The Operation

## Act III (Continued): The Operation, or, How Four Drunk Girls Turned a Grown Man Into a Living Art Installation

The makeup was only phase one. Madison stepped back to admire her work, and the four of them stood in a semicircle over the sleeping form of Marcus Whitfield, twenty-five years old, employed, a taxpayer, and currently wearing Zoe's bralette like it was a normal Friday night.

"Oh my god," Brianna whispered, hand over her mouth. "He looks *pretty*."

"He does," Kelsey confirmed. "He actually looks pretty."

"Guys," Zoe said, still filming. "Guys. We have to go further. This is not enough. The makeup is just the appetizer."

She was right, and everyone knew it. The mascara was a gateway drug. The real project was the Sharpie.

Kelsey retrieved it from her bag — a black fine-tip Sharpie, the good kind, the kind that meant business. She uncapped it with a theatrical *pop* and leaned over Marcus's sleeping body.

"Okay," she said. "Where do we start."

"The face first," Madison said. "Always the face."

So Kelsey drew, in careful and precise handwriting, the word **"PRINCESS"** across Marcus's forehead. Then, underneath it, smaller, in parentheses: **"(but a flat-chested one)"**. Because the bralette was not doing him any favors. Marcus had the chest of a man who had never done a single push-up in his life, and the lace cups were sitting there with the confident emptiness of two deflated tents.

"Okay, now the arms," Brianna said.

Kelsey obliged. On Marcus's left forearm, she wrote **"PROPERTY OF THE HOUSE"**. On his right forearm, she wrote **"DO NOT REMOVE UNDERWEAR"**. Then, because she was feeling creative, she drew a small heart around his wrist, like a friendship bracelet made of ink.

"Now the hands," Zoe said.

Kelsey drew a tiny smiley face on each of his knuckles. Five knuckles, five smileys, one hand, then the other. Marcus's hands, which were the hands of a man who typed forty thousand words of code per week, now looked like they belonged to a preschooler's art project.

Then came the chest.

"Okay, lift the bralette," Kelsey instructed.

Brianna gently lifted the hem of the bralette while Kelsey worked. Across Marcus's pale, hairless, slightly concave chest, she drew two arrows pointing inward toward his sternum with the label **"TECHNICAL SUPPORT"**. Then, below that, she wrote in block letters: **"WARNING: FLAT SURFACE. DO NOT PLACE HOT DRINKS HERE."**

Zoe was crying with laughter, holding the phone with one hand and clutching her stomach with the other. "I can't — I can't —"

"You're gonna wake him up," Madison hissed.

"He's not waking up!" Zoe whisper-yelled. "He's in a coma! He's been in a coma since we got home! Watch." She leaned over and clapped her hands loudly right next to Marcus's ear.

Nothing.

She clapped again, harder.

Nothing.

She took off her shoe and stomped it on the hardwood floor.

Marcus's snoring did not even hitch. He was out. He was *gone*. He was, as the girls would later describe it, "in the sauce." He had apparently reached the stage of sleep where the brain simply stops taking input from the outside world and runs on autopilot.

"Oh, this changes everything," Brianna said. "If he's not waking up, we can do *anything*."

Famous last words.

## The Sharpie Escalation

What followed was, in the girls' own words, "the greatest night of our lives up to that point."

Kelsey moved down to the legs. On Marcus's left thigh, she wrote **"LEFT LEG (DAY)"** and on his right thigh **"RIGHT LEG (NIGHT)"**. Then, because she had the Sharpie and she was nineteen and drunk, she drew a small, poorly rendered arrow pointing up his left thigh with the word **"SHORT"** and an arrow pointing down his right thigh with the word **"CUT"** — a reference to a haircut, but also, they decided, a reference to something else, which they found funnier.

Then they reached the panties.

"Okay," Kelsey said. "This is the moment. Do we look?"

"Do we *look*?" Brianna repeated. "Kelsey, he's wearing *your* — wait, whose are those?"

"Those are Madison's," Zoe said.

"They're *mine*?" Madison shrieked.

"They're yours," Zoe confirmed, zooming in. "Those are the cheeky ones with the lace. The ones you thought you lost."

"I *did* lose them!" Madison said. "I've been looking for those for like two months!"

"Well, they're on Marcus now."

Madison stared down at the sleeping man in her panties. "You know what," she said slowly. "He wears them better than I do."

"Low bar," Kelsey muttered.

"HEY."

"Okay okay okay." Brianna took charge. "Decision time. Do we pull them down to see what's underneath, or do we wait until morning and make him do it himself?"

The girls looked at each other.

"We pull them down," Zoe said. "Obviously we pull them down. Are you insane. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

"But gently," Madison said. "Gently. If we pull them down too far and the elastic snaps he'll wake up."

"He won't wake up," Zoe said.

"He might!"

"Okay, gentle. Gentle."

So Kelsey and Brianna each took a side, and with the careful coordination of four drunk girls attempting a bomb-defusal, they slowly, slowly, slowly slid Madison's cheeky lace panties down Marcus Whitfield's thighs.

And then they saw it.

And then there was silence.

Not regular silence. Not "oh, cute" silence. The specific, heavy, charged silence of four girls looking at something and simultaneously realizing that the thing they were looking at was going to change the dynamic of the entire house.

"...Is that it?" Brianna finally said.

"That's it," Kelsey confirmed.

"That's... that's *it*?" Zoe zoomed in further on her phone, as if maybe the camera could find more.

"Girls," Madison said, in the tone of a doctor delivering news. "Girls, is he... is it... *hard*? Because if that's what it looks like when it's *hard*, then—"

Kelsey reached over and, very lightly, with one finger, tapped it.

Marcus did not wake up. But something else did — a small, involuntary, almost imperceptible twitch.

"Okay, it's hard," Kelsey said. "It's at least partially hard. Or fully hard. Hard to tell."

"Hard to tell because *there's nothing to tell*," Brianna said.

The girls lost it. All four of them, in the living room at 2:30 AM, bent over double, hands over their mouths, tears streaming, shaking silently so as not to wake the sleeping man in the lingerie with the tiny appendage.

"Okay okay okay," Kelsey finally managed, wiping her eyes. "Measure it. We have to measure it."

"With what?" Madison asked.

Zoe was already digging in her bag. She pulled out a ruler. Because of course Zoe, the film major, carried a ruler in her bag. It was for storyboarding. It was now being used for something far more important.

"Hold it," Zoe said. "Hold it steady. I'm measuring."

Kelsey held it. Zoe measured. There was a long pause.

"How much?" Brianna asked.

Zoe looked up. Her face was a mask of barely contained joy.

"Half an inch," she said.

"Half an inch *what*?" Brianna said. "Half an inch soft?"

"Half an inch *hard*," Zoe said.

The silence that followed was even heavier than the last one.

"He's twenty-five years old," Madison said slowly.

"He's twenty-five years old," Zoe confirmed.

"And he has a half-inch dick."

"Half an inch *hard*."

"HALF AN INCH—"

"SHHHHH—"

"Half an inch *hard*," Zoe repeated, because it bore repeating. "That's — girls, that's smaller than my thumb. That's smaller than my *thumb joint*. That's smaller than a *USB drive*."

"Smaller than a *quarter*," Kelsey said, holding up a quarter from her pocket for scale, because she was a biology major and she believed in rigor.

"Smaller than a *piece of sushi*," Madison said.

"Smaller than a *Mike and Ike*."

"Smaller than a *tic tac*."

"Smaller than a *single* tic tac."

They were spiraling. Marcus was sleeping through all of it. His little friend, freed from the lace panties and exposed to the cool air of the living room, had apparently given up on dignity and settled into a kind of relaxed, resigned, half-hearted state of semi-hardness that was — and this is the important part — still only half an inch.

Kelsey wrote on his thigh with the Sharpie, in letters large enough to be read from across the room:

**"0.5" HARD (MEASURED 2:32 AM)"**

Then she added,