: I’ll never work again.

  “You look like you’re in the middle of being spit roasted.” Perky tilts her head. “Like the naked guy on top of you is fitting it in before getting up on his knees. What kind of lube did he use?”

  “How would I know? We. Did. Not. Have. Sex.” My voice goes lower with each word until I’m basically an echo from the Earth’s core.

  I've resorted to vocal fry as an emotional defense strategy.

  Perky frowns. She’s deeply disappointed.

  “Why is Will Lotham wearing a suit for a porn scene? Is this CEO porn? I love the hot CEO stuff. So dominant,” Fiona sighs. A slight blush pinks her cheeks and it hits me.

  She’s aroused.

  “You two are supposed to be my friends! Not get turned on by pictures of me with a naked Beastman and our high school quarterback!”

  And what the hell is spit roasting? Are they calling me a pig?

  Fiona and Perky share a look that immediately taps into fourteen years
of petty slights that line up in a perfect queue inside my ninth grade self. “We are your friends!” Perky assures me, patting my hand sympathetically.

  “And we can be turned on by your porn,” Fiona mutters.

  “Stop calling it my porn!”

  “What was it like, being that close to Will?” Perky asks, eyes all star-crossed and gooey. “Does he smell as good as he did in high school?”

  “I wouldn’t know. You’re the one who stole his jockstrap from his locker in ninth and huffed it every night before bed,” I say, giving her my best mean-girls, dagger-filled look. No way will I admit to smelling him yesterday.

  “Did not!”

  “Oh, please. We all know you did,” Fiona adds. “If social media had been a thing back then, you’d have been busted. And shamed. And ruined. Your reputation would have been demolished by the giant memory bank that is Google.”

  “Oh. Gee. How awful,” Perky deadpans, giving Fiona a killer look. “Given that already happened, I’m not too worried.”

  Fiona just laughs in that way you can mock a friend who remembers your Sailor Moon phase, complete with underwear you made using fabric pens.

  With every word they say, a piece of me dies. “Oh, God,” I groan. “I am ruined.”

  “Huh?” Fiona turns to me. “What do you mean?”

  “This did happen in the era of social media! Spatula posted those pictures and sold them to some scammy porn-industry gossip site! I am in the great memory bank! The memory bank that never, ever dies!”

  “Not a memory bank,” Fiona says, avoiding eye contact. “More like a spank bank.”

  “Success is fleeting,” Perky says with a nod, noshing on a piece of gluten-free brownie. “But porn is forever.”

  “That is not helping.”

  She shoves the remains of her brownie at me. “Here.”

  “It’s gluten free.” I wrinkle my nose.

  “So?”

  “Yuck.”

  “You are so picky, Mal.”

  “I get to be picky when I’m traumatized. That should be a universal human right. Someone needs to add it to the Geneva Convention.” I huff. “Along with the right to masturbate.”