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
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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.”
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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