Everyone's Favorite Girl

by Steph Sweeney

  I couldn’t figure out what that look meant, so I just brushed it aside.

  Sean was in a hurry anyway.

  In the elevator, he asked me if I’d let Kate out of the Showcase Hall.

  “No, do you need her? Take her out if you want.”

  He grinned and shook his head. “Someone let her out already.”

  We stepped out into the Level C lobby and could hear the ruckus in the cafeteria. Kate had done just as I instructed, and now nearly every employee of Your Favorite Girl, Inc., was now naked and immersed in a massive orgy.

  I couldn’t make out most of them. Sean’s guards stood out like sore thumbs—all three for their sheer size but one because of his limp, snub-nose penis.

  I also spied Damien, my short, fat, mute friend, on his back with one of the girls I’d assigned to guard the stairwell sucking his dick and the other sitting on his face.

  The lucky little bastard was still holding his notebook. I imagined him writing, Oh yeah, oh yeah, that’s it baby, and started laughing.

  “You think this is funny,” Sean said, shouting over the moans and cries.

  “Just a little,” I said.

  “Mr. Shriver sees things differently.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Did you do this?”

  “No.”

  “Did Judy?”

  “No.”

  Of course he suspected Judy. He thought this orgy was the result of the Libido Drug. Judy had a history when it came to this sort of thing.

  Sean stared me down for a moment. Then he motioned for us to follow. He led us to the service desk, where we collected Liu—I didn’t know why she was on Mr. Shriver’s list, but she was. Then we rode to Level B to collect Judy, a more obvious suspect in a conspiracy to cause such chaos. Sean knew Kate no longer had access to the Libido Drug.

  With Judy in the elevator, Sean hit the E button on the panel.

  “What about James?”

  “James is already up there,” Sean said.

  Indeed, when we reached Level E, we came upon Mr. Shriver and James sitting in two of the high-back leather chairs. The bed had been replaced with the stripper pole, and Kate, as I expected, was tied to it, still sporting her cute red dress—and also a black eye.

  After spiking as many trays of food, batches of waffle mix, loaves of bread, and items in the salad bar that she could, Kate had stood in the cafeteria doorway and watched as the cafeteria fell silent, each person stripped of his or her emotions, thoughts, and desires. Finally, she commanded them all to pick a partner or two and have passionate sex until further notice.

  Then she’d waited to be found.

  Liu had been the one to discover the scene. She made a point to mention it five times on the elevator ride.

  We came into the circle and Mr. Shriver invited everyone to sit.

  Kate looked calm. Too calm, really. I started to fear she would give us away. On a normal day Kate bitched and complained even when she was getting her way. Now she was tied to a pole that you didn’t get tied to unless you were about to die, and she didn’t have a thing to say about it.

  I should have coached her to cry and struggle.

  I fucked that up.

  When I sat next to Patton, Sean waltzed up to me shaking his head.

  “Nope, not you,” he said. “Stand up.”

  I didn’t move.

  “She was with me, Sean,” Patton said. “She had nothing to do with it.”

  “Take a seat, Sean,” Mr. Shriver said.

  But I could tell he wasn’t listening. His black eyes bore into me like wood bees. I could feel the bite of them, a tiny sting foretelling the pain to come.

  He snatched me out of the chair so hard it felt like my shoulder popped out of its socket, and in one quick motion he slammed my back against the hard pole, yanked my arms up, and duck-taped my hands with Kate’s. My mind was reeling, trying to figure out where I went wrong, what set him off. Was it instinct? Did he just hate me that much?

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Shriver demanded.

  “This bitch played us all,” Sean said, pulling his knife. “I saw the stitches on that little cunt’s arm—”

  He stopped.

  “What the fuck is this?!” Mr. Shriver screamed.

  Sean stepped aside to reveal James standing behind him, holding the syringe he’d just plunged into the back of Sean’s neck.

  That was it. The look Sean had given Flora. The loose wife beater. He’d seen the stiches on her arm, plain as day, and he’d realized what I’d done. That I’d used the Love Drug from the device to get to Judy, and then used her to fake my way into earning Mr. Shriver’s trust.

  Mr. Shriver was losing his mind. He knew his only ally in the room was Liu, and she was standing there looking like a little kid lost in a crowd. She had no idea what was going on.

  “Sean, seize him!” Sean didn’t answer, so he turned to James. “What did you inject him with? You think you can touch me? You have no idea what’ll happen to you if anything happens to me. All of you!”

  “That’s why you’re going to tell us,” I said. “Sean, if you would please put Mr. Shriver back in his chair.”

  Sean stepped away from me, and I knew I wasn’t going to die.

  “I’m not telling you shit,” Mr. Shriver said, so upset now he spat with every word.

  “James, cut me loose.”

  While James freed me from the pole, I watched Sean deliver a hard jab to Mr. Shriver’s jaw. He never looked so frail and old as he did now. Brittle, when he’d always come off as so foreboding. Stunned from the blow, he let Sean guide him to the chair, and he sat there holding his face, steaming mad but obviously rocked with fear.

  “Judy, if you will…” I said.

  Judy opened a small case like the one she’d loaned me and loaded a syringe with Loyalty. Mr. Shriver began to struggle and Sean responded with two more punches, rendering the old man half-conscious.

  She plunged in the needle.

  I stepped forward to watch.

  It was the most exhilarating penetration I’ve ever known.

  “Get on your knees.”

  Patton stood over Sean, holding the knife he’d just confiscated from him.

  “I’ve always known I’d kill you first, if I ever got the chance.”

  “Me?” Sean asked. “Why?”

  “Why?” Patton screamed. “For half a century I’ve been raising these girls as my own, giving them everything they need to go out into the world as functioning adults, just in case—just in case—I get the chance to kill you before it’s their time. Brian was the cruelest one for bringing them into this world, but you were always there at the end. To rape them, to torture them, and to murder them.” He paused, glaring down at a man who possessed no malicious feelings for him. A blank slate with only the shape of the person to whom he spoke.

  The rest of us watched eagerly, Mr. Shriver included—though he was like Sean now, a little confused and eager to be given an order or asked a question. I think even Liu wanted to see Sean die.

  “I keep telling myself I should turn you back into the person you were when we were children,” Patton said. “My brother. A good man I can look up to. But I keep coming to a dead end, Sean. You were never anything but what you are right now, and if I let you live, I’ll have to create a whole new personality for you. Well I’m done creating things that were never meant to exist. The only reason I should have stopped Melissa from killing Brian was so I could do it myself. Goodbye, brother.”

  Taking a cue from me, Patton stabbed Sean through his eye.

  Then he let go of the blade, stood, and walked over to his eldest brother. Mr. Shri
ver smiled up at him like a grandparent with dementia.

  Everyone turned to the sound of me yanking the knife out of Sean’s skull. They all watched me walk around the pole to face Kate, who had also felt Sean’s fist today. She wasn’t upset, though. I hadn’t told her to be.

  “Open your mouth.”

  She stuck out her tongue. On it was one of the Favorite Girl devices. I’d had James pluck a handful from a few dead girls, just in case we needed them.

  The plan had been for Kate to bite down on the button and spit in Sean’s face when he stepped up to kill her. It would put him in a lustful rage and he would lose control of himself. In that way, Kate would act as a sticky trap.

  I took the device from her tongue, and then I kissed her.

  I kissed the girl she was before she came to Your Favorite Girl, just in case, unlike Sean, some good person had once existed in her body. If Kate had always been Kate, I kissed the girl she was going to be.

  Then I raised the knife up and cut the duct tape from the pole.

  Unlike Patton, I was ready to create all kinds of things.

  “Thank you,” Kate said.

  I helped her pull the tape from her wrists. Then I walked over and knelt before Mr. Shriver.

  “Tell me what happens if you die.”

  “Well now, if I die, my drafted confession—along with a brick of documents incriminating every person in this building—will automatically go out to specific media outlets, police departments, state’s attorneys, and what have you, and everything will dissolve, with most of you spending the rest of your lives in prison.”

  “How do we change it?”

  “It’s a simple alteration of my Last Will and Testament.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting a little impatient, “let’s alter it.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my Will is guarded, and the person who guards it is well-trained to commit suicide if anyone, including I, ever ask him to change it. I report to him, and he reports to a third party. If that third party fails to receive two day’s reports, I’m assumed dead. I’m very sorry to say there’s nothing I can do.”

  “Oh, but there is,” I said. “Take me to him.”

  “To the man who guards my Will.”

  “Yes. Is he in the city?”

  “He’s in the building—on this floor, in fact. I keep him and his family locked away and I feed them meals laced with Longevity. They’ve been a young family for many years now.”

  I stood up then and turned to Patton.

  “He has a fucking family locked up in here somewhere?”

  “I didn’t know,” Patton said.

  I snatched the case from Judy’s hand and plucked out a syringe.

  “You’ll say the same after I shoot you up with this?” I hissed.

  I don’t know what came over me, but I wanted to kill Mr. Shriver right then and there. So I made him lead me through a series of hallways to a door he said would lead me to this kidnapped family. When he handed me the keycard that would grant me access, I instructed James to take him to his own dungeon, activate a device and make him swallow it, and then lock him in a cell.

  “And you know what?” I said as James turned to lead Mr. Shriver away. “You get in there with him.”

  I didn’t watch what happened to those two, but later Patton would discover them in a cell together with their dicks ripped off. They’d really had a go at each other.

  Patton, of course, was looking for any decommissioned Favorite Girls who might have survived.

  There weren’t any left. Only fresh blood from when Sean had killed the remaining few.

  I hesitated at the door, afraid of what I would find inside. A family frozen in time for decades. Had they adapted to the world or did they still see it the way people did back then? Would I terrify them?

  “Patton, go get Flora.”

  It was the best decision I ever made, sending Flora in to talk to Mr. Shriver’s attorney and his family. Of course, I sent her with a vial of Loyalty, and she used it, but Flora has a gentle nature about her all the brainwashing in the world couldn’t give me.

  I’m not going to tell you about the family we found in there. They deserve their privacy, and what we learned from them was enough to fill a book in and of itself. All I’ll tell you is they were very helpful. Even before we drugged them, they were very helpful people.

  -No Fucking Epilogue—

  WITH THE help of Mr. Shriver’s attorney, and the labor of Sean’s guards, I destroyed all evidence that anything criminal had ever taken place at Your Favorite Girl, Incorporated. This was a massive, expensive effort. We had to bring in outside labor, which brought with it the unfortunate necessity to drug the workers and make them swear to keep secret anything they come across.

  The attorney happily signed over all bank accounts, stocks, and assets to Patton and me, though he was quite puzzled about the fact that we weren’t married. You wouldn’t believe how much money we ended up with. Wealth beyond comprehension.

  We bought an island a mile off a tropical coast. I won’t tell you where. We’ve all lived in secrecy so long, we’re more comfortable that way now.

  We brought all the remaining Favorite Girls with us. Judy, Kate, and Liu, too. The island has a huge mansion, plenty of room for everyone.

  They’re all grown up now, the girls. Even the babies. They’re all so happy. It didn’t take anything to brainwash all the bad personality traits out of the Vampire Girls and Glow Girls—nor to build confidence in the Frogs. It did take a while for Patton to remove all their devices, and for a while we debated on what to do with them.

  In the end, we only kept one drug.

  We didn’t need the Love Drug or the Loyalty Drug anymore. Not for this bunch.

  We certainly didn’t need the Libido Drug. Over a hundred of the prettiest, most delicate young women in the world discovering and exploring their sexuality at the same time, the way normal girls do only in a consequence-free environment where no one associates nudity with shame.

  Yes, in the end Patton and I decided the only drug we wanted to keep around was Longevity, and when each girl turned eighteen, we began to administer it to her monthly—that was all it took. We froze each girl at a state of fresh, full development with excitement and fervor and curiosity and innocence. Here Patton and I don’t need a television. All we need is the open beach, where we can watch the girls frolic like wild creatures, naked and beautiful and happy to fall to the sand with one another for unpredictable moments most associate with privacy and locked doors. All inhibition abandoned here in this remote and exotic place young men with adventure in their hearts dream of finding.

  We decided not to administer the Longevity Drug to the Doll Girls. Theirs is a miserable condition that not even Patton can cure. We’re giving them comfortable lives—all of us working in shifts to bathe, feed, and care for them—but one day they will all die.

  But not the rest of us.

  The rest of us will live long, happy lives.

  We’re basically a nudist colony now. We play on the beach naked, we have dinner naked, we make love openly and passionately, wherever, whenever, and if someone wants to stop and watch, he or she is welcome.

  He or she, you ask?

  We have dozens of Favorite Girls, and each of them grew up anticipating a husband. I couldn’t very well spend my life with Patton and watch all those innocent young women suffer with loneliness, could I?

  Patton took some convincing, but eventually he saw things my way.

  It took Judy six months to create a clone of Patton for each and every Favorite Girl.

  The girls were given new born babies to raise themselves, with Patton acting as father to over a
hundred infants, and after eighteen years every Favorite Girl had herself a Favorite Boy.

  Even Kate finally got herself a Patton.

  Things are much better now that we have plenty of strong young men to guard the shores. We’ve been discovered a number of times, mostly by small boats that creep up in the night. I’m pretty sure word of us has spread somewhere, because for a while we were getting pretty regular visits.

  One night, a few of the Favorite Girls who happened to be on the wrong part of the beach were raped by a group of drunk men who stumbled off a boat onto what they’d obviously expected to be a sort of lost paradise of virgins.

  Deviant that I am, I’d kept a few vials of the Loyalty Drug when Patton and I agreed to destroy it. I’d feared a day like this, and having the capacity to brainwash someone meant those rapists got to live. Not an ideal thing, if you ask me, but it was better than bringing murder to our island and investigations after that.

  We’re strong now, and in all our time here no one has died an unnatural death.

  Flora and Melissa, my younger, prettier clone, came to me yesterday and asked me to promise that if the world stopped being cruel then we would share Longevity with it.

  “That’s never going to happen,” I said.

  “Anything’s possible,” Flora said.

  “Yeah,” the younger Melissa agreed.

  I looked at her. “You really think the world can change, Melissa?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Melissa had grown up around the Floras. She didn’t have my cynicism, my bleak outlook, my perspective on the world. I painted in dark shadows while she painted in bright colors.

  “I’m sorry to say I disagree, girls. Every boat that shows up here is another example of how horrible the world is. They don’t deserve to change.”

  Flora dropped her head and dug her toes in the sand. All she wore was a ragged, sand-stained white t-shirt. From her belly button to her dirty toes she was naked.

  Melissa had a yellow mesh fabric wrapped around her to form a skirt, but she was topless. I always felt more naked around her. Though we were both secure in our youth, I was still five years older physically. I envied her.