I Thought Things Would be Better if Humans Only Fucked to Reproduce

From our kitchen, you could see into our neighbour’s house. This girl lived there. She was a year younger than me. She was hot in an all-American sort of way. She wore tight Abercrombie & Fitch tops, and shorts with college logos printed on the arse. Sometimes I would see her on the bus and I would turn around real quick and look out the window. Once, she said my brother was cute. At dinner, I imagined climbing the fence into their backyard and doing that thing where you throw rocks at someone’s window when it’s really late, except her dad seemed terrifying, and I thought if I broke the window I probably wouldn’t have enough money to replace it. The room we could see into always had a blind down. Different colours always flashed behind the blinds. One night at dinner I imagined us watching TV together. I imagined sitting there, first with a window open, with the hot Texan air on our necks and arms, and then, at some point, closing the window and sweating in air-con. I imagined almost holding her hand and her dad walking in and saying something in a gravelly voice and me saying, ‘Thank you,’ and leaving. I stared at their window and choked on my carrot. Before I went to bed I thought about sex. I stared at my wall. Sex seemed dumb, but no dumber than everything else.