Free Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach Page B

hand.
    “Holy effing crap!” I shouted.
    “Woooo!” Cody shouted.
    “Jesus, Rein Stone,” someone shouted from above.
    “You’re big,” Cody smiled.
    Then my legs turned to rubber, and I almost fell over. Cody and I shuffled to his truck, and he drove me home. When he stopped in front of my house, he said, “This is going to be a great summer.”
    “Yeah,” I smiled and then climbed down from the cab. “Thanks, man.”
    I went in through the garage door and avoided Andrew and Jerri, who were upstairs talking. I showered but couldn’t get the smell out of my nose. Pee smell. I wondered if I would smell vaguely of pee for the rest of my life? A brawny pee-smeller with fur and muscles. I wondered if it was worth it. I figured it was. I already knew it was. Definitely. “Did you notice your brain didn’t talk to itself the entire time you were lifting?” the voice in my head asked. That’s great. Maybe I’ll learn to enjoy the pee smell. I thought of my dad and the smell in the Volvo. I sniffed and crinkled my nose. Weird smell. Then I coated myself in deodorant. I literally put deodorant on my whole body. Slip slop. Smelled like flowers soaked in pee. Gross.
    The doorbell rang.
    Oh, no.
    Aleah.
    Andrew.
    Jerri.
    Me.

CHAPTER 16: WE COULD ONLY SEE EACH OTHER, SERIOUSLY
    Yeah, what a huge day.
    From the bathroom where I’d just applied deodorant to my entire body, I heard Aleah and her father enter my house. I’d had no intention of “visiting” with them. Before. But wasn’t I large? Wasn’t I a Division I football prospect? I dunked a basketball. Holy Christ, I dunked a freaking basketball! I liked what Cody said too. I had to carry myself like an athlete. Jesus.
    Before doing anything, I went into my bedroom to check email. Surely Gus would have written something hilarious by now. I opened it up. Nothing. Where the hell was Gus?
    I wrote: beautiful piano girl from your bedroom is upstairs in my house.
    From downstairs in my bedroom, I could hear Jerri play cheery, although I knew she was not.
    “Oh, wonderful! Oh, lovely! What a beautiful dress!” She actually sounded kind of psycho (not surprising). I couldn’t hear Andrew at all, which made me think he was acting strange, probably just staring unblinkingly at Aleah from behind his plastic nerd frames and thinking about how jealous he was of her.
    If I let Andrew and Jerri represent the family, there was no way I could face Aleah Jennings, super genius, at her house for the rest of the summer.
    Om shanti shanti shanti , I mumbled. Then I slapped myself in the face. No, no, no! Not freaky om shanti! I am big. I am huge. I am an athlete.
    I stood straight. I broadened my shoulders. I looked at myself in the full-length mirror that hung on my bedroom door. I said, “I am really big.” What was weird was this: I looked really big. For real. I looked like a young man you might believe is fast. I clenched my jaw and glared and looked sort of mean and ugly and, potentially, sort of smelly, which was accurate.
    ***
    You know, I’ve never had any particular dislike for people who play sports. When I was little, I even watched football on TV. Green Bay Packers. I asked for a Brett Favre jersey once for my birthday (a request Jerri totally ignored—I believe she got me a Shel Silverstein poetry book that year). I’ve watched basketball too. I like big dunks. Sure, jocks smell funny. But animals don’t smell good, and I never blamed them for that fact. It’s nature. I never would’ve even cared that Ken Johnson played sports if he didn’t knock me off my damn bike when he was the one who parked half sideways in the swimming pool parking lot. Yes, it pissed me off that jocks called Gus names and me names and that Karpinski broke Sam Peterson’s finger in seventh grade (I’m sure on purpose, but he never got in trouble for it). None of that has to do with sports. I don’t mind sports. I like sports. I can be good at sports.
    In the mirror, I expanded