Read The Chocolate Money for Free Online Page A

to sleep.
    Babs, for all her power, has yet to catch me at it, this thing I call
chasing the smash.
It’s not that she would disapprove; rather the opposite. She would think it was a much better afterschool activity than ballet or tap dancing. But I don’t want to tell her about it. It’s a secret I keep with myself.
    My technique is, as far as I know, specific to me. I lie flat on my back in the bathtub with the tap running and let the water hit the small, hairless mound between my legs.
    I know from my reading that my vagina is tucked inside my body and that the spot the water is hitting when I tilt my hips upward is my clitoris. But in the tub I use my own vocabulary, make my own rules. I just think of the whole area the water touches when I masturbate as my me
.
    The my-me bedtime ritual feels so, so good. A steady pressure of warm water starts with a small tingle, which grows and grows like a balloon until there is an enormous pop. But the pop has no punctuation. It just flows from my
me up between my hips, like an enormous spill of water.
    At the moment of a smash, I press my hands against the sides of the tub as hard as I can. Steady myself to keep the enormous throbbing from propelling me out of the tub. A child gone overboard. I also brace myself to keep my me there for as long as possible, to see how much intensity I can withstand before pulling away. I learn that there’s no limit to the amount of smashes you can have. My record is four.
    If I have enough smashes, I fall asleep easily, without the intrusion of dreams. Without smashing, I usually nightmare. In such dreams, I’m usually naked, hunched on the floor in the middle of a crowded black-tie-one-on (what Babs calls formal parties). I’m wearing some of Babs’s drop-dead jewelry, perhaps her pissed-off-at-Mack South Sea pearls. The pearls are always twisted tightly, in a chokehold around my neck. Then I realize I’m about to be trampled by the heavy dress shoes and pointed high-heeled stilettos the grownups wear. They don’t mean to hurt me; I just happen to be in the way. They walk on my body while I suffocate. I always feel vulnerable and half-me the days after these dreams. I need to smash, smash myself extra hard and good to make this horrible dream go away.
    I am absolutely sure, however, that the idea of
chasing the smash
did not originate with me. I have the strong impression that when Babs was pregnant with me, she didn’t have sex, just masturbated. Since Babs and I were one body (or as close to it as two bodies can ever be, one body not merely penetrating but actually
floating
inside
another), I was rocked to sleep by her smash. Now I do it alone. A kind of gentle womb-breaking, my own invented version of birth.
    When all the water has drained, I pull myself over the side of the tub and rest on the bathmat on all fours. I’m usually too far gone to walk. I wait a little to dry so I don’t make a puddle and slip on the marble floor. Then I crawl to my bedroom, my bony knees relaxing when I make it there.
    My bedroom has white wall-to-wall that approximates bunny fur: soft and vulnerable, like the down of a newborn’s head. My bed is a queen-size canopy, but it is about as far as you can get from the pretty-pink-princess version all girls my age are supposed to want. It has a hard green wrought-iron lattice with angry leaves sprouting from the posts. They twist themselves into threatening vines. The top of this mean bed is covered with white mosquito netting. In an animated version of my life, where I talked to mice or had singing dwarf friends, Babs might be a fairy godmother who sewed this net to protect me from hostile creatures. The sad thing is, as it stands, the netting is just a creative touch she can show off to friends.
    When we are eating dinner, Lily always sneaks up and prepares my room. Stacey can’t be bothered. Lily turns down my bed. Leaves a fresh Lanz nightgown folded on the pillow. Babs forbids me to wear underwear to