Read Online Hot Pink by Adam Levin - Free Book Online Page B

said. “I think he’s a sleaze. But what was he doing in your house, though, the sleaze?”
    â€œWho knows,” Franco said. “Probably screwing my mother. Fucken used-car salesman. Parakeet breeder.”
    I thought “parakeet breeder” was a pretty funny way to say fag, but it didn’t make me laugh, cause I didn’t like him talking about his ma having sex, especially with a sleaze who colored his hair. I never even really officially met her—she barely left the house—but I saw her take the garbage out a couple of times and she looked used-up, like she belonged in a bathrobe 24-7 and it hurt her teeth to eat. It was a mean thing to say, I thought, what Franco said about her.
    â€œThat’s not nice to say that about your ma,” I said.
    â€œTo say what?” Franco said.
    â€œThat she’s screwing some guy.”
    â€œMy dad used to say it all the time,” he said. “All the time.”
    Me and Franco became friends the day we saw his dad’s ghost. That was the first day of the fifty-four-day run of me and Franco hanging out together, which was also the first day we ever hung out together. At that time, Franco was just friends with Helio who was my friend. Helio had weird chromosomes or genes or whatever and was brown like a Mexican guy, but Italian like most of the rest of the neighborhood, and his stomach wasn’t just a six-pack but an eight-. We’d been friends since fourth grade, when he got kicked out of fifth and put in my reading class. Five out of six times, on average, he beat me up in a fight, but that wasn’t just because he was strong. About two out of three times, he’d fight me in front of people, which put me off guard because he was funny and girls liked him, too, and so they would cheer for him like he was the home team and I was the away team. Even if I’d been like the home team and him like the away team, though, I don’t think it would’ve changed our outcomes too much, cause it was just people watching that screwed me up. When it was just me and Helio fighting, I won one in two times. That’s about seventeen percent of fights won overall compared to fifty percent of fights-fought-in-private won, and considering that me and Helio used to fight, on average, three out of seven days a week for nearly three whole school years, my stats are reliable. Unless I mean significant. I get it confused sometimes, the difference between reliability and significance, and that’s one reason why even though I’m supposed to be the junk at math—it’s mostly my math skills that got me tracked into gifted—I think that, really, I’m just above-average good at it. Which doesn’t even make me feel a little bit bad cause those other guys in gifted are serious pussies. All I’m trying to say is it’s highly unlikely that my outcomes against Helio in public versus private fights can be accounted for by freak accident. I tried explaining that to Jenny Wansie once cause we were alone in the nurse’s office together and it seemed like she finally liked me to my face a little bit, but then after we were done having our temperatures taken and mine was high and hers was normal, which I think made her mad at me, she said that I was a freak accident, and then when I came back to school the next week from having the strept throat, all her girl friends started calling me “Freak Accident,” then they called me “FA,” like eff ay , and then the guys who were friends with the girls called me “Fa,” like fah . Some of these guys were on the basketball team, and I beat two of them up for saying Fa to me, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to beat basketball guys up because fighting isn’t why people like them. It’s basketball. And even if I had it in me to make it so they couldn’t play basketball anymore, by breaking their fingers or cutting important