“Take off all of your clothes, lie down on your belly, and close your eyes,” the Rat orders after we enter the tackiness that is room 413 at the Holiday Inn. “I want to show you something.”

Another watch? His cock? Some strange hospital equipment? But this is my game, and I’m stripping down and stretching out.

He’s searching in his bag and I’m peeking out of one eye and he’s bringing out what looks like a bottle of oil.

“I used to work as a masseur,” he says as he climbs up on top of me and begins with my back. “Let me massage this fine body, sweetheart.” When his hands start in on me, I see this boy starting to slide way up my sexual-rating chart. By the time he’s worked me over with his oil front and back I’m completely limp in his hands and ready for anything, and he’s entering me from behind and riding me hard and holding my hair tight with one hand and slapping my ass with the other. He’s got me hollering, “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me,” and I know that if this Rat had been around in the fourteenth century, they would have definitely written the word down.

“Okay, so looks aren’t a good indicator of bad sex, Holly,” I admit, safely back in her pink bed. “But what can I do—interview people and ask them if they’re a lousy lay?”

Holly’s reviewing my log. “All it says here is ‘his hands, his hands,’ Kenna.”

“Shit, that’s all I can remember. It was great.”

She sighs, but we begin to plan the ex-lover possibility next. Julia was the love of my life ten years ago, until she decided she was too good for me and dumped me coldly. She’s a Monkey—clever, witty, manipulative, pretentious. The Chinese chart doesn’t really say all that, I’m just projecting. I do distinctly recall her saying she was going to sleep only with PhDs after our breakup. And that she was with me only because she was crazy about my breasts. This has to be bad.

I find her at her modern-dance class, where I show up in a low-cut black leotard to get her attention. I lie to her over lunch, tell her about my newly minted PhD in the thirteenth-century dialect of Baedel Fokka, and get invited back to her place. I make up other stories for her about the places I’ve been and who I’ve met. When I create an imaginary friendship with Camille Paglia, who I know she idolizes, I’m in. She spreads her legs for me and I’m devouring her and I suddenly can’t remember why I found her so attractive in the first place, but I go for the sex just to show her how hot I am, and it works.