"Oh, Goddddddd!"

I smiled, thinking of the good deed I was doing. Definitely worth some karma points, and with the life I've lived, I can use all I can get.

"Fuck, fuck, fuckkkkk!"

It might be an unconventional good deed, but it still ought to count.

I glanced at my closed bedroom door, then turned back to my computer. My latest novel - my fifth - had been rejected by forty-nine publishers, and I was composing a cover letter for magic number fifty before I gave up and started a new book.

"Jesus H..."

For some reason, I was having trouble concentrating.

"Cammie, can we have an adult conversation?"

Cammie gave me a look that I translated as, 'If you can find an adult for me to talk to'.

Cammie was a beautiful thirteen-year-old. She was going to be tall, already about five-eight, breasts that were slightly more than a handful, and I have big hands, though I'd never gotten them on Cammie's melons. Her hair was black as midnight. Right now she had a short, almost boyish cut, but it used to hang just below her shoulders. A few light freckles and a break in her left eyebrow completed the picture. The break came from a bicycle accident when she was six. Cammie hated it, but I thought it gave her face character.

I'd known Cammie since she was nine. I was a bartender at the Wooden Nickel, and her mom had started waitressing for me. Cammie had a pair of brothers, one three years and the other five years younger. The family had kind of adopted me since I didn't have a family of my own.

"I want to ask you an embarrassing question. Hopefully, without you getting mad, getting too embarrassed, or you saying 'bite me.'"

'Bite me' was her phrase du jour lately. She said it so often that I'd considered actually biting her more than once.

"What?" she snapped. There'd been a lot of snapping the last six months or so, since just before she'd turned thirteen. That was the reason we were having this conversation.

I swiveled my chair back to the table and looked down at her math book. "Let's try problem six." The reason her mom had brought her by today was help with her pre-algebra. I'd been a math-wiz in high school, though I'd never used it. Somewhere along the line I'd decided I wanted to be a writer, though bartending paid the bills.

"What?" she asked, softer.

I swiveled back. She looked annoyed.

I took a deep breath and considered a safer question, like, 'Would you like ice cream when we finish?' I forced myself to look in her face, though I was embarrassed myself. "Cammie," another deep breath, "do you play with yourself?"

Cammie jumped up. "You pervert!"

"So much for not getting mad. At least you didn't say..."

"Bite me!" She spun and started stomped toward the front door.

"A lot of girls do, you know."

She stopped, her hand on the doorknob. "What?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder.

"A lot of girls your age play with themselves. Probably most girls."

She hesitated. "Why would you ask that? Is that how you get your jollies?"

"Cammie-Bear," she cringed at the barely tolerated nickname I used for her, "like I said, most girls your age have started playing with themselves. But most girls have more privacy than you do."

Her family lived in a two-bedroom house. Her mother had one room, and the boys the other. Cammie shared the living room with her grandmother. Cammie had one corner that she'd defined as HER bedroom and no one was allowed in without permission, and her grandmother slept on the convertible sofa. Between grandmother and her mom or brothers passing through on the way to the kitchen, Cammie didn't have a lot of privacy.

"What's that got to do with a pervert wanting to know what I do?" She'd turned back to face me.