Free (You) Set Me on Fire by Mariko Tamaki Page B

out the other side of the dancing crowd. “Come here.”
    They say that when a person looks at your lips it means they’re about to kiss you. Unless the person is a dentist. As far as I know, this is true. The first time I kissed Anne I’d been staring at her lips for hours, sitting on the couch next to her while we watched soaps. I remember reaching forward and touching Anne’s knee, feeling the tiny prickles of the spots she’d missed shaving. First kiss. Body shaking. basketball">OH
    With glittery dance lights swooping overhead, I watched Shar/Cher’s eyes shift down to my moustache. Watched her eyelashes with the tinyrhinestones on the rim twinkle as her weight shifted forward, into my arms, and her lips pressed against mine.
    “WAIT!” something inside me screamed. But then Shar/Cher’s fingers pushed into my back and whatever ideas I had for self-preservation floated up into the rafters like so many soap bubbles, popping against the bass of the music while a little piece of me slipped out of my mouth, into hers.
    Shar’s kiss was ravenous and overwhelming. Her arms wrapped around me, pulling me tighter.
    “Let’s go, Sonny,” she mumbled, her breath pushing against mine. “Let’s get out of here before I change my mind.”
    We ended up messing around in my bed, mostly kissing. I think. I tried to focus and steady myself but my brain was awash with lips and ss="body-text_

SEVEN
    Sex is a problem
    The day after Halloween, I rolled out of bed and into the bathroom where I barfed. Violently. Several times. After a period of recuperation, a swig out of a pop bottle of mystery brown fizzy contents, and a shower, I managed to collect myself and find my way to Social Problems.
    One twenty-five p.m. Time for my “morning” class.
    I was late, and fumbled my way into a seat as Professor J paused to take a couple of chugs from her giant bottle of green Gatorade. The auditorium was a mass of hungover students, clearly unable to sit up unaided. The seats closest to the walls were in high demand. I caught sight of top hat, a.k.a. Pumpkin Head, a.k.a. Jonathon waving at me from his perch in the top row.
    “Sorry.” tcking to " aid="BE6O8">I wondered if he smelled like pumpkin. I immediately stopped wondering when it became clear that thinking about food made my stomach want to turn itself inside out.
    “The question we must ask ourselves, of course,” Professor J was saying, “is whether we as a society even know we have a problem. Or, better yet, how we know when something is a problem.”
    In the seats next to me, two girls were doodling back and forth on a notebook. One girl drew a sperm and the other started making a jacking-off motion in her lap.
    “You’re going to say, ‘There are symptoms.’ Of course there are. How do we know we have an economic problem? We have symptoms. We have a rise in unemployment. Debt. But what else? How else do we know we have a problem?”
    College professors ask a lot of questions they don’t want answered. I’d had no idea what a rhetorical question even was until after a couple of weeks at college when I went back to my room and out of boredom searched “questions you don’t answer” on Google.
    I got a page about talking to kids about sex and a page on “rhetorical” questions. Rhetorical questions sound like questions but they’re not. They’re leadspeople use for talking about something they want to talk about.
    On the screen behind the podium, a series of posters flashed. Propaganda. Pictures of kids smoking pot with the word “MARIJUANA” in big monster-green letters. World War II posters of the “ORIENTAL MENACE.” A pamphlet about promiscuity with a girl sitting in a doctor’s office weeping.
    “We know we have a problem because people tell us we have a problem. Not always so bluntly. It’s not every day that someone comes up to you on the street and TELLS you that you have a problem. No. Society tells us we have a problem in other ways.”
    I wrote