"Her name is Natasha," one policeman said to another officer. They had picked up a young girl off the streets. Her hair was dyed jet black, and cut short, so it came down to her chin. She wore all white, and boots the same color as her hair.
"And did she know him?" the other asked.
"Yes, very well."
He turned to the girl. "Miss Natasha, would you mind telling us a bit about this Alex? How you came to know him, perhaps?"
I had been lurking around with Billyboy and his four droogs after school for about a month now. Billyboy was my "boyfriend," but my em and pee disapproved of him. They skazatted I see the chelloveck in the flat upstairs; his em had said he went out helping people at nochy.
The chelloveck was Alex Burgess—that was his eemya legally, but we all called him DeLarge. He went to school with me, and when he asked me to one of those gloopy dances, I accepted. Alex was really no better than Billyboy. He had three droogs of his own, and on the night of the dance he stole an auto and we rode off. He yeckated straight on past the skolliwoll. I didn't know where he wanted to go, and I didn't ask.
The auto stopped in a dark back road. He turned to me and he said, "My em tells me you're a singer."
"Yes," I said, all shy-like. "I used to sing before we moved."
"Sing a warble for me, little sister."
I did. I decided on my favorite aria, O mio babbino caro by the great Puccini. He sat in silence—didn't say a slovo until I was finished.
"Beautiful. Will you sing some more for me?" he asked.
I started to name arias and gloopy warbles, but he pulled me from the auto and into one of the alleyways.
"Sing, like real quiet so nobody but I can slooshy this beauty," he said.
Em and Pee had taken me to see a show when I was but a malenky devotchka, called The Phantom of the Opera, where a veck in a maskie fell in love with a beautiful singer. I remembered one of the warbles and the words came out real quick. But as I sang, Alex started putting his hands all over my plott.
"Lovely," he whispered. And suddenly he was kissing my neck. I stopped singing—I barely knew him! There I was, a practically strange veck I didn't viddy very much, kissing me in an alley. I pushed him back, but soon he brosayed me down on the ground, real savage, pinning my malenky plott down with his fisties on either side of my gulliver.
"I can't sing like this," I sneered.
"Don't govoreet, sister," he replied, his goobers moving all up and down my shiya. "Let Uncle Alex take you to a fantasy world, like nothing you've ever sneetied before."
He fiddled with the buttons on my blouse, and even though I wanted to tell him to stop, I let him get on with what he wanted to do. I thought that if I said something, he wouldn't like me anymore. I felt his pan-handle up against my sharp parts, and I knew what he would do next.
It wasn't long before we were lubbilubbing, right there on the ground. He tolchoked me a few times throughout, but it felt real horroshow to have a new chelloveck on me. When it was all over, Alex sobirated me so we were standing again. He looked at me, his blue glazzies twinkling in the moonlight, and I kissed him like I meant it. He tolchoked me back down to the ground.
"Don't be bezoomy, love! That was just the old in-out, in-out, nothing more."
"Billyboy always meant it."
His glazz-brows raised in surprise. "Well! In that case, I mean it more than anything."
"Was this…Billyboy a rival to Alex?" the first officer asked.
"Yes, sir. They were always dratting."
The first officer looked at the second in confusion. "It means 'fighting,'" the second man said. "Teenage slang." The main police officer was an older man. He didn't know much of Nadsat. The second man was much younger, so he understood what Natasha told him.
The young man looked her in the eye. "So what you're saying is, Alex sexually harassed you when you thought he was taking you to a school dance?"
"I didn't think it was considered harassment," Natasha said, "if the victim liked it."