Stupid Fast

Chapter 18: I LIKE ME SOME FRIENDS




After the Jenningses left that day, I sat stunned in my room for a while. I wanted to tell someone about Aleah. Gus was the obvious choice, but I didn’t want to send him email after email without him ever replying because I’d feel like a dork. I checked email again, hoping for Gus. No Gus.

I did have email though.

Cody sent me a link to a YouTube video of a dude named Jay Landry who is on St. Mary’s Springs, the team Bluffton was to play in its first game of the season. Cody wrote: check it. he’s a safety. big time. going to notre dame after next year. we’ll beat him.

The video was set to some kind of screamy speed metal and was just a bunch of clips of this Jay Landry hitting people on the football field, totally killing them, knocking the ball out of their hands, hitting receivers trying to make catches, standing over kids he’s knocked totally stupid, shouting, and flexing.

Oh my Jesus God, I thought. Is this really what’s going to happen to me? Does Cody think I’m going to like football after watching this? I do not want to have my whole curly Jew-fro head knocked off my shoulders by Jay Landry. Jesus.

I closed the YouTube window and looked back at email.

No, no, no. Nothing from Gus. Man!

So I decided to be a dork. I wrote: what if i said i love beautiful piano girl who lives in your bedroom and also that i am on football team and i am d-i football prospect and i jammed a basketball and i am smelly and in love?

His response came back in two minutes: what in hell you talking about? mom annoying as crap and i cant be on computer and grandmas apartment smells like poop and everybody hates me. i hate…

Before I finished reading Gus’s message, I received another email and went back to my inbox. Three messages in one day that weren’t all from Gus (only one was from Gus)? I was on record pace!

It was from Cody again: me and karpinski going to grill and watch longest yard (bad football movie) sometime next week. you wanna hit that?

I responded right away: sounds good, man. thanks for video. jay landry is an animal. scary!!!

Cody messaged back right away: landry is good, but you’ll be better.

I jumped out of my chair and then sat back down. I shook my head. I’m going to be better than that animal? Then this occurred to me: I might suddenly have friends and a girlfriend. Are you kidding? That sounded really good, even if I’d have to grill out with Karpinski, one of the worst honkies on record (sorry).

What a day!

***

I mean, this is really the thing: I’d never had a girlfriend. The closest I ever came was in fifth grade when Abby Sauter lived in a house on the golf course, and we walked home from school together every day for about six weeks. One day, she said, “You’re my boyfriend. I wrote it in my diary.” After that, I almost passed out every time she was within twenty feet of me. I stopped walking home with her, running out the door after school to avoid her but tried to smile when I saw her in the hall.

By the next year, she was sticking pencils down the back of my pants and calling me Rein Stone in Mr. Ross’s independent study hour, which I totally didn’t get. Why is Rein Stone funny? It’s just my name with a vowel changed. When I cried, Jerri told me that kids have funny ways of showing they like each other. Oh, right, Jerri. She liked me because she stuck pencils in my pants. Great! I harbored the totally ridiculous notion that Abby was my girlfriend for another year.

Then in seventh grade, Abby, who had just gotten really tall and gotten boobs, shoved me against a locker so hard my head bounced off the metal. She pinned me there and breathed on my face because she’d just eaten a bag of Doritos. Jess Withrow shouted “Gross!” I figured at that point, Abby had broken up with me. My stomach hurt for a month.

But not long after, me, Gus, and Peter realized that honkies were honkies and were different than us and that we hated them.

In eighth grade, I got called Gay Boy Rein Stone so much that I began to figure I was gay, even though I was attracted to girls, especially Abby Sauter, who I believed to be a terrible person, but I couldn’t help it. I thought about how I’d like to smell her Doritos breath again.

Then, in high school, the upper classes changed my name to Squirrel Nuts or Squirrel Nut and didn’t invoke Rein Stone as much, and I felt like Squirrel Nuts—jumpy and flinching, staring out across the lunch room, nibbling my food fast. My shiny, secret rocks and crystals were squirreled away in my leather pouch in my pocket, and I was so wary of the dangers present—ready to hop and hightail it.

Romance, gay or otherwise, didn’t occur to me, not even when I searched for Ladies in Swimsuits on the Internet (which I did a lot all sophomore year).

Then I grew tall and strong and hairy and fast and a famous African American pianist, the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen in my entire life, told me she’d be playing music for me when I showed up at her house in the morning to drop off the paper.

As I lay in bed that night, I thought, “Aleah Jennings, you are my girlfriend.” Yes, that was a little…What’s that word? Presumative? Presumptive? Let me look it up.

Presumptuous!

Then, because I’d lifted weights and changed into another human being completely in one day (evolved from squirrel nut donkey boy to big) and was thus completely exhausted, I slept like a freaking rock.