In Summertime Saga

Debbie had made eggs again. She'd been making them every morning since I got here and they were always scrambled and always in butter and on the plate before I sat down with a piece of toast and a glass of orange juice that she poured while the pan was still in her other hand. The woman could run a kitchen the way air traffic controllers run runways. Nothing collided. Everything arrived on time.

"You're up early," she said. She was in the blouse and skirt today, hair pinned back, like she had plans to leave the house. Her eyes looked better than they had last week. The red was fading. She was sleeping more, or crying less, or both.

"School." I ate the eggs. They were good. They were always good. "Thanks for breakfast."

"Always, sweetie." She touched my shoulder on her way past to the sink and her hand was warm and the touch lasted one second and then she was running water over the pan.

I finished the eggs and was lacing my shoes by the front door when Jenny appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Hey. Twerp. Got a minute?"

She was dressed for the day but barely. Sleep shorts and an oversized t-shirt that hung off one shoulder and her hair was down and unbrushed and she had a cup of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. She came down the stairs like the stairs should have been grateful for the attention, each step a production, her bare feet hitting the wood with the confident slap of a woman who owned the space and everything in it.

"I'm heading to school."

"This'll take thirty seconds." She stopped at the bottom step and leaned against the railing and drank her coffee and looked at me over the rim. She'd been looking at me differently since the photo session. The difference was small enough that Debbie wouldn't notice and large enough that I did every time.

"What's up?"

"So I've been looking into content stuff." She said it casually, like she was mentioning the weather. "Growing the brand. You know."

"The brand."

"My brand. Sluttygram. Don't be a dick about it."

"I wasn't being a dick."

"You had a tone." She sipped her coffee. "Anyway. I need props. For the shoots. Accessories and stuff that make the photos more interesting."

"Okay."

"Specifically." She paused. Drank more coffee. Looked at the wall instead of me. "I need panties."

I waited.

"Other girls' panties," she said. "Used. It's a thing. There's a whole market for it and my followers go insane for it and I'm not going to explain the economics of influencer content to an eighteen-year-old but trust me, it works."

I knew exactly what this was. I'd played the game and the panties deal was the second beat in Jenny's route after the photography intro. Collect panties for Jenny. Trade panties for content opportunities. Watch the content escalate from Sluttygram posts to things that required age verification. That was Jenny's pipeline.

But that wasn't the only pipeline. In the game, Master Somrak at the gym taught Muay Thai in exchange for panties. Dexterity training, the stat I needed most, because Dexterity was what kept you alive when Dimitri was holding a knife over Debbie and Jenny in the warehouse. The panties had double value. Jenny got content, I got combat training, and nobody needed to know both transactions used the same currency.

"I'll get them," I said.

Jenny's mouth stopped mid-sip. She lowered the coffee cup. Her eyes narrowed and her chin tilted down and she looked at me from under her eyebrows.

"That was easy."

"Was it?"

"Usually guys at least pretend to be weirded out." She was studying me. "I say 'I need used panties from other girls' and you just go 'sure, no problem' like I asked you to grab milk from the store."

"You need something, I can get it. What's weird about that?"

"Everything about it is weird. You're an eighteen-year-old boy and I just asked you to collect used panties from girls at your school and you didn't blink." She shifted her weight on the step. The t-shirt slipped further off her shoulder and the strap of whatever she was wearing underneath it was visible, thin and pink, cutting into the skin. "That's not normal."

I shrugged. In my past life I'd done stranger things for women with less reason. A married woman in my old apartment building had once asked me to climb through her bathroom window because she'd locked herself out and was wearing a towel and didn't want the super to see her. I'd done it without asking questions. Panties were simple by comparison.

"Maybe I'm just helpful."

"Nobody's that helpful." But her eyes had shifted. The suspicion was still there but curiosity had joined it, and curiosity was what had gotten Jenny to hand me her phone for the photo session.

"Fine," she said. "But I pick which ones. And you don't ask what I do with them."

"Deal."

"And you don't tell Mom."

"Obviously."

"How many are we talking?"

She blinked. "What?"

"How many do you need? One? Ten? Do you need a specific kind or just any? Because this is going to require actual logistics and I'd rather know what I'm working with."

Jenny stared at me. She lowered the coffee cup to the railing and crossed her arms. The t-shirt rode up when she crossed and there was a strip of her stomach, tanned and flat, and the waistband of the sleep shorts sitting low on her hips.

"You're treating this like a business deal."

"You're the one who called it a brand."

Her mouth opened. Closed. She picked the coffee back up. "A few at a time. Different colors. Different styles. Lace, cotton, whatever. The variety is part of the appeal. And yeah, used. Worn. That's the whole point."

"From who?"

"Girls. At your school. I don't care who." She waved the coffee cup. "Cheerleaders are gold. Popular girls in general. If you can get anything that belonged to someone hot, that's premium content."

"So I'm going to walk up to girls at school and ask for their underwear."

"You're smart. You'll figure out a way that doesn't get you expelled." She was looking at me again and the corner of her mouth was fighting a smile. "You did say you were helpful."

"I did say that."

"Then be helpful." She pushed off the railing. Took another sip of coffee. Started up the stairs. The oversized t-shirt shifted when she turned and the outline of her body was visible underneath it and the sleep shorts were riding up on one side and she was climbing the stairs drinking coffee and she had no idea I was doing math in my head about how many panties bought one Muay Thai lesson.

"Jenny."

She stopped. Turned on the step. One hand on the railing, coffee in the other, looking down at me.

"You owe me one."

Her eyebrows went up. Then they came down and her mouth pulled at the corners and her jaw settled. She looked at me for a second. She'd already recategorized me once after the photo session. This was the update.

"Sure," she said. "I owe you one." She threw the words away as she said them.

She smiled. Small, quick. Then she turned and went up the stairs and her door closed and the music started behind it, the bass through the walls, and the hallway was empty and Debbie was running water in the kitchen and the cat was on the third step and I stepped over it.

She didn't mean it when she said it. I did.

I picked up my backpack. The front door was already open from when I'd been lacing my shoes and the morning air was warm and the sun was hitting the front walk and Debbie was humming in the kitchen, the low tuneless hum she did when she was alone, and I pulled the door shut behind me.

Panties. I needed to figure out how to get them. The game had an inventory system for it, specific items in specific locations, but this was real and I couldn't open a locker and find a pair conveniently sitting on the top shelf. I was going to have to talk to actual girls and come up with actual reasons to end up with their underwear and the distance between clicking a mouse and standing in front of a person was the distance between knowing how to swim and being in the ocean.

I'd figure it out. Talking to women was the one skill I'd brought from my old life that this body couldn't weaken. Confidence and timing and knowing what to say to who.

The walk to school was the same as every morning. Past the mailbox, down the sidewalk, three blocks with the building visible from the second one because it was tall and ugly and designed by someone who believed education should feel like punishment. A man was pulling weeds from between the cracks in his driveway across the street and he waved at me and I waved back and neither of us knew each other and that was fine. A dog barked from behind a fence. A sprinkler was hitting the sidewalk and I walked through the wet strip and my shoes were damp after and I kept going. The cedar deodorant from Consum-R was working. I smelled like a person instead of a chemical experiment and that was an improvement that nobody would ever thank me for but everyone in a ten-foot radius would benefit from.

Jenny wanted panties. Somrak wanted panties. I wanted Dexterity. Collect panties, give some to Jenny for content and favors, give some to Somrak for training. The logistics were the hard part. The motivation was the easiest thing in the world because every day that passed was a day closer to the warehouse and the man with the scar who'd laughed at me was going to be holding a knife over the two women who made me breakfast and I needed to be fast enough to stop him.

I walked to school and the morning was warm and I was eighteen years old heading to class with a backpack full of French homework and a plan to collect used panties from my classmates for a woman who called me twerp and a martial arts master I hadn't met yet.

The game kept getting weirder. I kept playing.