“Um, yeah, exactly! I thought I misheard him at first, or that it was a joke. But he said it again.”
“Shut up,” Lindsey said. She put the chip down without bothering to take a bite.
“I’m serious! I went in there, and I asked him if there was any way I could get my grade up, and he said yes, you can be my sex toy.”
Lindsey’s eyes widened. “Holy shit,” she said. “That’s hot. I need to go talk to him about that. You don’t think he’d mind having more than one sex toy, right?”
“Lindsey!” I said. “Stop it!”
“What? Would you mind? You’d share, right?”
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I am. Well, kind of. I mean, if he’s that open about it, hell yes I’m going to go see him about some extra credit of my own. That’s the whole reason I signed up for the damn class in the first place! He’s hot.”
“I didn’t agree to it,” I said. “There’s no way I could agree to that. It’s like . . . it’s like exploitation or something.”
“Not if you want it, too.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Aw, come on, Tessa. He’s hot. I bet he’s great in bed. It’d be fun. How could you not want that?”
“Um, because it’s probably illegal? Or at least immoral.”
“I don’t think it’s illegal for a professor to sleep with a student. It might be against policy or something, but I don’t think it’s something he’d go to jail for. It’s not like you’re underage.”
I shook my head. “Why are we talking about this like it’s something I’m going to do? Because I’m not.”
Lindsey shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “Suit yourself. But you know as well as I do that your parents are going to freak.”
“I know. But I’m hoping if I go to them and rationally explain that I am working on getting my GPA back up and that I will graduate with a 4.0, that maybe they won’t be so hard on me.”
She stuffed a chip heaping with guacamole into her mouth and nodded, probably just to avoid having to tell me that there was no way my parents were going to be easy on me.
4.
Leo
I was on my way to meet up with Jack when my brother, Aaron, called.
I almost didn’t pick up the phone, because I had zero desire to hear about Aaron’s latest adventures, but on the fifth ring, I relented. He was, after all, my brother.
“Yo, what’s up!” he said. “Just had a few minutes and thought I’d give you a call. How’s it going?”
“Oh great, living the dream,” I said, even though it was really Aaron who was living the dream. It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say that he was the whole reason I’d gotten into the extreme sports thing in the first place; he was four years older than me, had been skating his whole life, turned pro at 17, and never looked back. He was definitely one of the oldest guys on the scene now, but instead of that holding him back, the newer kids looked up to him as a pioneer, a wise master to be revered.
“That’s great,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Reykjavik. We’re going to shoot a video over here, and then we’ll be heading to Paris. I was thinking how dope it would be if you met up with us.”
“In Iceland?”
“Yeah! I know how much you like it here. Really great place. Or Paris. I haven’t seen you in like, a year or something. I get that you’re busy and everything, but it’d be great to hang out.” At another time, I would have been all over that shit. Hell, he wouldn’t have needed to call me like this, because I would have already been out there. Even if I hadn’t been working on a story, I’d sometimes go with Aaron when he traveled, and just as often as not, I’d come across a story, one that my editor hadn’t even thought of, and I’d write it up, and everyone there would tell me I was a genius, that I really knew how to seize the zeitgeist. But now. Now I could barely even be on the phone with Aaron without wanting to rip my fucking hair out. Everything was the same for him, but for me, things were basically unrecognizable.
“I can’t get the time off,” I said. “It’s the middle of the term.”