(I was playing Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, natch.)

On second thought, it’s probably good Corey forced me out of my room. I might have ended up with my head in an oven the way I was going. Being a teenager sucks balls. I have too many feelings, and the weirdest things give me an erection. Like a strong breeze. Or fresh tofu. I know, I know. That’s weird and gross and dumb. How do you think I feel? My emotions are whack, and I get inappropriate boners. And I use words like boners. Why can’t I be in my forties with the beginnings of receding hair and an inevitable middle-age spare tire already? Life would be so much easier.

“I’m fine,” I say to Corey, as if the poem with all my feels doesn’t exist. “I haven’t been sleeping too well, but I’ll get over it.”

“Uh-huh,” he says in that way that tells me he’s not buying a single word coming out of my mouth. “Talked to Bear yet?”

Fuck Bear. Stupid fucking Bear. “Nope.”

“How about Otter?”

Fuck him too! “Nope.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve tried to call Dominic.”

Fuck him the most! “Of course not!” I scoff. “As if! Not hardly! I would never! The sheer audacity of such a question! How—”

“You just don’t know what to say, right?”

“He has a kid!” I shout. People laying out next to us look at me weird. I look back at them just as weird. “A child,” I say in a lower voice. “He came, he saw, he conquered that woman’s nether regions, and now he has something to show for it!”

“I still don’t know exactly what you’re pissed off about,” Corey says, spreading sunblock on his brown shoulders. “The having a kid part? The you not knowing part? The people not telling you part? The fact that you want to have relations with him part? The fact that he’s straight part? Help me, Tyson. Tell me what it is.”

“Pretty much all of it,” I admit.

“Ugh. Your teenage emotions are drowning me.”

“You’re only a couple years older than me,” I remind him.

“And with age comes sophistication and maturity,” he says with a sniff. “Of which I have both in spades. I don’t understand your tiny little world anymore. I’ve grown up.”

“What about the Starbucks guy?”

“I’m positive I have no idea of what you speak.”

“For a month straight before we came back here,” I remind him, “you made me go to Starbucks every day so that you could stare at Lorenzo the barista. You squealed at him when he remembered that you didn’t want whipped cream on your Frappuccino.”

“Lorenzo,” Corey says with a sigh. “My summer fling that never was. And it never was because I had to come back here with you, watch as family revelations are revealed, and then deal with your emo fallout. Thank you. Thank you so much for this.”

“Can we talk about me some more?”