the guy I am.

And yet? High school girls hate me.

Guys who get girls in high school honk their car horns and yell at girls with short skirts; they down tiny hotel bottles of vodka at school dances and work up their nerve as they work their hands up girls’ dresses; they make fun of girls at football games for tucking their jeans into their boots and put girls’ numbers into their phones as “Blonde” because they never asked their names and never cared. Or because they genuinely forgot. That’s how Luke is with girls. That’s why he gets them—and actually, now that we’re talking about girls, it started with one.

So that’s where it started.

Celine.

chapter 2

But hold on. Before I launch into my tale of humiliation (the first of many), I’ll tell you more about the move to New York.

In August, we moved from Indiana to Pelham, New York. Pelham was bordered by the beach and the Bronx, both of which Luke and I thought were awesome. Within a week, my mother had located all Catholic churches and emergency rooms within a fifteen-mile radius of our new house. Having grown up in Boston, my mother was glad to live near New York City and reacquaint herself with all her urban neuroses—about falling in that crack between the platform and the train, getting robbed in a back alley, being tempted to join a gang with a cool handshake, contracting diseases carried by homeless men and pigeons (my mother hadn’t quite reached the level of sympathy that her oft-referenced role model, Jesus Christ, had for the poor). She equipped Luke and me with medical masks and silver whistles. After deciding we looked like SARS patients heading for a gay club, we promptly “lost” both—in a very unfortunate incident involving the Long Island Sound and a receding tide.

My dad got a raise at his new job, so we got a new car for Luke and me. A silver Volvo. Luke and I spent July learning how to drive, and we both passed our driver’s tests. I was actually a good driver. Luke was such a dangerous one that I think our evaluator passed him out of relief for having survived the test. One car for two eager teenage drivers—and for once, things worked out in my favor. I got the Volvo, sexy airbags and all, to drive to school. Luke would be taking the train to a Catholic school in the Bronx called Fordham Prep. Fordham had recruited him for the football team, and he would be taking the train every day. Fordham was a lot like St. Luke’s—a small community, uniforms, heavy focus on sports, and all boys.

In a rare moment of true empathy, my mother had realized that I needed a change from St. Luke’s School, or, perhaps, a change from Luke. She enrolled me in Pelham Public High School.

“You’ll get to meet more people!” my mother said. “It made me sad that you didn’t have more friends at St. Luke’s.”

“Mom,” I groaned. “I had friends.”

“Oh, yes, Henry Kim! I forgot about Henry Kim,” she said. “What a nice boy. He was so good at math. And the violin.”

(The worst part about my mom’s shameless stereotyping of Henry Kim, who was Korean American, was the fact that he was very good at math and the violin. Of course, he was also a star player on the varsity soccer team. But I didn’t tell my mother that, because I didn’t want her to know that Henry was better at sports than I was.)

This was my first time going to public school. This was my first time going to a different school than Luke. Most importantly, this was my first time at school with girls. But I had already met a girl in New York. Celine.

We had been talking online for four months. We’d met on an Internet message board called College Confidential. It isn’t a dating site. Usually it’s a place for high school students to post a list of extracurriculars the length of War and Peace and then ask, “Will I get into Duke?!?!?!?!?” Sometimes it’s a place for parents to advise one another on which is a more admissions-friendly extracurricular, fencing or playing the oboe.

For Celine and me, it was a place to chat about colleges with comparative lit majors. Then our relationship got more intimate, moving over to Facebook and AOL Instant Messenger. We began talking weekly, and then every other day, discussing our favorite books and degrading their crappy