21 I Wanna Be Your Dog

People seemed to think it was funny to offer Delilah sips of their drinks and then laugh at the faces she made. "You can't even really taste the alcohol," said Eusine.

"I don't know, I really hate beer," she said.

"It doesn't taste like beer," he said, handing her his glass. "It tastes better. It's finer."

She took a sip.

Her face contorted naturally, but she exaggerated it to make him laugh.

"Ugh! It tastes like medicine!"

"Let's play MASH," said Eusine, flipping over his placemat to the white side.

"Oh, are you playing MASH?" Whitney asked arbitrarily.

"Who are you playing MASH for?" asked Delilah.

Eusine smiled and pointed to Delilah with a blue crayon. "Okay, husbands first," he said, writing Boys as the first heading. "What's the Twilight guy's name?"

"Robert Pattinson?" asked Delilah. "Do you mean the actor?"

"Isn't that the other one?" asked Whitney.

"No, that's Taylor Lautner," said Irwin.

"We'll put him too," said Eusine, adding TL under RP. "And Lance Siegfried...and let's put...Obama, because did you ever notice his initials are 'BO'..."

"If I married him," said Delilah, "my initials would be...d'oh!"

"Mine would be...whoa," said Whitney.

"Okay, cars," said Eusine, writing the next heading. "Whitney's back..."

"A garbage truck," said Irwin.

"A lawnmower," said Delilah.

"Whitney's back?" said Whitney.

Eusine, Whitney, and Irwin came to visit her in the spring, and came to a party thrown for her. There was a montage of her famous matches, and then a black-and-white photo of her looking very glamorous. That was when she stepped out onto the stage, and the audience rose to their feet, clapping and cheering.

Standing between a rolling sea of applause and a gigantic picture of herself, she suddenly felt very small and shy. She made an "oh go on" hand gesture of campy false modesty, and the applause turned to laughter and then finally subsided so she could make a speech.

"Oh, Delilah, my sweetheart!" exclaimed Eusine when she was done, wrapping his arm around her and pretending to weep into her shoulder. "It's so hard for me to believe you're a great big pokémon master now!"

"Oh, there, there," she said, stroking his hair.

"Oh, look at you, the utter toast of women's liberationists! I'm so proud..."

The next day Delilah had a publicity photoshoot, but she was able to meet with them for dinner to hear about their adventures.

"Don't you think this would be a neat tattoo?" said Eusine, touching the back of his t-shirt, which had some sort of artsy Celtic graphic on it.

"Yeah, that would look cool," said Delilah.

"No, don't get a tattoo, Eusine," said Whitney. "Tattoos are stupid."

"I have to get a tattoo," said Eusine. "I won't be young forever! I've had everything pierced, I have to get a tattoo."

"What have you had pierced?" asked Delilah. "I didn't know that." She had figured he had had his eyebrows pierced because of a couple of odd scars there.

"I had my ears pierced," he said. "And my eyebrows, and I had a labret. I had a septum piercing for a while but not very long."

"But those healed over," said Whitney. "Tattoos aren't going to heal."

"You know, when you think about it," said Delilah, "tattoos are technically dyed scars."

"They are so gross," said Whitney.

Eusine ignored her. "Falkner's the one who made me want a tattoo," said Eusine. "He has Alice on his arm, with, like, cards behind her. It's so cute. And of course Adam Harlow has got that rather alluring feraligatr—"

"Do you see a lot of Adam?" asked Whitney.

"Um...I see him now and then, here and there," said Delilah.

"You don't hang out much?" she asked. "Then who do you hang out with?"

Delilah shrugged. "Nobody, really," she said. "I'm a lot busier than I was this time last year."

She didn't really want to talk about Adam and was attempting to veer the conversation in another direction, but apparently Adam was just too attractive a discussion topic. "God, Adam fucking hates me," said Irwin, laughing. "Like, if he found out I was with you when you bought that dress, he would automatically hate it."

"I doubt it's that serious," said Eusine. "I think that's just him, I think everybody probably gets the feeling that Adam hates them."

"Um...no," Irwin disagreed gently. "I'm pretty sure he legitimately, explicitly hates me."

"He just gives off a really scary vibe," said Whitney, "because he's just so fucking INTENSE." She made some hand gestures to elaborate. "Like, one time, he was at my gym, probably a year ago, and he was just staring at me, with no expression. I thought maybe he was just like spacing out, or looking at something behind me, but then I looked at him, and our eyes totally met, but he didn't look away! He just kept staring at me! And I mean I looked away, like you do when you accidentally meet eyes with somebody, but then I looked back, and he was still staring at me! And he just slooowly looked away...not even embarrassed..."

"Whitney, you think everybody's staring at you," said Eusine. "You always think everybody is saying your name. Conceited..."

"Shut up! He was totally staring at me!"

"No, that's just like this kid I went to middle school with," said Irwin. "He would always do shit like that. I could never tell if he was looking at me or just at the clock or something. He was seventeen or something—it was like, dude, you're not twelve. He had a beard, practically. And then one day he got picked up after school in a convertible by this tall blonde lady, and he got in the car by, you know, jumping over the door? Like, dude. That's not your mom."

"I always thought you and Adam were so funny together, though, Delilah," said Whitney relentlessly. "I'm surprised you wouldn't hang out more."

"Yeah, well," said Delilah. She didn't want to try to explain it to them so she went back to the last subject: "There's a guy I train with sometimes who has a tattoo on his arm, and it's a Jolly Roger, except instead of a skull and crossbones it's a stack of pancakes and a fork and knife."

"I've seen a tattoo of Aunt Jemima," said Irwin.

Whitney laughed. "Okay, I'm converted," she said.

"That's what I want," said Eusine. "Aunt Jemima, and Mrs Butterworth. In a mud fight."

"A mud fight?" said Irwin. "Come on, you mean a syrup fight."

"Do British people eat pancakes?" asked Whitney.

"Don't be stupid, Whitney," said Eusine. "The British eat crumpets." He released a trill of particularly SpongeBob-ish laughter.

"Well, I was just asking!"

"Morty and I had baked pancakes once at Richard Walker's," said Eusine. "They changed my life." He stopped. "I miss my little Morty," he said, pretending to wipe a tear from his eye.

"Why did he decide not to come?" asked Delilah.

"Well, every gym leader in Johto can't holiday at the same time, Whitney," he said accusingly.

"Oh, shut up," said Whitney.

Seeing them again was nice, if a little strange. It had been a few months since the last time and so required a certain amount of starting over. They did some tourist things in London, and also went to Paris for a couple of days, and met Eusine's parents, who lived in Celadon. Morty and Eusine had met when Morty had been on a sabbatical to train in Kanto, and apparently they had fallen in love and Eusine had made the move to Johto.

Delilah couldn't always be around because of her previous commitments; when this was the case, Eusine said he had wanted to visit some local clubs, only to quickly tire of hearing "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", "9 to 5", "Video Killed the Radio Star", and the Baywatch theme over and over again. Goldenrod wasn't London, but Celadon wasn't even Goldenrod; so after that their Kanto excursions returned to more typical tourist destinations like the Indigo Plateau and the Pewter Museum of Science.

When they went home she felt a strange emptiness, a ragged absence of emotion. She had a badge from the Pewter Gym, so it was time to move on to the next one, to Viridian, and an Earth Badge, and Adam. On her first day staying in a Viridian hotel (Mr Driscoll insisted she no longer stay in pokémon centers, for the sake of privacy) she had to go to a nice reception, and she spent most of the evening looking around in exhausted paranoia, waiting to see a pair of buckled winklepickers or a striped Ann Demeulemeester jacket. But apparently he wasn't there.

Oh, if only they had done it! She tried to imagine what might have happened if that police officer hadn't stopped them. She remembered the way it felt to have the weight of Adam's body on her, the barbell through his tongue skating masterfully across the roof of her mouth. Boy, he was a disgusting piece of work.

Probably they would not have removed any more clothing than was necessary. She remembered how cold his hand was in her thighs. Probably he would have been able to tell she had never done it before. Maybe he could already tell. Maybe he would have said, "You're a virgin," and then maybe she would have said, "Not anymore," and then maybe he would have been angered by her tone, and maybe it would hurt. So then probably they would take greedily from each other for a few minutes, things they had wanted for a long time, and then...

And then what? After he shipwrecked himself in her legs, after she gasped rhapsodically to him, after the shuddering relief of frustration, what would happen immediately afterward? It probably wouldn't be a period of relaxation and contentment with the world. They would probably be dirty and ashamed and take it out on each other.

The tension between them ran more broadly than the mundanity of sexual attraction. Yes, he was a boy and she was a girl, that much was true, but they were also both people, and for various reasons sometimes people didn't like each other. It wasn't shyness that had kept them at arm's length of each other.

She wondered why Lance was a Champion for everybody, but she had to be a self-esteem tool for fifteen-year-old girls who thought they weren't thin enough.