Age Recommendation: Adult
Draughn High School, Robert L Patton High School
***NOTE: GRAPHIC CONTENT***
Book Summary: In a post-apocalyptic world, he helped destroy, a young man recalls his past involving his best friend girlfriend whom they found on a child pornography website.
Summary of Concerns: This book contains alcohol use and abuse; drug use; sexual activities; sexual nudity; profanity; suicide; violence; inflammatory religious commentary; and beastiality.
23 Old enough for what? To drink, to fuck, to know better? ... Her hair was soft and dark. Jimmy's mother's hair was what she herself called dirty blonde. ("Not dirty enough," said his father...) 40 Let's pretend I'm here with you, big butt and all, getting ready to suck your brains right out your dick.
73 They'd wait until some parent was away, then get right down to business- they'd swarm the place, waste themselves with loud music and toking and boozing, fuck everything including the family cat, trash the furniture, shoot up, overdose.
89 Then they went to HottTotts, a global sextrotting site. "The next best thing to being there," was how it was advertised. It claimed to show real sex tourists, filmed while doing things they'd be put in jail for back in their home countries. Their faces weren't visible, their names weren't used, but the possibilities for blackmail, Snowman realizes now, must have been extensive. The locations were supposed to be countries where life was cheap and kids were plentiful, and where you could buy anything you wanted. This was how the two of them first saw Oryx. She was only about eight, or she looked eight. They could never find out for certain how old she'd been then. Her name wasn't Oryx, she didn't have a name. She was just another little girl on a porno site. None of those little girls had ever seemed real to Jimmy — they'd always struck him as digital clones — but for some reason Oryx was three-dimensional from the start. She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon, frequent props on the sex-kiddie sites. She was on her knees, with another little girl on either side of her, positioned in front of the standard gargantuan Gulliver-in-Lilliput male torso — a life-sized man shipwrecked on an island of delicious midgets, or stolen away and entranced, forced to experience agonizing pleasures by a trio of soulless pixies. The guy's distinguishing features were concealed — bag with eyeholes over the head, surgical tape over the tattoos and scars: few of these types wanted to be spotted by the folks back home, though the possibility of detection must have been part of the thrill. The act involved whipped cream and a lot of licking. The effect was both innocent and obscene: the three of them were going over the guy with their kittenish tongues and their tiny fingers, giving him a thorough workout to the sound of moans and giggles. The giggles must have been recorded, because they weren't coming from the three girls: they all looked frightened, and one of them was crying. ...Oryx paused in her activities. She smiled a hard little smile that made her appear much older, and wiped the whipped cream from her mouth. Then she looked over her shoulder and right into the eyes of the viewer — right into Jimmy's eyes, into the secret person inside him. I see you, that look said. I see you watching. I know you. I know what you want.
Crake pushed the reverse, then the freeze, then the download. Every so often he froze frames; by now he had a small archive of them. Sometimes he'd print them out and give a copy to Jimmy. It could be dangerous it could leave a footprint for anyone who might manage to trace a way through the labyrinth — but Crake did it anyway. So now he saved that one moment, the moment when Oryx looked.
...The joint he'd been smoking must have had nothing in it but lawn mowings: if it had been stronger he might have been able to bypass guilt. ..."This a keeper?" Crake said. "You want it?" "Yeah," said Jimmy. He could barely get the word out. He hoped he sounded normal. So Crake had printed it, the picture of Oryx looking, and Snowman had saved it and saved it. He'd shown it to Oryx many years later. "I don't think this is me," was what she'd said at first. "It has to be!" said Jimmy. "Look! It's your eyes!” "A lot of girls have eyes," she said. "A lot of girls did these things. Very many." Then, seeing his disappointment, she said, "It might be me. Maybe it is. Would that make you happy, Jimmy?” ...Jimmy had to think about that. He remembered himself watching. How could he have done that to her? And yet it hadn't hurt her, had it? ...She sighed. "I was thinking," she said, tracing a little circle on his skin with her fingernail, "that if I ever got the chance, it would not be me down on my knees." "It would be someone else?" said Jimmy. "Who? What someone?" "You want to know everything," said Oryx. 110 Tonight she fails to materialize and he is left alone, whimpering ridiculously, jerking off all by himself in the dark.
121 The mother of Oryx sold two of her children at the same time, not only because she was hard up. ...The other child was a boy, a year older than Oryx. Fewer boys were sold than girls, but they were not therefore more valued.
130 Something else would have to be found for the brother — some other occupation. He would have to be sold elsewhere. The older children in the room shook their heads: the brother would be sold to a pimp, they said; a pimp for hairy white foreign men or bearded brown men or fat yellow men, any kind of men who liked little boys. They described in detail what these men would do; they laughed about it. He would be a melon-bum boy, they said: that's what boys like him were called. Firm and round on the outside, soft and sweet on the inside; a nice melon bum, for anyone who paid.
131 "Will I be a melon?" she asked. "A melon-bum girl?" and Uncle En laughed and said where did she pick up that word. ...Next day the man appeared and asked Oryx if she would like some money, a lot more money than she could make by selling roses. ...He unlocked a door with a key and they went in, and he locked the door behind them, and they were in a mauve-and-gold-coloured room with a giant bed in it, a bed for giants, and the man asked Oryx to take off her dress. Oryx was obedient and did as she was told. She had a general idea of what else the man might want — the other children already knew about such things and discussed them freely, and laughed about them. People paid a lot of money for the kinds of things this man wanted, and there were special places in the city for men like him to go; but some wouldn't go there because it was too public and they were ashamed, and they foolishly wanted to arrange things for themselves, and this man was one of that kind. So Oryx knew the man would now take off his own clothes, or some of them, and he did, and seemed pleased when she stared at his penis, which was long and hairy like himself, with a bend in it like a little elbow. ...She could remember the singularity of his penis but not the singularity of his face. "It was like no face," she said. "It was all soft, like a dumpling. There was a big nose on it, a carrot nose. A long white penis nose." ..."I won't hurt you," said the man. His accent was so ridiculous that Oryx wanted to giggle, but she knew that would be wrong. She smiled her shy smile, and the man took hold of one of her hands and placed it on himself. He did this gently enough, but at the same time he seemed angry. Angry, and in a hurry. ...But out on the street he laughed and made jokes about the man hopping around in his snarled-up trousers, and told Oryx she was a good girl and wouldn't she like to play this game again?
141 And the girls would laugh, because whatever else happened to them they would never be like him, a rope-haired clownish giant with a cock like a wrinkly old carrot. Oryx said she had many chances to see that old carrot up close, because Jack wanted to do movie things with her when there were no movies. ..."You did it for nothing?" said Jimmy. "I thought you said everything has a price." ..."He never did anything with me that you don't do. Not nearly so many things!"
142 "What did you do for him? You sucked him off?"
174 Shagging smaller boys, dabbling in black-market pharmaceuticals. ..."Honey, we're so proud of you," said Ramona, who'd come decked out like a whore's lampshade in an outfit with a low neckline and pink frills. Jimmy’s seen something like that on HottTotts once, only it was worn by an eight-year-old. Ramona's push-up-bra breast tops were freckled from too much sun, not that Jimmy was much interested in those any more.
215 It was the picture of Oryx, seven or eight years old, naked except for her ribbons, her flowers. It was the picture of the look she'd given him, the direct, contemptuous, knowing look that had dealt him such a blow when he was- what? Fourteen? He still had the paper printout, folded up, hidden deep.
272 "If you were ninety and you had the chance for one last fuck but you knew it would kill you, would you still do it?" Crake asked him once.
310 "I gave you a printout. From HottTotts- you know." ..."That show you used to watch. Remember?" "I guess," said Jimmy. "Sort of." ..."Oh, right," said Jimmy. "Each to his own. You wanted the sex-kiddie look?"
Profanity Count Ass 8 Dick 9 Fuck 30 Goddamn 1 Shit 59