SIX!

((bobby remembers))

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My name isn't really Bobby. It's actually Robert Portland Junior, but that makes me sound like some decrepit, old man. I remember in first grade how Mrs. Lows called out my entire full name, including the goddamn junior part, and being the asshole that he was, Michael made a big deal out of it. People laughed, I threw a fit, and the name was virtually history. Kids are retarded; they'll laugh at anything. Looking back, I should've punted them in the faces if I really wanted to shut them up.

In case you didn't know, I'm kind of a stud. I do a little bit of crew on the side, so I'm not obese like half the fucking country. Not a lot of people are fat here, but not many can do a five-minute mile, either. And it's not like my face is busted up; it matches the rest of myself pretty well, if I do say so myself. Blond hair, blue eyes, the whole shebang. I'm not gonna lie—it feels pretty damn good knowing that half the females are turning around for a second look.

I rarely get rejected by girls, and I don't reject the majority who approach me. What can I say? Equal opportunity, equal chances. And besides, only the confident, good-looking ones actually come forward. That was a weed-out right there. I've been turned down a total of one time since my social climbing career, and it came from a rug muncher in tenth grade. Out of all the girls in our grade, from the acne-prone to flat-chested, she was by far the most fuckable one: long legs, red hair, and an enormous rack. What more could you ask for?

But it was still disgusting how half the boys lost their balls for her; they scrambled around buying her shit and practically rolled the red carpet out for her. They were whipped, and they showed it. Michael stirred up a lot of shit, too, bragging about how he could bag her if he wanted to. It was bullshit, and I got tired of it in chemistry. He had been sitting behind me and talking loudly about how he had made it past second base with some freshman and how he was so skilled in the pants. Back then, you were considered the shit if you made it past puckering.

So anyway, Michael had the actual balls to turn around, look at me, and go, “When was the last time you got some, Portland?” I swear he has some inferior complex with me, which was about as manly as getting your dick lopped off. His attitude pissed me off, and righteously so. Where the fuck did this guy get off? If I had to sit in front of the asshole for an entire semester, I was going to make goddamn sure he knew where he stood.

“I know it wasn't with some ugly chick,” I said, and it was sweet how his eyes bugged out.

“Wha-”

“At least I have standards.” Michael was purple by then, but he was still functioning enough to bite out a comment about my sexuality. “I'm only gay for girls, and it seems like they like me back, too,” I replied dismissively, reveling at how he spluttered incoherently. And somehow, I don't remember, that turned into a huge bitchfest between the two of us—correction, it was a bitchfest from his side, with me coolly negating every point he could muster in that little peanut brain of his. Then Michael managed to drag Hot Girl into the mix, and it turned into a bet, to see who could get her to go out with the other first. I'm not gonna lie; there was absolutely no chivalrous notion behind it. Yeah, she looked like she came straight out of a Playboy magazine, but it wasn't like she was good for anything else. The bet was all about the pride, and whoever could bag her first had the bigger cajones. The jerk-off really had it in his head that I couldn't bone a girl even if I tried, and he strutted out of class at the end of the period like some smug bitch. What a dickhead.

It took two hours tops before Michael caved and hit on her. I remember it like it happened yesterday: he approached her by the lockers, leered over her tits, and then asked for her digits. She responded by punching him in the face.

“Shove your boner in someone else's face,” Hot Girl snapped, scowling as she slammed the locker door shut and sauntered off. I think that was when she earned a little of my respect. Not all of it, since she was the target, but anyone who could see how much of a douchebag Michael was all right in my book. It didn't look like she gained his respect, though, since he raised a finger to her back and skulked towards the group of now laughing boys.

“Shove it,” he growled, shoving me aside, and I smirked. Shit, if the girl turned down Michael, then half the battle was won already.

I waited a week, watching her and mapping out her schedule, and by Friday, I had a plan. Her world history class was two doors down from mine, and I made sure to linger around her door. A few girls tittered as they passed me, and they giggled even more when I nodded in their direction. Even as a tenth grader, I knew I was the shit.

It was a minute before the warning bell, and still no sign of Hot Girl. I was about to head back to my class in disappointment when she rounded the corner, her knee boots clomping on the floor. I grinned confidently as she neared and began, “Hey, you're just the person--”

“Save it,” Hot Girl interrupted, flipping back her hair. Her eyes glared and sizzled big holes into my head.

I blinked. That was uncharacteristically fast. “But you didn't even--”

“Spare me the details. I'll save you time and give you a list of no's right now. No, I won't go out on a date with you. No, I don't want to kiss you. No, I don't think you're hot. No, I don't want to ride in your car, and no, I don't want you to touch my boobs.” She looked at me, her mouth curled patronizingly. “Did I answer all of your question? Good.” Without waiting for an answer, she strolled into her classroom just as the bell rang.

She earned a little more respect from me then, not because she told me off—I was severely offended at that time—but because she had enough confidence to talk like that. All the girls simpered and hung off my arms or trailed after me, something I didn't protest too much, but not this one. She was hard to get, and that was a fucking turn on.

I didn't tell Michael about that because then he would've rubbed it in my face. Instead, it became something of a personal mission to try and nail her. I started to meet her by the history and art classrooms every other day and tried to start one too many conversations with her; at first, Hot Girl was annoyed and told me to fuck off every two seconds, but I like to think that my brilliant charms eventually won her over. No, I know my charms won her over because she started being less of a frigid bitch and more of an actual person over time. Three months in, and she started to melt a little. She began telling me all these things about herself, like how her name was Lisa, or how she had two little sisters and a drunk mother, or how she shopped at the Salvation Army because she could barely afford food, let alone clothes. There was more shit, but I was too busy thinking about how Michael's reputation was so screwed in the ass. As far as I was concerned, he was as good as castrated, and that motivated me to keep pretending that I cared. I mean, I pretended at first, but then I really started to, and that kind of fucked me up for a while. I started to notice how she mostly stayed by herself or stuck around me whenever she saw me, which was pretty sweet since the guys looked at me with a mixture of awe and jealousy.

Honestly, I was beginning to think I had a chance with her. Well, I knew I had a chance to begin with, since it was painfully obvious that I was the only male Lisa had in her life for a while, but I really thought that she liked me. And... I liked her. I was beginning to, anyway. I liked how she was brutally honest and cutting if she wanted to; not a lot of girls were smart, and most of them were just retarded dumbfucks. Lisa was calculating and knew how to balance checkbooks, and she knew how to survive off the streets while taking care of her sisters. She was independent, and I liked that. As fruity as it sounds, she was probably the first girl who made me feel like someone sucker punched me every time she touched or linked arms with me.

Of course, Lisa was a lot smarter than I gave her credit for, and she inevitably found out about the bet, courtesy of Mr. No Balls. Most girls cry or screech like banshees when they hear about this kind of thing, but not her. She called me up, asking if she could come over, and then showed up with a bat in her hands. “Bobby!” she called from outside, “Open the door! Open the door now! I have something very important to tell you.”

So I did, wondering what was so important, and the first thing she did was swing the fucking thing at my head.

“What the flipping fuck?” I barely had time to swear and dove into a wall as the bat whipped over my head and slammed sickeningly into the wooden door. It was the nastiest hole I had ever seen, and I looked over to her heaving form, my jaw slack. “Lisa? What the--”

“You,” she growled, pointing a finger at me. She blinked furiously, her shoulders trembling, and jabbed in my direction again. “You! How could you? How could you do something as fucked up as that?”

“What?”

“Don't pretend!” Her eyes were tearing up now, and I was still confused by all this. One minute she was trying to play pinata with my head, and the next she was crying? Was this some extreme PMS thing? “You played me, you bastard,” Lisa hissed, wiping her eyes angrily. “I should've known that you guys were all the same. I am such a fucking idiot for thinking you could be different. Fucking idiot!”

“Wait,” I said slowly, putting up two placating hands. “What's going on?”

Lisa laughed incredulously. “Just drop it, Bobby. I already know about the stupid bet between you and Michael.” She laughed again when I jerked back in surprise. “Yeah, it's so funny, isn't it? Let's see who can sleep with the girl first. Let's see who can get trick her. Let's see who can play with someone's feelings and get away with it. It's so funny, isn't it? Well, congratulations, Bobby, because you won.”

Lisa's face crumpled as she turned around and fled the house. Under normal circumstances, I just wave them off and get on with my merry life; after all, life was too short to get hung up over people who were upset with you. If I had met Lisa now, I would've called her a crazy bitch and driven to ATO for Thirsty Thursdays afterwards, but that was hindsight. At that moment, I felt like someone had run my body over with a tractor, and all I could think of was how much of a dumbass I was for making her feel like shit. For the first time in my life, I wanted to fix something for once.

Lisa was a stubborn, little bitch, though, and she wouldn't talk to me for a good two weeks. Every time I tried to catch her before the next period, she would either duck into the girls' bathroom or take a different route to class. Michael had a nice hoot about it for about three days before I rounded on him and split his lip. It felt good to see him writhe and bleed on the floor, and he didn't try anything after that. He still doesn't to this day, and that was fine and dandy with me; he was a fucktard who had no opinion of his own, so whether he spoke or not wasn't a big deal to me.

I finally caught her in the middle of the hallway one day and yanked her into an empty hallway. Usually I'm gentlemanly and nice enough, but I had to manhandle this one. It was the only way to get Lisa to listen to you.

“Get your hands off me!” she hissed, trying to pull out of my grasp, but I only gripped tighter.

“Not until you listen to me.”

“Like hell I will, and if you don't--”

“I like you,” I said flatly, and she finally shut the fuck up. “I'm sorry that you had to find out about the whole stupid bet thing between me and the little shithead. Yeah, it was a bet, and it was stupid to get into it, but I didn't know you at the time. I didn't know you were this awesome girl. I thought you were one of those easy lays, so I jumped into it.” I didn't tell her that half those lines had been carefully paraphrased from the Internet. I did like her, and I was sorry; I just didn't want to spend an hour writing and rehearsing an apologetic explanation. God, I was brilliant.

Luckily, Lisa was too busy looking flustered by my declaration to notice its lack of creativity, and I took that as a sign to keep going. “I know you're mad at me, but I really am sorry. After getting to know you after all these months, I realized how cool you really were.”

“Bobby...”

“I didn't mean to break your trust, and I feel like the biggest piece of shit for dragging you through this.” I nodded earnestly, hoping to God that she didn't see how much bullshit I was spewing out of my mouth. I swallowed thickly, ignoring the feeling of my masculinity being violated, and finished off with, “And... I really like you, I guess.”

Lisa turned beet red. “Bobby, listen--”

“I've liked you for a while now,” I interrupted, and she looked ready to melt into a puddle. Of happiness, I was sure. “You're just so much more--”

“I don't like you.”

There was a long pause, and then I closed my mouth. “Ah,” was all I could say, and the back of my neck started to feel a little warm.

“But it's not because I don't like you.”

“Mm hmm.” I had removed my hand from her, but Lisa didn't walk away. She looked a little nervous, wringing her hands and shifting from foot to foot. “I think I have to get to class now.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“I'll see you later.”

I turned, ready to walk out when she grabbed my hand. “Let me explain,” she murmured.

“Some other time. We'll be late for class.” Nobody can blame me for wanting to get the fuck out of that situation. Here I was, telling the girl I had liked for three months my feelings, and she rejected me? Hell no. I wasn't going to sit around and listen to Lisa make up some sorry ass excuse about why she wouldn't go out with me. I was a fucking catch, and I knew it. Girls didn't hesitate when I strolled up to him, and if Lisa didn't want me for whatever lame reason, then it was her loss. It was the proverbial kick to the groin, and I tried to brush it off. “Hey, do you mind letting--”

“Give me a second.”

“We'll talk later.”'

“You don't understand.”

“I'm not stupid.”

“I don't like boys.” That stopped me in my tracks, and I turned around to stare at her. Impossible, because Lisa was hot as hell, and I liked her, and she should be all over me and not some random chick because that was the way it was supposed to be! “I don't like boys... at all,” she repeated, emphasizing the last two words, and Lisa winced when I continued to gape at her.

I know my reaction didn't show it at the time, but that was when Lisa had earned all of my respect. She was really independent from me, and I knew her well enough by now to know that if I dumped her, if I straight up cut her out of my life, she wasn't going to sit in her room and snivel about it. She was going to wake up and go to school and move on with her life without me, and that was impressive. My pride stung a little, but it didn't lessen anything.

I didn't dump her like I did with other girls. Instead, I kept her because she was the only girl who ever exhibited anything other than neediness. It still kills me everyday, though, knowing that out of all the girls out there, the one relationship I had put the most effort into even to this day, the one girl I had really liked, turned out to be pointless because she was a lesbian. Fuck that. That day had brought a whole new level of clarity to my tenth grade self: first, that effort was overrated, and second, that it was stupid to pine for one girl. Why can't you have your cake and eat it, too?

So even though that had been a nasty situation to get out of, it had taught me important life values. Lisa and I became close friends after that, and she started to tell me a lot more personal things, like how she hadn't been able to really trust a male since her father touched her five years ago; or how she had been detained in juvenile for eight months after attacking her father with a switchblade when she had caught him in one of her little sisters' bedrooms; or how her mother had basically sold everything to propel the divorce and get them away from the shithole.

And then she told me about other things, like when she first started to notice girls, her first crush, her first kiss, and her first girlfriend. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little resentful; Lisa was the fucking package, and she didn't even bat for men. Trust me, the irony wasn't lost. But the bitterness didn't last long. Sure, it was a blemish on my otherwise perfect record, but that didn't stop me from racking up other girls like a fatass on the Weight Watchers point system, and hey, sex was good.

That was one thing Lisa didn't like about me, though, the the way I treated girls. After her there had been way too many to count, and she had known about them every time. And each time, she would just tell me off for being such a dickhead. “You're a sweet guy, Bobby. I don't get it,” she said once. “Somewhere under that male chauvinistic layer you've got going on, I know you actually care.”

“My dick needs caring, Dr. Freud.”

“Well, your dick needs to stop making half my friends cry,” Lisa retorted, her eyes boring a hole into my head. I yawned, scratching my balls. “God, I don't even know why I'm friends with you. You're the epitome of what I wouldn't want in a guy, if I were theoretically into them.”

I shrugged and went back to lazing on her bed. She still doesn't know why she's the only girl friend I have.

Even now, when she's at Virginia Tech, Lisa calls a few times a week and demands for details. The girl lived to hear about what I do with my life, and she loves to launch into half-hour lectures. “They're not just sex objects for you to use. You're in college now, Bobby, not high school. Grow a brain and some consideration while you're at it.” I scoffed, and she deliberately ignored me. “They have feelings, too, and it really hurts them when you go around creeping behind their backs.”

“I don't care. They're the ones who throw themselves at me, not the other way around.”

“It doesn't make them any less human.”

“I don't know why I have to act like I'm their fucking boyfriend when they didn't even ask me. If a girl wants a fuck, I'll be happy to comply. Sex doesn't have to mean anything.”

“Why don't you tell them that?”

“Because I'm a gentleman, and gentlemen don't make girls cry.”

“Don't be a condescending asshole.”

“Don't be a self-righteous cunt sucker.”

“At least I don't have a mutated form of gonorrhea,” she sniped lightly before saying goodbye and ending the phone call. It was none of her business how I treated the girls, and besides, how could I help it that a lot of girls found me attractive? Being in a relationship didn't mean I had to become celibate; it just meant that I had a more secure source of booty whenever I wanted. But where was the fun in that? The way I see it, I was only doing the world a favor by spreading Bobby love.

So with that in mind, it was pretty understandable why it annoyed the fuck out of me when Ella's roommate threatened to out me. “What if I tell her accidentally? Like a slip-up?” she asked, and I almost told her to go fuck herself. How could something like that be an accident? It was as good as a threat, and I narrowed my eyes. I think Ella said her name was Luci or something—it didn't matter.

What did matter, though, was the fact that Luci decided to stick her nose into my business. I hate people who try shit like that; I'm a big believer in MIND YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS, and she blew right past that one. It was one thing to be a demanding cocksucker, but it was a completely different ballpark when people tried to manipulate me. Adam Salzberg had tried that in seventh grade, when he saw me jack a few dollars from the class donation box, and he had ended up with a broken nose during football practice that day. He learned quickly to never pull a stunt like that again.

The same could be said for Luci. She really liked that goldfish of hers, so I shoved the bowl out of her hands and watched as she gasped and fell to her knees along with the fish. I didn't really like animals much, so it wasn't a big deal for my conscience. “That was an accident,” I mimicked before I turned around and left the apartment.

Fuck her if she saw me with Phoebe. I was bored, and I wanted a good screw. Ella was good in bed, too, and even though she was turning out to be a little clingy for my tastes, I still liked her enough to milk it for its worth. And if some deranged roommate was going to try and pull something, then she was more stupid than I thought. She really had no idea who she was messing with, did she?

Whistling, I strolled out of Lambeth and sauntered towards my car. Luci was in for a big surprise if she thought I was going to back down any time soon, though I didn't think she was going to try and pull anything further. They were usually far too intimidated, and this girl didn't look any different.

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an: uh yeah, fourteen reviews? crazy. lovelove. bobby needed more meat on him, so i devoted a chapter to him. i love writing bobby so much because he's so freaking offensive, ha ha, though i shouldn't be doing this right before finals...