Never Always Sometimes - Adi Alsaid Page 0,77

when you don’t actually care about the response.”

“What would you ask instead?”

A sigh escaped Julia’s lips and they both fell quiet. The basketball

DAVE & JULIA 259

players started arguing about something, all in lingo Julia couldn’t

understand. Julia wondered what she and Dave were even doing still at

school. They could have gone off campus on their lunch breaks, snuck

away to the harbor, avoiding the gaze of all the people who’d helped

at the promposal and now didn’t understand why Dave was with the

pink-haired girl instead of Gretchen. They could have been wrapped

up in each other. Julia reached into her bag, found the side pocket

where the Nevers list had been resting since they found it. She knew

it by heart, knew that most of the items had been crossed off now.

But she wanted something else to be on there, some new adventure to

share with Dave.

“You could ask about erections,” Dave said, his voice cracking at

the end.

Julia folded up the list, laughing. “Really? Erections are the best way

to measure the quality of a day?”

“Maybe not the best way. But it could paint a picture.”

“That’s a pretty gross picture.” She looked over at Dave. When

they were alone, she felt these uncontainable urges to touch him, not

necessarily in sexual ways, just rub her face against his, lay a hand on his neck. At school, those urges fell away, and she sometimes found

herself forcing the issue, throwing her arms around him as if to prove

something to herself. “Plus, aside from the gross inherent sexism of

that male-dominated question, are you really saying each erection

carries with it the same exact ecstasy? Every day, every man, an erection carries with it the exact same shot of happiness, every time?”

260 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES

“This is a bizarre conversation.”

“Don’t back away now, David Vas Deferens. You started the

conversation.”

Dave laughed, his hand going to the back of his neck. “Probably not

the exact same, no.”

“Absolutely not. I mean, if the desire men feel is anything like what

I feel—and, I’ll admit the flaw in this argument, since I don’t really

know a thing about male desire, if it’s the same thing as female desire

or a whole other beast—there are different grades of it. There’s the

longing to be with someone you love”—here she gave him a stomach

poke—“there’s the instinctive desire you feel for someone who you

find attractive even though you have no intentions to pursue the

desire. There’s the slight desperation in thinking that particular desire wouldn’t ever have the chance to live itself out. There’s the kind of

sad desire that comes along with loneliness, the mad desire from

sexual frustration. If the sexist question of how many times you had

an erection had a perfect female equivalent, it would still have the completely erroneous assumption that all boners are created equal.”

Dave’s eyebrows were raised, his jaw ever so slack with surprise. As

if to punctuate her speech, the bell rang, which caused the basketball

players to groan in complaint. “Next point wins,” someone called out.

“Well, shit.”

“Plus,” Julia added, standing up and slinging her bag over her

shoulder, “no erection could equal the amount of joy that a Marroney

erection provides to the world.”

DAVE & JULIA 261

Dave made a face. “Yup, gonna throw up.”

“That got weird, didn’t it?”

“I want to say ‘massively weird,’ but I’m now strangely put off by

the word ‘massive.’” They hopped off the bleachers and exited the gym,

Julia leading them the long way around so they would avoid as many

people as possible. It felt cruel that there was still an hour and a half left of school.

“Let’s skip class,” Julia said, pausing at the entrance to the hallway. “I can’t go through those doors.”

“I don’t know, Jules.”

“I promise to not bring up Marroney’s erection ever again.” She

bumped him with her shoulder, suddenly desperate at the thought of

going to class, of staying in a room, staring at all those home-printed

quotations about knowledge on the wall, the same ones she’d reread

millions of times throughout the year. “Come on, let’s do something.”

Dave’s eyes flicked ahead, as if his desperation lay in the exact

opposite direction. “I feel like I’ve been slacking in class, and finals are coming up.”

“I can’t do it, Dave. I can’t sit in a classroom right now. My life can’t handle it; I’ll explode.”

“How about after school?”

“Nope.” Julia reached in her bag and found her car keys. She started

to turn away, sure that Dave would follow. He’d always followed. She

even made a big gesture of jangling the keys, motioning with her head

toward the parking lot, the entire world outside of school that was

262 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES

waiting for them. “Right now. You, me, adventure. Erections optional.”

Dave