Fresh Girls & Other Stories (7 page)

I know what will happen from here. There are only so many plot possibilities, only so many combinations of scenarios and outcomes. I expect this old man will be around for another month or two, calling every other day to ask how the girls are doing, and the lady. Fine, I will say, the whole family is doing fine. He will offer to take me away with him for a holiday and we will negotiate a price. We will discuss it over double Scotches, planning first-class plane tickets and hotels and what we
will bring in our luggage, but we will never go. At some point he will say that he is in love with me. But this will pass, and eventually he will call only every week or two, and then the calls will stop. He may move on to another girl, of a different nationality and with different measurements, or he may meet a woman his age and take her for dinner at the trendy restaurant and move in with her, or most likely he will settle back into his sexless life. I predict he will never blow my head off.

Meanwhile, he is still trying to find the perfect name for me. Barbie, Lolita, Cuddles … the old man is not entirely satisfied with any of them. Last night when we were sitting in the living room trying out different names, I slipped in my real one as a suggestion, but he shook his head vigorously. Absolutely not, he said, no way, that isn’t you at all.

Fresh Girls and Other Stories

Copyright © 1993 by Evelyn Lau.

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EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40665-9

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First published in hardcover by HarperCollins: 1993

FIRST HARPERPERENNIALCANADA EDITION

This is a work of fiction; the characters and settings found within are imaginary composites and do not refer to actual persons or places1.

Acknowledgments

Some of these stories first appeared in a slightly different form in the following publications: “Fresh Girls” (under the title “Twenty”) in Books in Canada; “Marriage” in NeWest Review; “Mercy” in Left Bank; “The Apartments” in Descant; “Glass” in Vancouver Magazine and Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians.

The One Day: A Poem in Three Parts, by Donald Hall. Copyright © 1988 by Donald Hall. Reprinted by permission of Ticknor & Fields/Houghton Mifflin Co.

Do not go gentle into that good night from The Poems by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

Special thanks to Crawford Kilian for reading these stories first, Chris Napolitano at Playboy for his encouragement and advice, Maya Mavjee and Iris Skeoch at HarperCollins for their sensitivity and direction, and Doug Coupland for finding the right title.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Lau, Evelyn, 1971–Fresh girls and other stories.

1st HarperPerennialCanada ed.
ISBN 0-00-648588-X

1. Sadomasochism – Fiction.

2. Prostitutes – Fiction.
I. Title.

PS8573.A7815F74 2001          C813’.54

C00-932332-5

PR9199.3.L38F74 2001

01 02 03 04 R RD 5 4 3 2 1

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