Free Biggie by Derek E. Sullivan

but the way I look at it is that when we’re eighty years old and reminiscing on how we met, I doubt she’ll care how I put together the night we fell in love. Second, I’m addicted to her poetry. She sends all of her poems to her cousin, Margaret, who lives on an air force base in Germany. The first poem of hers I read is called It Felt Like Being Drunk . The poem itself sucks. It rhymes but the rhymes are not good. The first two lines go like this or something:
    Tuesday was a blast. Wednesday sucked ass.
    Thursday flat out stunk. Friday, I will get drunk.
    I always wonder if she drank when she was a seventh grader or if it is a metaphor for doing something else, something seventh graders do. I don’t know how to explain it, but the idea that she might’ve gotten drunk when she was thirteen made me like her then, and now, five years later, I still like her. I just can’t find the perfect time to ask her out.
    If I’m going to be Annabelle’s boyfriend, I’m going to have to lose weight. I know that. I’m not stupid. She’s beautiful—dark hair with red streaks, little nose, green eyes. She’s about five-foot-six with massive breasts trapped inside those amazingly tight V-neck shirts, my favorite. She has her ears and nose pierced. The nose piercing, a little silver stud centered on her left nostril, makes me melt every time I see her. She probably weighs around 160 pounds—not anorexic, but not fat either. Since I fell for her five years ago, she’s had five boyfriends. Three of them easily weigh more than two hundred pounds, so she doesn’t like skinny guys.
    I figure if I can get down to 250 pounds, she would go out with me. And if television diet shows have taught me anything, it’s that fat people lose weight at a faster rate than skinny people. With Laser training me, I should lose fifty pounds in a few weeks.
    Once I reach 250, I need to quit being a pussy and step up and ask her. I have all the research I need; I just need to pull the trigger and ask her out. But how do I do it? How can I ask out someone who I’ve never had a single conversation with? She comes into the convenience store most nights, so I could just ask her then. But what do I say? Hey Annabelle, want to go out with me sometime? No, I need a more open-ended question. It’s a girl’s reflex to say no when asked out by surprise. Maybe I’ll ask her what she’s doing on Friday night. That’s pretty open. She can’t say no to that.
    But what if she tells me she’s going out on a date, which would be worse than her saying no. I guess I could ask her if she’s still dating Mike, but then I might come across as her dad, wondering what she’s up to. This is so difficult.
    My problem is that I’m trying to accomplish this the hard way—in the real world. Nothing good ever happens in the real world—at least not to me.
    As I think about her, I feel the urge to see that smile, those eyes, those V-neck shirts. I roll out of bed and flip open my laptop.
    I pull up Twitter and log out of my account. As I go to log in with her information, I stop. For years, I’ve scrolled through her private, protected photos with her password, but now, after the perfect game, I wonder if I could just be her Twitter follower and see the photos that way. I’ve never sent her a follow request. In fact, I’m not friends with anyone at school on any site. I keep my online and school worlds apart.
    Not that I haven’t thought about sending her a request. I mean, we do go to school together. I doubt she wouldn’t accept it. But then a small part of me worries that she would find it weird that I asked. Maybe she would take a closer look at me and figure out that I’ve been logging on to her account for years. Whenever I’ve considered sending a follow request, I’ve decided it’s better to remain invisible.
    But tonight, I send the