She was beautiful. I’ll always remember her in a red-and-black plaid skirt and cream blouse. Big hair, like all the girls; not a real blond, but there was something erotic in the way her roots matched her eyeliner. Breasts juicy as kumquats. Legs like pistons – she ran track, which surprised anyone who saw how much she smoked.

Shitty taste in music, though – seemed like every time I was over, Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla was on her boombox.

(As much as I hate to admit it, I can’t hear “We Built This City” without getting a little hard.)

But she wasn’t of my sphere. She was of the angels and I was of base stuff. Nerdy stuff, ink-stained and gawky in glasses, with bad teeth and worse hair. She wasn’t doing well in math – she wasn’t doing well in anything – and it didn’t take much effort on her part to get me to tutor her. At the time, I thought she was flirting with me, which only shows how clueless I was. I was the platypus man, a collection of God’s leftover parts: awkward, poisonous and all wet.