My roommate was already moved in. A pretty bird and butterfly quilt covered one of the beds, and her stuff had been packed away, all but a red high-heeled shoe atop her bookshelf.

“Hi, I’m Robin,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind I picked a side. We could switch if you like.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said. “Early bird gets the worm.”

She smiled prettily. I hadn’t really thought about her name being Robin when I made the worm joke. I blushed. Quickly, I pointed to the shoe on the bookshelf. “What’s with the stiletto? Did you lose the other one?”

“It’s to remind me of home,” Robin explained. “My mother ran a brothel. After school one of the women’s kids, Tommy, would come over, and we’d play ping-pong. There was only one ping-pong paddle. One of the women must have used the other for something else. But there was also this shoe.” Robin picked it up. Tilted it.

“See, the strap is broken.”

I nodded.

“Tommy insisted he got the paddle and I had to use the shoe because I was a girl. It wasn’t as hard as you might think. We’d play for hours, day after day. Tommy got pretty good, but I got better. I could beat the pants off him.

“One afternoon during a heated match, I noticed a man on the stairs. ‘You little mice make a lot of noise,’ he said. ‘No, don’t stop. It’s good music to... ‘

“Then my mom was on the stairs with a couple of the other women. ‘There you are,’ she announced. ‘Come back upstairs.’

“‘How old is she?’

“‘Too young.’

“‘I think you’re right.’

“My mom asked him what I was wearing. He appraised me. ‘Two shoes, a tee shirt, shorts, and maybe panties. What if we play a little strip ping-pong?’

“‘Don’t be silly,’ my mother said.

“‘Ten thousand dollars a point. I get to five first, I win the girl.’

“While Mom was thinking it over, the man took Tommy’s paddle and nipped one into the corner. ‘One love, take off a shoe,’ he said.

“Now I was off balance. The man knew how to play. Dinks and spins, and he won another point, and then another. I pulled off my tee shirt. My titties were just big enough to wobble. I won the next four points.

I served for the match, and he smashed one. This guy was good. Slowly, I took down my shorts. There was just enough hair so he could see the shadow. I felt strange inside. I fluffed the serve. A lollipop.

“But the guy hit a lollipop back. It just hung there. I flipped the shoe. The spike cracked clean through the ball, impaling it.

The man wrote out a check and carried me to his car, me still holding the shoe.”

“Wow,” I said. “Did you...? Did he...?”

“No, he didn’t fuck me,” Robin said. “He loved me. And sometimes he beat my pants off at ping-pong.”