Free Teen Angst? Naaah ... by Ned Vizzini

have sparring * classes. Everyone fights in rounds for an hour. There’s a guy named Brendan who only comes on Wednesdays. He’s about six feet two and two hundred pounds, with tree trunks for legs. Sparring with him is like taking on a swinging girder—at any time, he can just kick a leg straight out and topple me. Once or twice each Wednesday, as we rotate partners, he knocks the wind out of me. Sabunim has to rub my back until I can breathe again before she encourages me to keep fighting.
    Jessica Green’s True Power Martial Arts is like my high school’s evil twin. Everything that I can do at Stuyvesant—concentrate, participate in class, keep my pants on—I can’t manage in karate. I’m pretty anonymous at Stuy, but in karate, everyone knows my name.
    Maybe the real reason that I go to karate class is because I need something to be bad at. I’ve always been good at school stuff: math, reading, tests, obedience. Until karate, my only problem was talking out of turn in class. Now I have something to be bad at twice a week, over and over, without hope of improvement. The humiliation is becoming addictive.
    * When I was eight, I played in a soccer league for a season. All the other teams had cool names (Tigers, Condors), but I got stuck on a team with an insane coach named Mr. Sack, who insisted on calling us “The Sack Attack.” The Sack Attack went 0–12 that season. I was the goalie.
    * Sparring means “controlled fighting.” It’s two people getting together and beating on each other for two minutes.

HERE COMES TROUBLE
    â€œA re you a virgin?” she asked, speaking slowly and deliberately.
    â€œOf course,” I said, nodding several times. Perfectly reasonable question.
    â€œWell, I lost my virginity … ah … the summer between ninth and tenth grades. Don’t lose it too soon.”
    Oh, sure, that’s a big problem of mine. Losing it too soon.
    â€œHow about, you know, getting to third base? * Have you ever done that?”
    â€œUh, no,” I gulped.
    â€œUh-huh.”
    She sipped her drink. There was silence. I saw what was coming: more questions.
    â€œSo you never got laid? Have you ever felt a girl’s breasts?”
    After each of these, I shook my head, and she looked even more stunned.
    I stopped her with a speech. “Uh, I don’t think you understand. I’m a nerd. See, what we do is”—Icounted on my fingers—“(1) go to school, (2) get good grades, (3) come home, (4) play Magic. I’m just not good with girls.”
    She didn’t give up. “Are your parents really overprotective or something?”
    â€œNope. They’re great.”
    â€œAnd no girls like you?”
    â€œMaybe some do. I don’t talk to them much. It’s probably my crooked mouth.”
    â€œYour mouth?
Noooo
. I don’t think it’s crooked. I think it’s very sexy.”
    Whoa. I was talking with Amy Sohn,
New York Press
columnist, at the paper’s annual “Best of Manhattan” party. * I had wanted to meet her all evening. She wrote some amazingly dirty things in a weekly newspaper read by a hundred thousand people.
    I liked her. She was shorter than me, wearing something black. Stylish red glasses. Perfectly arched eyebrows. A childlike face. She reminded me of a fifth-grade teacher—not
my
fifth-grade teacher, a brown-toothed psychotic who had throttled my friend Ben ** during class—but a nice, normal teacher.
    â€œWell …,” she said, more casually than before, asI sipped my cola. “If you ever do want to lose your virginity, call me. I’ll loan you my
body
.” *
    My brain, which had churned out clever anecdotes just moments before, shut down. Was I being offered sexual favors by an older woman? Nah. Must have misheard.
    â€œI’m sorry?” I squeaked.
    â€œI said,” she moved in close, slowly mouthing each