Author's Note: This story is completely fictional, meaning that I made it up myself, guys. And just for the record, the speaker is male. This is completely experimental and I'm not responsible for any lost brain cells. Do let me know what you think please.

Disclaimer: Mine. All mine.

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Hi, my name is Finney. (cough) And I have an apology to make. The title on your program is a sort of misnomer. (odd glances ripple through the audience.) It was merely a statement to capture your interest to hear out my story. It’s a good story, I can promise you that much, but it has absolutely no sex in it. (pause) I can see people leaving already. I’m really sorry.

In any case, if you are really all that interested in that stuff, you should be out at a party or on Google querying suggestive phrases, not trying to get your freak on in my audience. (appreciative laughter) It’s taken a while for me to work up the nerve to sign up for this night. I’m trembling right now, even if you don’t notice it. My hands are so sweaty I feel like I just might drop this mic…

Nobody here’s against sex, though, right? Anyone asexual? No? No Amish people here tonight—oh, there’s a hand. Not that my story is about sex at all, no no no. (shakes head and the hand free of the mic)

Has anyone here ever been to one of those after-prom parties? Yeah, I can see a couple of you. Well, I haven’t.

I’ve always been a sort of geek. I enjoyed the company of my computers, though it might have not been reciprocated as I constantly had to replace parts after they’d go boom, but that’s beside the point. My parents were never really the stay-at-home kind of people. They didn’t really go places with me. I wasn’t forced to get a job to get money. All I would have to do is ask, and they would give it to me.

I had pretty much free reign of the house. My father constantly went on business trips that consumed months of his time and my mother worked in some prestigious law firm and usually had to stay after hours, living on java and espresso as she worked night shifts. That was about all I knew. They could have even been working for the mafia, smuggling massive amounts of drugs in the shapes of dog biscuits through Petland Discounts retailers for all I knew.

If this really was a story about me having sex though, this would be where I would go into how my parents didn’t love me, how I became lonely, and how I found love in the form of a classmate named Bob and you would learn about our wild sexual escapades in the janitor’s closet during fourth period. (pauses) But my story isn’t about that.

I’ll be honest; while I was a geek, I never progressed to full-fledged nerdom. I was pretty average when it came to the classroom. I listened sometimes, copied down notes without actually processing or even looking at them ever again, and occasionally falling asleep in English. Okay, that’s a lie, too. English was where a caught my anti-beauty sleep on top of Catcher and the Rye or MacBeth, or whatever we happened to be on at the time.

I like to draw too. I never went to art school or anything, but according to my History teacher, talent comes naturally, or some stuff like that. If this were still the story about sex—which it absolutely is not, so don’t mistaken it—I would have to tell you about the time Bob and I got in serious trouble for posting pictures I drew all over the school. They were pictures of us, only no one could tell because we had chosen specific traits that we didn’t have, and I had incorporated them into the scene. I would also have to tell you about how we got caught, but seeing as this is not a story about how I had sex, I can’t tell you. (points) The nice Amish man in the back might sue.

So instead, I’ll tell you about how I would sit for hours and draw the ladybugs that landed on my window sill—which was quite often, actually—and is much more interesting than sex any day. I would draw them sitting in this cramped position, hunching my back until it hurt, and I would stay that way until the picture was done, every detail of it, or until the ladybug flew away. Then I would scan it into my computer and work on it in Photoshop. Those were the good old days. I swear, if you had just come into my room then, there would be pictures of ladybugs on my window sill covering an entire wall. The other walls were occupied by other drawings, like the one’s we hung at school, but that isn’t important, seeing as sex is obviously not the topic of this story.

Anyway, I’ve always wanted to be an anime artist or at least on a manga team. I can sense some confusion. You can turn to the back of your programs and there’s a footnotes section for any terms you might find unusual. Anime is basically a Japanese art form of animation. Does Pokemon or Dragon Ball Z ring a bell? Ah good. Those two are considered anime. Manga is just anime in graphic novel form. (sighs) I told you guys I was a geek.

So I have wanted to go into this profession for a while now. It seemed adventurous in the sit-in-an-office-for-long-hours-in-attempt-to-meet-a-deadline-every-month kind of way. It worked for me anyway. I could draw, I barely slept anyway, spending much of my time with Bob (offers an apologetic smile to Amish man in the back), and I liked computers, which are used a lot in the business. Speaking of Bob, not that we really should be considering the topic of this story, he had always pushed me toward my dreams, telling me that I have to do what I enjoy and what I’m interested in. I appreciated it, really, but I had a sneaking suspicion that he wanted me to make a Yaoi-themed (programs rustle as people flip to the footnotes section; some gasp, some cringe, others catcall) anime or manga, centering us as the main characters.

My parents, as I said before, were never home, so we never really had time to talk about my career goals until my senior year in high school. My father came home deliberately and stayed for a record breaking two months. He told me that I should strive for my dreams and that I should do anything I want or am good at. Then, he told me that my mother had an internship opening at the law firm and that we could bond if I pursued law.

I can already see it in the audience. You guys are dreading that I will say yes, and that this will conclude the story. Don’t worry.

I did end up saying yes, but it was only because I knew if I had told my father about my dreams of becoming part of an anime or manga team, he would probably sell me off to an illegal Jamaican slave holder that he had found somehow through his secret connections in the mafia that I didn’t know about.

As soon as I told Bob, fourth period became boring and lonely again. He got angry that I didn’t tell my father about my dreams, called me the alternative word for a kitty cat and stalked off to buy some Sloppy Joe. Luckily, this isn’t a story about sex, otherwise you would be bored from a lack of it.

I had tried to explain it to him, but he just didn’t seem to understand my predicament. I told him about the mafia and Jamaican slave holders, but he just shook his head and told me to stop trying to win over his affection because it wasn’t working.

I really needed something fill the void in my life that was fourth period so I asked out Angela. Unfortunately, she was really pretty and said no, so I had to go back to Bob and beg for forgiveness. In the end Bob agreed, but only on the condition that I would eventually tell my father how really felt and what I really wanted to do. I agreed.

Considering our unspoken agreement between performer and audience, I won’t tell you that Bob and I continued our routine once again after this, only we moved to the coat rack in the principal’s conference room. We lived in Arizona and nobody hung coats because they had none, so we were less likely to be disturbed and more likely to hear about any experimental endeavors on the parts of our teaching staff, which where sometimes even more adventurous than our own.

All I had to do now was work up the nerve to sit down my father and explain myself.

It proved harder than I thought.

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Author's Note: To be continued on the next open mic night. Or chapter. Whichever comes first.