every guy in the room knew something I didn’t.
That was how a bunch of Catholic schoolboys taught me an important lesson about sex. All you have to do to make people think you know about sex is talk about it a lot.
Although I planned to put this theory into action and bring sex into a conversation—the more people in the conversation the better—I hadn’t found the right opportunity yet. Whenever I was with a group of guys and girls from class and we broached that subject area, either some other guy made a dumb dirty joke and swiped my chance or I didn’t notice the opening to bring up sex until it was too late. To be fair, I had been busy lately, and distracted, mainly by physical exhaustion.
Luke’s training regimen was killing me. He woke me up every morning at 5:45 AM. Luke begins his own strength training by lifting 130 pounds—that is, by lifting 130 pounds of reluctant Finbar out of his warm bed. Then we both do cardio—running three friggin’ miles around our neighborhood when only people dumb enough to own dogs are awake. Then it’s back upstairs (and every step fucking burns. Why do our stairs have so many damn steps?). Then it’s so much weight lifting you would think the two of us were filming a Total Gym infomercial in our bedroom. I’m not sure that my body is made for exercise. Since starting this whole thing with Luke, I’d suffered sunburn (yes, sometimes even before the sun rose. Life—and UV rays—are cruel), shin splints, a strained bicep, a twisted ankle, a sweat rash, and a groin pull. With that last injury, Luke tried to administer some first aid, and I think we accidentally violated some New York State incest laws.
I had also been getting busy because of Kate. No, not getting busy with Kate. Wrong preposition. But I had been getting a lot closer to her. We ate lunch together almost every day. She told me she wanted to start an investment club at our school.
“You can make money off these online stock market games!” Kate told me. “Well, if you beat those douche bags from the high school of economics.”
Well, I definitely wanted to beat those douche bags from the high school of economics. Mostly so I could impress Kate. So I wasn’t going to admit how bad I was at math. Math is supposed to be one of those things guys are good at. So I checked out A Kid’s Guide to Stock Market Investing from the library. I also asked Matt Katz for advice, because apparently his dad was a successful investor.
“Sure, I’ll ask Dad for some stock names,” Matt Katz told me. “He’s good. He earned so much last year he bought my stepmom a whole new face.”
While Kate got me interested in the investment club and even made math a little bit sexy, I recommended books for her to read and admitted to her that I like poetry.
“Really?” she smiled. “I never knew a guy who liked poems.”
Except for those homos from the Dead Faggots Society, I finished in my mind. That’s what Johnny Frackas had called me after my poem was published in the St. Luke’s Lit: “One of those homos from the Dead Faggots Society.”
“Which poets are good?” Kate asked. “You should tell me which ones to read. Remember I’m a beginner.”
“Yeats and Frank O’Hara are awesome,” I began. “And H.D., and Jeffrey McDaniel is really funny and stuff. But if you like more traditional kinda rhymey stuff, definitely do Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
“Shakespeare?” Kate tilted her head with mock thoughtfulness. “Never heard of him.”
“He’s a pretty good writer.” I grinned. “Doesn’t get the respect he deserves.”
And, actually, it was poetry that provided me with my sexual opening (haha). Mrs. Rove’s introduction to our poetry unit gave me the opportunity to dirty-talk the pants off my seventh-period literature class.
On a dull rainy Tuesday in mid-October, our AP literature teacher announced, “This is Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress.’ ” Mrs. Rove kind of looked like Hillary Clinton, but she had this huge Escalade in the teachers’ parking lot, so she must have had a secret gangsta side. Or a stockbroker husband.
My classmates turned their heads from the drug deal going down in the parking lot and groaned in remarkable unison. Even AP students hated the poetry unit. But me, I stopped doodling fangs in the margins of my looseleaf and looked up expectantly. This was my chance to dominate