King Dork Approximately

ALSO BY FRANK PORTMAN

King Dork

Andromeda Klein

So I’m just going to pick up where I left off, if that’s all right with you.

Tenth Grade, act one, was pretty awful. I wouldn’t recommend tenth grade to anyone. Yet I survived. And while there was no particular reason to believe that the looming second act would be much better, the most pressing challenge, as I saw it, would merely be figuring out a new hair strategy for the upcoming semester. My previous method of preemptive self-ostracism, where I would sit with my back against the wall hiding my face behind my glasses and my glasses behind my hair and my hair behind a book, would be severely hampered because I had quite a bit less hair to work with. They had had to shave some of it off to do my surgery, and then my mom had cut the rest of it pretty short with my dad’s old electric clippers once I got home from the hospital.

“You’re a nice-looking boy without all that hair,” she had said, causing my sister, Amanda, to collapse in melodramatic amusement.

Well, yes. I was a “nice-looking boy,” and it was going to be a great year. Maybe I could get a hat or something, was my main thought.

Of course, I was as wrong as wrong could be. The horrors of Tenth Grade, act 2, would not, and could not, be solved by a mere hat.

That said, do you want to hear something weird? If yes, just read this sentence out loud:

I’ve done it. With a girl
.

It is basically true, as in, it’s pretty much the case. Except “I” is me, not you, and I guess that’s more like one and a half sentences. So yeah, I screwed that up, but never mind.

Now, perhaps it didn’t sound all that weird when
you
said it aloud—I don’t know you. (And if you’re a girl and it didn’t sound weird, all I can say is, congratulations: you’re hot.) But when I say it, trust me, it sounds weird. And maybe you’re thinking I’m just being cagey, and it will turn out that the “it” that was done, with the girl, by me, was something like baking cookies, or playing Monopoly, or fetching a pail of water from the old well up the hill. But I assure you, it means what people usually mean by “it.” I’m talking full-on, approximately literal ramoning. (If you’ve somehow been fortunate enough to avoid my previous explanations, I’ll make it clear: ramoning is sex.)

I know you probably don’t believe me about this alleged ramoning. I wouldn’t believe me either. And it’s true that I’ve been caught in an exaggeration or three when it comes to women. For instance, being strictly honest, I had, at the beginning of the stuff I’m going to tell you about, made out with three girls in my short career as a womanizer. Well, okay, technically two, but the third one kind of counts, as she was an alternate identity of one of the first two. And what if something
extra special
happened during one of these “sessions,” something that went above and beyond the call of ordinary making out? Shouldn’t that really count as a bit more than one? I think so. And then if I include girls who have, say, pretended to be interested in me as a Make-out/Fake-out stunt, and girls I’ve accidentally brushed up against, and girls where it seemed like they might have been looking at me and maybe would have possibly been potentially willing to make out with me? Well, then sometimes
I can get the total up to as high as twelve or thirteen. Once I even made it to nineteen, but since two were comic book characters and one of those was a space robot, even I can’t accept that statistic as official.

But trying to be as honest and accurate as I can, we’re talking making out with anywhere from three to nineteen girls, but mostly just two, and doing it with at least one. Salvador Dalí couldn’t have done much better at fifteen, I’m pretty sure of that. I’ll tell you what, though: math of any kind makes me dizzy these days.

So who’s the lucky lady, and who’s this Salvador Dalí character, you’re asking? Well, Salvador Dalí—and I’m surprised at you for not knowing this—was this Spanish artist who painted things like melting clocks and ships with butterfly sails. He was a notorious lover of women, particularly of naked women, who all went wild for his crazy eyes and his big twisty mustache. There’s a photo of him using a sexy lady as a desk, doing office work on her belly. Even I can imagine being interested in homework under such circumstances. One day I may attempt to pattern myself after him, if I’m not doing it already. So that’s our Salvador. As for the “lucky lady,” that’s the thing I’m telling you about here, so don’t rush me. (But the Salvador Dollies would be a great band name, and if I ever meet three willing girls I will totally Kim Fowley them and turn them into rock and roll history. Who’s this Kim Fowley? Look him up, I’m tired of explaining.)

Anyway, you’ll have to bear with me because even though I was promised a full recovery, my brains are still scrambled on account of this head injury, which, if you remember from my previous explanations, I received when the normal people of the world tried to kill rock and roll by hitting me in the face
with a brass instrument. Words come out a little funny sometimes, when I talk at all, and I find I lose track of things more easily than I believe I used to. Thanks, tuba.