"Read a book."

Lily, Meg’s third best friend, is sitting at a coffee shop in downtown Waxford, the peaceful little New England college town where this all takes place. She sips her espresso as she leafs through the pages of The Master and Margarita, watching the world go by.

She’s an intelligent redhead, a literature postgrad with a speciality in medieval comedy and a tendency to be pretentious. She looks a lot like Donna from That 70s Show, with a sarcastic smile and an irritating habit of not taking other people very seriously. She wears a tight black turtleneck sweater and close-fitting jeans.

“Meg,” she says, glancing up from her book. It’s highlighted in four different colours, with notes scrawled in the margin. She’s paid special attention to the scene where Woland sells all the women in Moscow disappearing clothes. “How are you? Did you read that article I sent you?”

“Well…”

“Oh, come on. It’s only forty pages. You don’t have time to learn about the hermeneutics of gendered epistemological **** in post-Florentine colloquial female saints’ narrative and the many-layered ways it informs currently extant systems of capitalist patriarchal domination and oppression? This stuff really matters, you know.”

“Just slipped my mind.”

“Jrn Szyczkymrk is such a genius. The way she distinguishes between ways-of-being and ways-as-being while simultaneously demonstrating how they’re both just ideological tools of the heterodogmatic power structure and only through ways-in-being can we fully manifest the healing potentialities of sapphoclimactic resistance? Priceless. And don’t get me started on Xochitl Hayakawa’s brilliant reading of Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron…”

“Okay, I won’t. Lily, how do you feel about pranks?”

“I think they’re a form of neocolonialist psychic brutality. Why?”

“What about pranks played by women?”

“On men? Well, then they’re an ingenious deviant recontextualisation which effectively traduces the fundamental hollowness of the male system of control.”

“No, I mean on other women.”

“Like what?”

“Like, for instance, you know how Cass always tries to steal my clothes from the shower?”

“That’s different,” says Lily, with a slightly smug grin on her face. “That’s an experimental mode of metalesbonic theatrical play which compels you to engage with new forms of emancipatory hierarchy by subverting expected binaries of subject/object. You should be more open to it.”

“You’re saying you think it’s…”

“Funny, yes.”

“Why?”

“That’s the academic consensus. Read a book.”

“What if I played a prank on you? Would that be funny?”

“Come on, now, Meg. How would that even be possible? I’m not some gullible little freshman, you know. You’re hardly going to steal my clothes while I’m… eep.” Lily sits bolt upright in her chair, eyes suddenly wide, shuffling closer to the table.

“Meg?” she says, in a studiously even tone of voice.

“Yes, Lily?”

“Where are my pants?”

“Pants?” says Meg, smiling sweetly. “What pants? I don’t recall saying any pants when I got here. Did you always have pants?”

The two girls are sitting at a sidewalk table, in full view of the street. The quaint little downtown shopping area is full of antiques stores, upscale restaurants, second-hand bookstores, arthouse cinemas. Both students from the college and tourists from all across New England wander in small groups down the wide sidewalks, stopping to photograph interesting lamp posts and coo over window displays.

Lily’s bottom is bare against her chair’s cool metal. Her jeans and panties have vanished, leaving her naked from the waist of her black turtleneck to the straps of her black sandals. She purses her lips, chewing over a thousand different barbed comments, yet not quite brave enough to utter any of them aloud.

“Meg,” she says. “Very… funny. I don’t know how you did this, but you’re clearly breaking new ground in the field of sapphohermeneutics. You should write a paper about it. Now, please, can I have my pants back?”

“Wait, you’re not wearing pants? Oh my god,” says Meg, slightly too loud. The three frat boys in letterman jackets eating ice-cream sundaes at the next table look over. Lily sinks down as far as she dares below the table and tries to look inconspicuous. “What happened to them? Did you forget to put them on when you left home this morning?”

“Meg! This isn’t funny!”

“Yes it is. Read a book.” Meg picks Lily’s copy of The Master And Margarita up off the table, winks at her and slides the book into her bag. “You keep telling me to read this. I think it’s finally time. It might give me some ideas. Anyway, I’m sure you’re very busy, so…”

“Wait!” There’s an urgency in Lily’s eyes as she grips the edge of the table, which has no tablecloth or anything else she could use to cover up. The frat boys are studying her curiously, trying to work out what they’re missing.

“Meg! Whatever I did, I’m sorry, okay! I’m sorry my educational privilege makes you feel uncomfortable sometimes! I’m sorry I **** your complicity in gender-speculative aggression matrixes to your conscious attention! I’m sorry I tricked you into appearing as Malvolia in my all-female nude production of Twelfth Night! Just… don’t leave me here without my…”

“Without your what, Lily?” The frat boys, and the butch lesbians at the table on the other side, are both listening very closely. Lily glances sidelong at first one, then the other. She bites her lip.

“You know,” she says. “What I… what I’m not wearing.”

“Bark like a dog.”

“What?”

“Bark like a dog,” says Meg, that sweet smile still resting on her face, a wicked gleam in her green eyes, “and I won’t leave you here in just your turtleneck to run all the way home.”

“But…”

“Bark.”

“I… that is to say… I… well… that’s not… the psychodynamics… the emancipatory potential of… woof.”

“Louder.”

“Woof woof woof,” says Lily, loudly, her cheeks aglow, wanting nothing more than to sink into the earth. The frat boys are chuckling, the butch lesbians sniggering. Even the cafe waitresses have paused their work to pay attention. “I’m a… I’m a cute little puppy dog. Woof woof.”

“Aww! So adorable! Okay, now admit I’m smarter than you.”

“But you’re not!”

“Who’s wearing the pants in this relationship, Lily?”

“I… but… argh! You’re smarter than me,” says Lily, face blazing red as the whole cafe and a surprising number of tourists stop to listen. “Meg’s smarter than everyone, okay? I think I’m so smart, but I’m just a silly stuck-up little nerd, and everyone laughs at me and thinks I’m lame and a dork and a loser. Also, I think men are really hot and I want to kiss all of their penises.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily incompatible with at least some forms of radical feminism.”

“I know, but it’s just really embarrassing! I really like boys’ penises, and their big strong hands and the way they smell and the taste of their cum in my mouth. And I’m a cute little puppy dog. Woof woof woof.”

Meg nods thoughtfully.

“Lily,” she said. “Get up on the table.”

“I…”

“Do it. Now.”

Lily scrambles to comply. The whole cafe is treated to her slender bare legs, her round pale bottom, and a peek at her ginger bush as she does her best to **** her black turtleneck down over her hips, struggling with the stretchy fabric. It isn’t nearly long enough.

“Meg…”

“Yes, Lily?”

“I’m your best friend, right?”

“Bestest friend in the whole wide world.”

“You wouldn’t,” Lily stutters, acutely aware of the dozens of eyes resting on her legs and hips. She tries to forth the turtleneck further down in back, and barely manages to catch it before it rises up far enough in front to expose her sex. “You wouldn’t really leave me here like this, right? Not your best friend? I mean, I did everything you said…”

“But, Lily, it’s so funny to embarrass your best friend! Who else would you embarrass? A casual acquaintance? Best friends were made for embarrassing, I always say.”

“Okay, but… you promised.”

“That’s true. I did promise.”

“Yes! You promised!”

“I promised not to leave you here in just your turtleneck.”

“That’s exactly what you promised!”

“And I’m going to keep that promise,” Meg says. She snaps her fingers.

“EEEEEEEEK!”

“Told you I was smarter than you.”