“What’s her name?”

“Ogre Penderghastly.”

Her real name was Olga Pendergast, and she was in my French class. She was a pretty friendly kid and not nearly as horrible as Wheeler described, but she’d acquired this awful alias, partly because her real name invited it, but mostly, I guess, because she almost always wore a pair of spotless painter’s pants that were several sizes too small and made a spectacle of her already ample ass. Olga was a shameless preppy, one of those lime-green-sweater-crocodile-shirt-boat-shoe clones who think everything’s “tacky” except old Frank Sinatra albums, Head-of-the-Charles races, smores, and Mack the Knife. But, like I said, she was friendly.

“Friendly?” Wheeler said. “Come off it, Dunphy, the girl’s a rhino. She’s got to be friendly.”

“You trying to talk me out of this?”

“No way. Let’s face it, Carrot Top, you ain’t no box of chocolates yourself.”

It hurt to hear it spelled out like that, but it had been a long time since I’d been with a girl. He was right: It was beast or famine.

Wheeler phoned the girls Sunday morning and told them we’d meet in town and then walk to the restaurant. At the 10 o’clock chapel service I prayed to God and all my dead relatives that Olga would wear a skirt. Well, if there’s a God, I’m sure he’s got bigger fish to fry, so I couldn’t really complain when Olga showed up jammed into her painter’s pants. She was also blessed with a flowering boil on her chin, which she soon rubbed into full bloom.

At the restaurant Wheeler started reminiscing about all the delicacies in the various countries he’d toured with his father. S.D. and Olga had seen their share of foreign soil so they kept right up with him.

Jonathan convinced them to try an Indian appetizer, which he said, along with the bleu cheese dressing, the restaurant was famous for. I swear they were called Indian Chicken Balls. They were yellow, doughy things about the size of a Ping-Pong ball and were sprinkled with coconut. I was dying to try one, but I didn’t want to beg and they each ate the three they were served.