Page 12 of Let's Talk About Love
But this had been where Alice messed up. Turned out, Sam had a thing for Alice, too. A different kind of thing, but a thing nonetheless.
He had asked her out. Shehadto say yes.
Alice had been trying to sort out the difference between romantic attraction (which she felt) and sexual attraction (which she didn’t). By the end of their first week together, she knew for a fact that she didn’t even want to be Sam’s friend anymore. He was an awful human being. A human-shaped garbage fire. A waste of space and genetic material.
But finally,finally, she fit in perfectly with her friends.
(Peer pressure was a helluva drug.)
They all had someone and now she did, too. Normal felt like a constant state of despair, but they had stopped teasing her. Had stoppedgiving her pitying looks, calling her “innocent” and excluding her from sleepovers because she had nothing romantic to gossip about.
Fast-forward six months, she’s dumped with a new nickname. The Corpse. Because kissing him had been an ordeal to overcome. Because she never seemed interested in touching him (see: jacking him off). Because she had just lay there while Sam had sex with her, and he had told everyone.
Whenever Alice thought about that time, two things stuck out:
One—Francine Loren’s mock whisper in the locker room: “I heard she didn’t moan. Not even when he went down on her.”
Two—the curiously soft sound of Feenie’s fist connecting with Francine’s face layered with the instantaneous crunch of bone cracking.
Alice had stood there covering her mouth like all the other girls, except not in shock. She had tried to hide her smile. Cute girls were not supposed to be violent. Seeing Feenie, fists clenched at her sides silently daring Francine to get up, fierce and seething with unchecked rage, was kind of… liberating. Even if it was in a secondhand sort of way.
As harsh as it seemed, Feenie’s confrontation had felt like a gift to Alice.
Feenie standing up for her gave Alice the courage to tell her friend the truth. She had confessed she thought something might be wrong, so one day, after health class, they had talked to their teacher, who then said the word:asexual.
Everything had finally made sense. And had given Alice a whole new set of challenges.
Through it all, whenever Alice entered crisis mode about anything ever, she turned to Feenie (or Ryan by proxy). So she told her about Takumi and their botched introduction. As she babbled, Alice’s tears began to recede, her tone returned to normal.
(The sniffles didn’t quite go anywhere.)
Feenie eyed her, keeping her face neutral. “And you think you’re attracted to him?”
“What else could it be? It’s not just me appreciating how cute something is like I usually do. He’sbeautiful, Feenie. I almost melted into primordial soup of Alice.”
“And he’s so beautiful, you think you want to have sex with him?”
Alice fidgeted in her seat. “I’m not sure.”
Feenie gave her a withering look. “Okay, well, how did he make you feel?”
“Like I was stupid. I’m serious! Don’t look at me like that. My mind went completely blank and filled up with white noise.”
“That still sounds less like you were turned on and more like you thought he was exceptionally hot. He probably just exceeded the Cutie Code.”
The Cutie CodeTMwas a fun game, but it was also a system used for critical analysis—Alice’s way of processing the different kinds of attraction everyone else seemed to experience. She only shared her system/game with those whose opinions she trusted, to see how her coding compared to theirs.
It was aboutfeeling—the level of emotions it could evoke from her, how likely it would be to make hersquee,and most important, how did her body physically respond to it.
A naked, muscular male chest was Code: Red for Feenie. Meanwhile, it was Uncodable for Alice. Over time, it expanded to includeeverything, and Alice had become obsessed with it. She clamped her bottom lip between her teeth. A new wave of tears began to coat her eyes.
“Oh,” Feenie said. “Oh.You checked?”
“After he left, I went to the bathroom. Theplumbingwas on.”
Feenie softened, and said, “Oh, sweetie,” which made Alice start crying again because Feenie was neversoftfor anyone.
“How could this happen?” Alice wailed. “He didn’t even touch me.”
