in a giant sloppy pile of man love. Somehow, by the time I had made it down the bleachers to congratulate him, that crowd of sloppy teammates had been replaced by a mob of girls. Jeez! Where had they all come from? He’d only been at this school four days! Further, this school didn’t have any girls! But here they were, sporting plaid skirts of various uniform shades and sweatshirts that listed the entire roster of girls’ schools in the area: Ursuline, Holy Child, Sacred Heart. My brother is magnetic north for Catholic schoolgirls.
And they were finding any excuse to touch Luke, even though he was so sweaty he looked like he’d survived a tidal wave. The fortunate girls who had arrived early were staking out the prime territory of Luke’s bicep. Others used flimsier excuses: one girl’s manicured nail traced the 5 on the front of his jersey; one authoritative hand rearranged his sweat-soaked hair. One girl even bent to tie his shoe.
Luke waved at me from inside his circle of girls.
“Brother!” he said. “Thanks for coming!”
“You slaughtered them, bro,” I told him.
“And people said Holy Cross was good!” He laughed. “Piece of cake.”
Girls began asking Luke questions mostly about his feats of strength and how much he worked out. It was a flirtatious little press conference. “How much can you bench-press? Could you bench-press me? Will you?”
One girl, a brunette, observant—much more my type than Luke’s—looked me up and down and asked, “Are you a reporter for the school paper or something?”
I shook my head. “I’m Luke’s brother,” I said.
“Oh, his little brother?” She broke into a smile. “Awww.”
She looked at me like someone who had the potential to be cute one day.
“Oh, uh, no,” I said. “We’re… twins.”
Her pupils flashed from the bandages around my toothpick arms to my sunken-in chest and the goose bumps emerging on my legs beneath my swim trunks to my super-pale face and eyes.
Then this brunette said an obvious, truthful, and terrible thing.
She told me: “You two are nothing alike.”
When I didn’t leave the house for three days after the football game, my mother worried that I was antisocial. My mother has suspected me of antisocial behavior since last year when I didn’t cry during The Notebook. After her prodding, I managed one tear. I didn’t tell her that the tear came from the fact that I was home on a Friday night watching a Nicholas Sparks adaptation with my mother.
During the last few days of August, I used the excuse that the doctor had said it was too sunny for me to go outside. This also conveniently got me out of mowing the lawn. It also excused me from scoping out our seventeen-year-old neighbor, whose family was Italian and renting a house for the summer, and who Luke claimed sunbathed topless. I was so embittered by my recent experiences that I didn’t want to see another teenage girl as long as I lived. I didn’t even want to see another teenage girl’s boobs. When it became early September, and also got rainy and overcast, though, I had no more excuses (neither did the topless girl, who buttoned up and went inside, much to Luke’s dismay). To appease my mother, I decided to go to some museums in Manhattan. I looked forward to losing myself in mummies, dinosaurs, and other species who were past their self-conscious teenage years.
Unfortunately, my seat on the train was directly facing three teenage girls. Didn’t girls in New York ever go to school? Oh, wait, school hadn’t started for me either. Well, I could just look out the window. Oh, wait. I didn’t have a window seat. Oh, well. If I had to look ahead, I would focus on the books the girls were reading and not on the three pairs of crossed legs beneath them.
The first book cover had the typical Fabio-style romantic male lead. He had blond hair longer than the woman’s and a piratelike shirt ripped open to reveal pectoral muscles that were bigger than hers, too. He was a guy who could speak five languages and perform award-winning sexual maneuvers. He was a seducer.
I could never be a guy like that.
On the second novel cover, the guy was swinging an ax dangerously close to the woman’s face. She was still smiling. He was a clean-cut kind of guy, with a flannel shirt and bulging biceps, like the Brawny paper towel man. He could handle a canoe or a grizzly bear, and catch and