My Dad likes to say he had a Ferrari, once. But it wasn’t actually a Ferrari. It wasn’t even a car.

When I was in the fourth grade, I became obsessed with lizards. Anoles, geckos, skinks, iguanas, and even Komodo dragons captured my attention. On the outside, I looked like the other little girls with my blonde pigtails and Disney Princess lunch box. On the inside, I had a reptile obsession. While other kids my age read chapter books and played soccer, I checked out every reptile book in my elementary school library and memorized hundreds of fun facts about lizards.

He was a character, apparently. He wore a cape—not one of those little capes that rich people (usually villains) in old movies wore to the opera. This was full-size, and black as night with a red lining. He had a khaki shirt and trousers underneath, and he wore a pith helmet like he was Livingston I presume, going on a safari.

Bird shit. Bird shit everywhere.

“You said car washes were a rip-off, Dad.”

The video starts playing, and square in the middle of the frame is a metal chair with a female robot on it. She has pin-up model-like curves, and her head is a sleek monitor displaying the face of the one and only Marilyn Monroe. Even now, that mask is still one of the more popular, and expensive, downloadable features an owner could purchase for their PleasureCorp sex robot.