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  “Uh-huh.” She adjusts the ribbon’s bow just left of center, then decides against it and rips it off.

  “Mom says guys like Steven Price are good to keep track of for later use,” I say. “But for right now—social death.”

  Ramie just stares at me.

  “I know. But that’s Mom for you. Anyway, the whole sad incident got me thinking about the fact that I have no boyfriend, no prospects and no strategy in place to ensure a successful prom experience.”

  “Hmm” is all Ramie comes up with. Then she returns to the closet floor, where an ecosystem of forgotten clothes has taken root. I suppose I should mention that Ramie thinks the prom is stupid. Ramie thinks all high school traditions are stupid.

  She stands up holding a bright paisley scarf and lays it across the ugly beige sweater. “There.” She backs away from the outfit and squints at it. Then she rips off her pink alligator shirt and squeezes her D-cup boobs into the B-cup corset dress. “Zip me,” she says.

  I get the zipper an inch up her back. “Can you breathe?”

  “Nope,” she says. “Keep zipping.”

  She sucks in her stomach and I tug the zipper half an inch higher. “That’s it.”

  I stand back as she pulls on the beige sweater and ties it at the breastbone.

  “You have to be willing to suffer for your art,” she says.

  “Uh-huh.”

  As fun as it is watching Ramie bust out of my corset dress, I’m distracted by my prom issue. You see, once I started worrying about the prom, a certain someone I had previously not noticed suddenly made himself intriguingly visible to me. It was as if the universe itself were summoning its awesome powers to save me from prom malness.

  I take a deep breath. “So, Rames,” I say. “What do you think about Tommy Knutson?”

  “Tommy Knutson?” she says. “You mean that weird guy from Brazil?” She grabs a pink down vest from my closet.

  “New York,” I tell her. “I think he moved here from New York.”

  “Oh. I heard Brazil,” she says. “But then I also heard L.A. He’s kind of mysterious, right? Doesn’t talk much?”

  “No,” I say. “But he’s been doing sticky eyes with me.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re in H Block calculus together,” I tell her. “He sits one row over and two seats in front of me, and last week he started doing it.”

  “Uh-huh.” She zips the puffy pink vest over the outfit.

  “I’m not talking furtive glances either,” I say. “I’m talking one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three. Once, I counted all the way to five.”

  “You count?” She hands me the rainbow ribbon and sticks her arms out to the side. I tie the ribbon around her waist. “Higher,” she says. “Empire.”

  I hike the ribbon up, leaving the puffy down vest to bulge beneath it like a pregnant belly.

  “So that’s what this is all about?” Ramie says. “You want to go to the prom with Tommy Knutson?”

  “Right now I consider him Candidate Number One.”

  Ramie hands me a white cashmere beret and I tuck her wild black bramble hair into it.

  “He is non-ugly,” she says.

  Believe it or not, that’s a big statement coming from Ramie. She’s given up on guys until she gets to college, where she fully intends to have an affair with a professor. A European professor. No, I’m serious. That’s her plan.

  “Before you commit, though,” she says, “let me do some digging.”

  I panic. “Ramie, you cannot under any circumstances let Tommy Knutson know I have any interest in him.”

  “Spot me some credit, Jill. I said digging, not blabbing.” Ramie turns to the side to evaluate her profile. “Uh, Jill, do you see something wrong with this picture?”

  I check out her profile. “Yeah, Rames. You look like a whale.”

  “Not that, dummy.” She points to her beret. “White hat. White dress. It’s too matchy matchy.” She rips off the beret and shakes out her wild hair.

  “Yeah, Rames. That was the problem with the look. You’ve definitely nailed it now.”

  She turns from side to side to examine the full heft of the mal outfit. Somehow it’s managed to make even her skinny legs look fat.

  “Chubby Chic?” I say.

  I’m joking, of course, but Ramie, psycho that she is, gets that look in her eye.

  “No way,” I say.

  She nods slowly. “Yes, Jill. Yes.” She grabs both of my shoulders and looks down on me from her extra six inches. “Chubby Chic. That’s perfect.”

  “You are not wearing that.”

  “Oh, yes I am.”

  I try to untie the rainbow ribbon around her waist, but she pushes my hand away.

  “I am leaving here today with this outfit,” she says. “And I am wearing it to school on Monday.”

  She will too. She’ll walk around all day looking like a pink Michelin Man and try to spread the rumor that Chubby Chic is the new black. Weirdest part? Within the week, she’ll have a few imitators.

  “Hey, you know,” she says, “maybe you should pull a Steven Price on Tommy Knutson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, make your own preemptive strike.”

  “You mean, ask Tommy Knutson to the prom?”

  “Why not?”

  I sit on the edge of the bed. “I never thought of that. It wouldn’t be too forward, would it?”

  “Guys love it. Take the lead. Why should you wait around for him?”

  For Ramie to claim any expertise on what guys love is a bit of a stretch. She’s not exactly a hot property at Winterhead High. Don’t get me wrong. There isn’t a guy at the school who wouldn’t do Ramie. But I can’t think of a single one who would date her. As Mom never tires of reminding me, I’d be much more popular if I “reconsidered my loyalty to that girl.” But I’m not about being popular. To be honest, the fact that I’m able to live any semblance of a normal teenage life is a surprising bonus, given my potential for catastrophic humiliation. Besides, with Ramie as my BFF, no one can honestly accuse me of being anything but comparatively ordinary.

  There is a knock on the door, and Mom breezes right in.

  “Hey, Mom,” I say. “How’s the spying?”

  Mom hovers in the doorway. “I was going to heat up some soup for lunch, sweetie. Will Ramie be joining us?” She does not look at Ramie as she says this. Mom once called Ramie a “worshipper of chaos.” When I told Ramie, she thought it was cool and threatened to tattoo it on her butt cheek.

  “Mom,” I say. “We just ate breakfast.”

  “I know, sweetheart. I want to know how much to defrost.” Without making eye contact, she gives Ramie’s outfit the up and down. “Jill, is that your dress?”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m deeply over it.”

  Ramie grabs the stack of magazines from my desk. “I’ve got to run. I’ll let you know what I find out about you-know-who.”

  “Cool,” I say.

  Mom’s eyes follow Ramie as she flees down the hallway and disappears down the stairs.

  “Was that the down vest you absolutely had to have and would die if you didn’t get for Christmas?”

  “She’s not stealing it, Mom. She’s just borrowing it.”

  Mom tugs at the sleeve of her cashmere sweater, then inclines her head at me.

  “What?” I say.

  “So, you’re concerned about the prom?”

  “I’m not concerned, Mom. I just want to go with Tommy Knutson.”

  She narrows her eyes at me.

  “What!” I say.

  “If he wants to go to the prom with you, sweetie, he’ll ask.”

  “What if he’s shy?” I say.

  Mom sucks in this gigantic breath, like I’ve asked her to explain something deeply obvious. Then she pulls out a paperback, which I’ve just noticed tucked under her arm, and hands it to me.

  “The Guide?” I say.

  Mom nods. “We didn’t have this boo
k when I was your age. We had to improvise.”

  The subtitle is Timeless Tips for Landing Mr. Right. I have a quick flip through it.

  “Men are different,” Mom says. “The sooner you learn that, the better.”

  “I don’t care about men, Mom. I’m focusing on one man. Tommy Knutson. The rest of them can spontaneously combust as far as I’m concerned.”

  I put the book on my desk and start picking up the rejected clothes Ramie has flung about my room, including her own, which she’s left in a pile.

  Mom crosses her arms and leans against the doorjamb. “I know it’s hard to believe,” she says, “but even at the ripe old age of seventeen, you may not know everything there is to know.”

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll read it.”

  She fires one last condescending glare at me, then leaves. On the one hand, I’m not inclined to take Mom’s advice on men. It’s not like her marriage to Dad is anything to brag about. They’ve barely spoken since Dad assumed sole occupancy of our basement. On the other hand, if her stories are to be believed, by the time she graduated from college in Ye Olde Early Eighties, Mom was dripping with “prospects.” No less than six guys proposed to her. Six guys!

  And she chose Dad. That’s the bewildering part. But then, he used to be normal. He used to be a corporate lawyer until he ditched his career on “the eve of partnership, for God’s sake,” to use Mom’s oft-repeated phrase. Mom worked two jobs to put him through law school, so she has an understandably bad attitude about that particular decision. As you’ve undoubtedly guessed by now, my parents are annoyingly complicated. I try not to think about it.

  So anyway, I go to my desk and glance at the first tip, which is “become a being like no other.” I’m fairly certain I already am a being like no other, but the authors have something else in mind. To them, becoming a being like no other means sipping rather than slurping your drink, pausing between sentences, and—I am not kidding here—“if your hair falls into your face, comb it back from the top of your head in a single graceful sweep.”

  I turn to my left and practice the move in the mirror above my dresser. It looks deeply fake at first, but when I practice it a few times, it starts to look natural, and I have to admit, there’s something surprisingly elegant about it. It beats sticking your hair behind your ears or, worse, wearing a barrette.

  I keep reading. Most of the tips involve variations on the theme of playing hard to get. Things like ending a conversation quickly and never calling a guy on the phone. I can’t help wondering, though: if everyone who reads this book follows its advice, won’t we become beings just like every other?

  I close the book and look up at my calendar. I now have one hundred and twenty-six days to get Tommy Knutson to ask me to the prom. That may sound like a long time to you, but I don’t even have a strategy yet. I pick up Mom’s book again. It’s a place to start, right?

  March 14

  Jack

  Let me tell you something about Jill. The girl’s life is a friggin’ fairy tale. I swear she wakes up to the sound of woodland creatures whistling a happy tune at her window. Oh, but it’s not all sunshine and roses, right? “Boo friggin’ hoo, Steven Price asked me to the prom when I really really really want to go with Tommy Knutsack.”

  Well, listen up, Little Jilly Wets-her-pants, when your biggest problem is conning some lazy-eyed schmuckwit into asking you to the prom, you can excuse the rest of us for withholding our sobs. Some of us have real problems to contend with.

  All right, Jack, chill out. Take a few deep breaths.

  Sorry. I don’t mean to rant. I’m in a bad mood. I’m always in a bad mood when I wake up. It’s hormonal. Jill, the lucky bitch, gets three full weeks per cycle to live her stupid life. I get four days. Four premenstrual days. How many dudes have that complaint?

  But don’t go spilling any tears for me. I’ve got this under control. Jill may have her Plan B rituals. Well, I have Plan Jack rituals. They go like this:

  Wake up, check that I’m all in one piece, if you know what I mean, then haul my naked ass out of bed. Jill’s been decent enough to sleep naked at the end of her phase ever since I informed her what it felt like to wake up with my nuts twisted into a thong strap. Yes, I have to tell Jill these things. I have to leave her little notes because of all that Plan B stuff she does to obliterate me. I’m telling you, the girl knows nothing about my life.

  Which means she doesn’t know how much I know about hers.

  So anyway, first thing I do after taking a monster piss in our private bathroom is check the calendar on which Little Anal Annie has dutifully crossed out all the days that have passed. Then I lie right back down to begin my own form of meditation.

  Of course, I skip the “I am all girl” crap. I go right to the black dot. It’s always there, right in the middle of my forehead where Jill left it. But instead of using it to erase things, I do the opposite. I envision myself squeezing through it like a snake into a rabbit hole. Then I project Jill’s last three weeks onto the blackness like a superfast movie and take detailed mental notes of the good parts. I’m not sure she’d appreciate the gory detail in which I record the things she does, says, thinks, lies about, smells, touches and dreams. Would you?

  Don’t be judgmental, though. Jill’s life—that petty, grade-grubbing, Ramie-worshipping life—constitutes my only experience of the outside world. I can’t afford to forget things.

  That’s how it has to be. I’m a realist. I understand the ways of the world. I have no interest in parading our “condition” around like a circus act. Besides, as long as Plan B keeps working, I don’t have to worry about them finding a cure. Oh, don’t be naive. They’d snuff me like a rabid dog if they could. They tried to. That was Plan A.

  Honestly, the fact that “Mom” (and, believe me, I use the term loosely) never came after me with a scalpel is a small miracle. That woman is nuts. You should have seen her reaction on the day I finally woke up. No, not the day Gail Girliepants grew a dick. I’m talking about the day the dick developed an autonomous sense of self. Don’t ask me how this transpired. I’m not a shrink. All I know is that in May of our sophomore year, almost a year after the cycling had begun, I stopped feeling like Jill with a penis and started feeling like me.

  That was a messed-up day. At dinner I told Mom and Dad I wanted to be called Jack, not Jill, because, you know, I was a guy. You should have seen the look on Mom’s face. She jammed her fork into her mashed potatoes and said no way. I should just knock that off right now. The fact that I was suddenly, you know, alive, meant nothing to her. In her eyes, I was nothing more than an ugly wart on a pretty girl’s cheek. She and Dad talked about locking the bedroom door, even handcuffs. What if I escaped? What if I roamed the neighborhood like the bogeyman? What if I ruined their precious Plan B?

  Mom and Dad eventually came to their senses. Well, Mom did. Dad’s senses have been MIA for three years now. She decided against handcuffs and door locks and settled for a sturdy parental filter on the Internet. Big miscalculation. I hacked through it in two days, set up a MySpace page and started downloading epic amounts of porn. It was a short-lived victory, though. When Mom found out—who knows how—she canceled the Internet altogether. The next day, she canceled the phone service. Now only she and Jill have cell phones and Mom keeps both of them with her lest I get my dirty hands on one and make pornographic prank calls. Which I would. Believe me.

  Mom and I formed a tense truce after that. I stopped trying to leak my hideous self into the outside world. She bought me books, CDs and Nintendo. But things were never the same. I wasn’t her child anymore. I was an unwanted houseguest. A dangerous unwanted houseguest. After a while, I started having dinner in my bedroom. She didn’t mind. She was glad to be rid of me. Dad was harder to read. He always had this guilty look on his face as if he was about to say something but didn’t know how to phrase it. What was I supposed to make of that?

  I hardly ever leave my room anymore, except to raid the fridge. Someti
mes I bump into Dad in the kitchen, but for the most part, he stays in his basement and I stay in my room. When I need something from the outside world, I leave a note for Jill. She’s pretty cool about getting me stuff: books, DVDs, that kind of thing. She’s all right, I guess. I just wish she wasn’t so boring.

  It’s an issue for me because, like I said, her life is my only window to the outside world. It’d be nice if the girl would cut me some slack and, I don’t know, vandalize something, flip off a teacher or maybe experiment with lesbianism. Something. Instead, I’m forced to live vicariously through the tedious non-adventures of Marjorie Model Citizen.

  But what can I do? I try to make the best of it. When life gives you lemons, and all that.

  So anyway, on March 14, after taking a piss and noting that only one hundred and one days remain to get Tommy Knutcase to ask us to the prom, I lie down, summon the black dot and squeeze through the rabbit hole of Jill’s life. I won’t bore you with the complete details. Suffice it to say, it goes something like this:

  Saw Ramie in a bra . . . speed-read Mom’s Guide book . . . broke a fingernail . . . tripped over Tony Camere in front of a bunch of football players . . . got Mrs. Wainwright to raise my A– to an A on my Red Badge of Courage paper . . . almost wet myself in calculus when Tommy Knutjob looked at me . . . secretively picked my nose in Spanish class . . . practiced Ramie’s alluring over-the-shoulder glance in the mirror.

  Riveting stuff, right? Bear with me. There is one theme from Harriet Ho-hum’s Adventures in Snoozeland that always gets my juices flowing. I spend extra time remembering those sections. I savor every luscious, forbidden detail. If Jill ever knew about this illicit pleasure of mine, she’d freak out. Heck, it scares me sometimes. There’s something so taboo about it. But what can I do? I’m a flesh-and-blood guy. Just because no one knows I exist, it doesn’t mean I don’t have needs. In fact, I’m having a need right now. Time to leave Barbara Boredom a note with a new request.

  March 18

  Jill

  Ninety-seven days until prom night.