Legal

“What’s so special about being eighteen? I don’t get it.”

The girl lying on the pastel pink bedspread drops the phone she holds over her head and faces her school-loaned laptop. “What’s there not to get?” she asks, pushing away the thick tendrils that fall in front of her eyes.

A very poised, blonde girl on the other end of the video call sits at her desk, delicately tending to her manicure. “Why that age?”

“I think it’s when the brain is finished maturing or something?” Jenny tells her as she presses the back of her head into the mattress and arches her back up towards the ceiling. She holds her phone out to the side this time. “How’s this?”

“Fine. So if the brain finishes maturing at eighteen then why do you have to be twenty-one to drink or smoke?”

The phone clicks and Jenny pushes herself up onto her knees. She pushes the camera out in front of her and tightly pinches her t-shirt behind her back. “Like that’s ever stopped you.”

“Jen,” the friend says with a stern tone. “Be real.”

“God, Tina, I don’t know. Drugs fuck up your mind or something.”

“And sex doesn’t?”

Jenny plops back down and starts flipping through her camera roll. “I think that sex has more to do with body. And I wouldn’t even be having sex so, really, it shouldn’t effect me at all.” The pictures are fuzzy and pixelated.

“So does that mean you think you’ll do it?” Tina pulls back her hand and examines perfect french tips. Her face is scrunched up in disbelief and disgust.

“I don’t know. Tons of girls on the internet do it and they say it's super easy. Most girls send guys pictures all the time, why shouldn’t we get paid for it?” Jenny sits up and pushes her phone towards the webcam. “Do you think these are any good?”

“No.” She waves her away. “Your camera is terrible and I don’t think anyone wants to see you in your holey pajamas.”

Jenny shyly fingers the ragged hole in her sleeve. “That’s not what I meant. And I already knew I needed a new phone. Why do you think I’m considering it?”

Tina rolls her eyes. “What if someone finds out. What about your parents?”

“I’m not dumb, I’ll use a fake name,” Jenny says nonchalantly.

“Someone could still recognize you.”

“No one will.”

Tina places her emery board to the side and looks at her friend intently. “We’re still in highschool,” she says in a low voice. “It feels, I don’t know, wrong?”

“How?”

“Well, because aren’t adult guys still not supposed to look at us that way?”

Jenny’s thick brows furrow in thought. “Well did your age ever stop that guy from looking at you at the pool when you were a kid?”

“Well, no--”

“And did it stop your thirty-year-old neighbor from hitting on you just last year?” she quickly adds on.

“No, but--”

“Or Mr. Winston from doing what he did with Amber to get fired before spring break? C’mon Tina, you know guys look at us that way regardless, why shouldn’t we get something out of it for once?”

“Jen, you need to stop. It’s not worth it,” Tina says intently. “You can find some other way to get cash. Promise me you won’t do it.”

Jenny pulls her lip into her mouth and turns away. “I won’t do it. Promise.”

Tina’s eyes wash over her face. “Fine. I believe you.”

Silence stretches between the two and Tina picks up her phone to check the time, baring it’s shiny, gold back to Jenny. It’s the new model, the one Jenny wants.

“I should go, I have an essay due in two hours,” Tina says after a while.

“Yeah I probably have homework to do too.”

Her friend smiles shyly at her, but her eyes are troubled as she hangs up, “Bye, Jen.”

As her laptop chimes and the window closes Jenny stands up and peeks her head out of her bedroom door. She yells down the hall towards her parents’ room:

“Good night Mom! Good night Dad!”

“See you in the morning soon-to-be birthday girl!” her father booms.

“Love you, baby!” her mother sings sweetly.

Jenny closes the door and pushes in the lock. She turns off her lamp and uses a small remote to set her room aglow with red LED, then opens her laptop’s webcam and places it on her dresser, facing the pastel pink bed now glowing crimson. From her underwear drawer Jenny pulls out the Victoria’s Secret two-piece that’d cost the last of her summer job money. All the while thinking of that shiny new phone, Jenny changes out of her holey t-shirt and exercise shorts, lies down on the bed, and presses the ruby button: record.