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The system thanked her for recording her greeting and assured us there would be horny singles on the line momentarily, if only we’d stand by.
    We stood by. Everybody was flipping out, even Johanna, who’d resignedly brought out the Carvel cake for consumption on the sidelines of what was now the main event. I was mixing the vanilla ice cream into the chocolate crunchies for Carvel soup, my favorite food, when Ronit put the decidedly nonerotic hold music on speaker, per Melissa’s orders. Soon, the music stopped, and there was a canned “chime” sound.
    “Great news!” intoned the slutbot. “Somebody liked your profile and wants to talk to you, live!”
    There was a click. And then, there was a pause that seemed to last forever. What followed was the distinctively sheepish voice of a man who’d called a “party line” in the express hope of receiving cut-rate phone sex from a nonprofessional.
    “Hello?” said the sad man.
    “Hello?” said Ronit’s twenty-six-year-old not-fat character.
    “Hi, this is Alan.”
    “Hi, Alan.” Ronit’s “Danielle” had a baritone rasp like the business end of a barbershop quartet.
    Alan wanted to know what Danielle was doing.
    “I’m reading Stallions magazine,” she actually told a stranger with a hard-on.
    “Oh yeah?” challenged Alan, sotto voce , trying hard to seem sexy to a twelve-year-old. “How does looking at that magazine make you feel?”
    “Pretty horny,” admitted Ronit-Danielle. There was muffled snickering.
    “What about you?” she continued. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m stroking my cock,” said the only person in the situation telling the truth.
    “You fucking pervert!” screamed Melissa into the speaker phone, ruining everything. She hung up and we all laughed. I felt bad for Alan, poor guy, but hope, in retrospect, that hearing a room full of laughing twelve-year-old girls made him come harder.
    Hannah went next. She decided to go with an accent for the voice of her character, Tatiana. Tatiana was of Balkan descent, based on Hannah’s Boris/Natasha throatiness and habit of skipping articles in her speech.
    “My name Tatiana,” bleated Hannah, on the party line, to another fresh rube. “How big is your boner?”
    Hysterics.
    When it was my turn, I felt desperately guilty that I was pranking this man on the other end of the line. I wasn’t used to talking to somebody eager to at least pretend to find me attractive, and I loved it. He flirted, he was friendly, he wanted to have phone sex with me, and I wanted to try out all the new vagina euphemisms I learned from the Forum . But the girls were in the room, pressuring me to land a zinger so we could all enjoy the folly. So, we hung up on the guy, and then, retired to our sleeping bags. And as soon as Ronit’s snoring filled the dark room like the scent of a pumpkin candle, I, once more, Grinch-like, silently crept into a friend’s backpack. I copied the number from the phone sex ad onto the Loebs’ memo pad by their phone, ripped out the page, and took it home with me for later.
    What followed after that night was a year of calls of my own into that phone-sex line, which I made from my bedroom when my parents weren’t home. I spoke to at least a hundred different strangers from the Tri-State Area, describing myself, like Ronit did, as the girl I hoped I’d one day become. I made myself an art school student in her freshman year: sometimes I went to SVA and sometimes I went to NYU. I was wearing stockings. I was bare-legged. I had red hair with blond streaks in it and was “curvy, not chubby.” I said I was nineteen or twenty-one, even though I was not yet old enough to get a learner’s permit.
    I spoke to all types—from the guy who said he looked like Kiefer Sutherland and lived on the Upper East Side, and that maybe we should get a coffee at Barney Greengrass, to the man with a snarly voice you’d think belonged behind bulletproof glass at an OTB, who told me about how much