SCARED

I DO IT.

I meet him after school.

I go because I’m too scared not to.

But being scared is only 99 percent of the reason why I join Luis after school.

The other 1 percent doesn’t have much to do with fear at all.

The 1 percent is made up of the following:

a) I’m bored.

b) Too many old people.

c) Curiosity.

Let’s take these in order:

For starters, I’m so bored I can’t stand it. I gotta do something! This is the first time I’ve felt like doing anything in forever. And that’s huge, because my level of boredom has been unprecedented. I’ve been so bored I don’t feel like anything can be not boring. Eating, watching TV, going fishing … even listening to Nirvana.

I know there’s more to life than this pile of blah and sometimes I convince myself to get out there and look for it. But I just can’t make the move. I can’t start.

I can’t begin to start trying.

Until now.

I don’t know why. I don’t know what it is, but there’s this little piece of me that wants to do something about it.

To try and get my ass moving.

The next part of the 1 percent: I’m spending too much time with too many old people. No offense to Ginny and Bill, but I’d like to hang out with someone who doesn’t have her hair dyed bluish, or someone who doesn’t have more hair growing out of his ears and nose than the top of his head. And it’d be nice to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t start sentences with “I remember when I was your age,” followed by a firsthand account of plowing the fields behind a mule or joining Pa to take up arms against the British in the fucking Revolutionary War!

The third and final portion of the 1 percent is curiosity.

I’m curious about Luis.

I wanna know what Luis is like. I mean, I thought I knew what he was like. I thought he was someone who wouldn’t write a poem for stupid Cassidy. I don’t know why, but I wanna know. And I’m curious to see where a kid like him lives. How he lives.

The fear of what Luis would do to me if I don’t meet him is so big that this 1 percent of stuff doesn’t even matter. I’d be meeting Luis if the 1 percent didn’t exist.

But it does.