Now she turns her formidable tits and formidabler eyes on O. “Well, you have to do something.”

“I dunno,” O answers, wilting under the four-point gaze.

“You have thirty days,” Paqu says.

“To…”

“Get a job or go back to school,” Paqu answers, cutting up strawberries and putting the pieces into a blender with two scoops of protein powder.

She’s been into “power smoothies” lately.

“Oh God,” O answers, “have you been to one of those tough love seminars again?”

“DVD,” Paqu answers.

“Did Four put you up to this?” O asks.

She knows that Four put her up to it because he doesn’t want an “adult child” cluttering up the house he thinks is his just because he nails Paqu in it.

I was in this house before you were, O thinks.

Come to think of it, I was in Paqu before you were.

“Nobody put me up to it,” Paqu yells over the whirl of the blender. “I have a mind of my own, you know. And if you go back to school, you have to take it seriously.”

O had a 1.7 GPA at Saddleback before she gave up the charade entirely and just stopped going.

“What if I don’t?” she asks.

“Don’t what?”

“Will you shut that fucking thing off?”

Paqu turns off the blender and pours her power smoothie into a glass. O knows that in a half hour she’ll go to the gym to work with her personal trainer for two hours, then drink a “meal replacement shake,” then go to yoga before coming home for a power nap. Then she’ll spend two hours getting herself ready for when Four comes home.

And she thinks I’m a useless cunt, O thinks.

“You have a power-smoothie mustache,” O tells her.

“If you don’t get a job or go back to school,” Paqu says, wiping her upper lip with the back of her index finger, “you can’t live here anymore. You’ll have to find your own place.”