E. Godz Read Online Free PDF

that the regular school
bullies didn't even bother making fun of it. Too much like shooting fish in a barrel. But
there were plenty of juvenile improv sadists who weren't above dragging me into the
girls' room, dunking my head in the toilet, flushing, and telling me to visualize whirled
Peez. Good gods, it's just a wonder that I turned out as well as I did."
    The teddy bear snickered spitefully. "Yeah, those were the days. Remember back in
the pre-nanny years, just before Edwina decided she'd better get you dear little tykes off
the road and settle down? Remember that town you stayed in for, what, four whole
months where your teacher told everyone to draw a picture of a house and you drew a
Volkswagon van? Boy, did the kids in your class laugh at you or what?"
    Peez's pale, heart-shaped face turned bright red all the way up to her hairline. "At
least it was better than what happened in the town we moved to after that."
    "Right, I remember," said Teddy Tumtum, who remembered much too much of
everything. "That was where you scored so badly on the standardized tests for your age
group that they stuck you back a year and you had to be in the same class with your little
brother."
    "That was also the place where the teacher asked our class to draw a picture of our
daddies for Father's Day." Peez was bitter. It had all happened a long time ago, but the
sound of her classmates' rude laughter and ruder name-calling was still loud and clear in
her ears. It didn't take a rocket scientist to tell that the drawings produced by Peez and her
brother were of two radically different men.
    "It wasn't so bad when the other kids just called us stupid," Peez said. "But then the
teacher stepped in and tried to make things aaall better. Better! She went into that big
song-and-dance about how some brothers and sisters from the same family can have
different daddies."
    "Sometimes two at once," Teddy Tumtum put in.
    "This was a little too close to the Pleistocene for a public school teacher to talk about
alternative life-style families," Peez reminded him. "Hell, she didn't even want to open
the whole widowhood can o' worms in front of the kiddies—death was a big no-no—but
she did mention divorce. That was when my genius baby brother had to go and ask,
'What's a divorce?' "
    Teddy Tumtum nodded wisely. "And she told him it's what happened when mommies
and daddies decided they didn't want to be married to each other any more. And that was
when he told her that your mommy would never get a divorce because your mommy
never bothered to get married to either one of your daddies in the first place."
    Peez blushed a deeper shade of scarlet. Even after so many years, she was still
sensitive about her mother's Olympic-grade amorous shenanigans. When most children
learn where babies come from, the first thing they do with the information is to search for
exceptions, escape clauses, loopholes, anything to keep them from thinking of their
parents doing something like that. Gross. Peez not only had to contend with the image of
her mother "doing it," but also with the inescapable knowledge that Edwina had "done it"
with enough men to stock a small road company of The Mikado, chorus included.
    All of which probably accounted for Peez's own scrupulously preserved virginity,
although her official excuse was that staying a virgin meant she could have direct access
to and participation in some of the more esoteric rites for the pickier sorts of gods. And if
some of her clients chose to believe that she stood ready to offer herself up as an
emergency virgin sacrifice—Do Not Use Except in Case of Imminent Volcano
Eruption—there was no harm in letting them do so. Not while she also had access to a
wide variety of speedy getaway vehicles, anyhow. Peez was all for building customer
confidence, but she wasn't about to die for it.
    Teddy Tumtum made a clucking sound of commiseration. It was about as authentic as
a beauty queen's