You Don’t Own Me

By

Vickie Lester

The first roof over her head that summer was courtesy of a friend of friend who was house-sitting in a red brick colonial on a leafy street in Brookline. The house’s owner, a Political Science professor, little suspected that his home was harboring a swarm of students while he vacationed in Europe. Nor was he aware that the students were using his phone to make any number of free illegal calls using an access code — the origin of which was hazy — that was circulated from one college campus to another up and down the eastern seaboard.

In retrospect hijacking a telephone code was the least of Billie’s sins that summer, and since she’d stopped attending confession about the same time she stopped taking piano lessons, she never atoned, achieving a state of grace was the furthest thing from her mind. What she wanted was out. Out of Gloucester, out of Boston, out beyond the familiar and the known.

Let us turn our attention to the seafood bar in which Billie was working. It was called Toninno’s and was owned by Billie’s mother’s second cousin’s husband, Silvio. He was what Brits of the upper-middle class might once have called an unsavory individual, if not for the fact he was so unsavory that the term didn’t pack the requisite punch. One evening Silvio (yes, like the character from The Sopranos or the mediocre Dylan song) entered the prep-kitchen in which Billie had a blade wedged deep within an unfortunate bivalve. She had barely managed to pop open the abductee from Duxbury Bay with a swift twist of the knife, exposing it glistening and heaving into the air, when Silvio — who she had always been encouraged to call Cousin Silvio although he wasn’t her cousin, one of those peculiar family quirks — snatched the squishy thing from her hand and plopped it into his capacious gullet. “Like an ocean breeze,” he confided, giving her an indefinable wink. Billie scowled at this, a scowl that only deepened as he beckoned her into his office like Caligula summoning a catamite to his bedchamber…

Heavens! What kind of book is this, anyway? You can find out by reading the preceding pages by clicking…

First here…

Then here…

Now, tell someone you love them.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

© Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Vickie Lester and Beguiling Hollywood with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.