Ostrich: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

connection between the two things. It was almost like Sony wanted to encourage us to make the association, as if they realized it was mainly men who bought wide-screen TVs and they knew what impressed us most. But whether it was a coincidence or not, I knew from the moment I started calculatingthe size of electrical appliances as a factor of my own penis that something fundamental had changed.
    For an entire week after they showed us the video, debate raged in the playground about what made for admissible data. We all recognized the need for standardization, but we weren’t all agreed about what it was we were actually measuring. Some of us argued that the penis was just what you could see with your own eyes (and hold in your own hands (which some of us had started to do, apparently)), while others maintained that the shaft actually began before the balls. (One or two even measured from their bum holes forward, which reminded me for some reason of an argument my mum had once had with Aunt Julie about abortion. (Aunt Julie thought it was okay, but Mum just kept saying that
Life began at the moment of conception
.)) Eventually, we reached an agreement that the penis was the protuberance alone, and for a week or so this looked set to be our Magna Carta, until someone with an older brother raised the subject of
girth
. Then it was back to the measuring tapes. In seven days we’d gone from blissful ignorance to this. There wasn’t a man among us who (with a little application and a Casio FX-83) couldn’t have calculated his volume to twelve decimal points.
    For a few days we were as happy with our new knowledge as Mr. Carson was with our sudden interest in π. However, slowly it began to dawn on us that a penis in isolation, whatever size (large, medium, or travel), didn’t actually mean all that much in real terms. It was only when correlated against the depth of our classmates’ vaginas that the data became useful. And that’s when the boys started talking to the girls.

    That was the term that Susie Beckman spoke to me. Susie Beckman was the first girl in our year to get breasts, which means she’s even more of a celebrity than I am now (which means I don’t know anything about her). She didn’t need to say hello, because I had tracked her approach all the way across the playground (which she must have either seen or assumed). Instead, when she arrived, she announced that she had made a bet about me.
    “It’s about the clitoris,” she explained, unwrapping a stick of bubble gum and sliding it between her lips until it squashed against her teeth and folded up like a sound wave.
    I had no idea what the clitoris was. (I’m still not sure I do entirely.) My guess was it was something sexual, because we were living through the second great Age of Discovery. The clitoris must be some new Newfoundland, I figured. Maybe Susie Beckman had discovered it accidentally while looking for India.
    “The clitoris?” I asked, casually tossing off the word with false familiarity.
    “Yeah, it’s whether or not you know what it is.”
    Eff-word
. I examined my options and realized quickly I didn’t have any. (One thing I could have done was just own up to my ignorance (
own my ignorance
), but technically if you’ve got only one option, then it isn’t an option at all.) I could feel the sweat starting to gather in the small of my back. (In that moment, my Hydroelectric energy potential was vast enoughto power a small Peruvian village.) To buy myself time, I asked how much was riding on my answer.
    “Pound tuck,” retorted Susie Beckman, in a double-berry-flavored speech bubble.
    “And what did you bet?”
    “I said you didn’t know, but Chloe Gower reckoned you would and I should leave you alone.”
    Here I looked up and spotted Chloe fifty meters away in the tuckshop queue, oblivious to its flow, like a pebble in a stream, a stethoscopic Y of headphone cord disappearing at her throat into a dark swathe of anti-uniform. Her