Chapter 6

The announcement that Robin had won her division wasn't completely unexpected, but she jumped into my arms like we'd just won the lottery. And that was a pretty good analogy. By winning the 18-and-over division in Las Vegas, and becoming one of the five national finalists, Robin had guaranteed herself another hundred thousand dollars.

Becca had quite clearly expected to win everything up to the national divisions. Usually I got a high five; once I'd gotten a peck on the cheek. The only time she got excited was when she won the whole thing.

Robin, though, was really excited every time she won. Except for the first time, maybe. After that one, she just turned to me and asked, "Ready to go?"

That was just about the only thing she'd said to me all day up until that point. I'd arrived at her house at 8:30, where I dutifully pulled into the garage. She came out in the same sweats, jacket, and ball cap that she'd worn three months ago, and slammed the car door behind her.

"Morning, sunshine," I said.

"Kenny?" she said.

"Yes?"

"Shut up."

I made several other attempts at conversation, but I was pretty clearly getting the silent treatment, the worst punishment, in my view, ever invented by women.

I pulled into the parking lot of the high school and said hello to the principal (I still couldn't believe we were doing this in the high school gym, but apparently the baseball field needed reseeding). Robin hustled in ahead of me, pulling the cap low over her eyes. Fortunately, when it became clear to that they didn't allow the general public in for this round, and that there was no one there who knew her, she finally started to relax. Not enough to talk to me, but enough to let her stop looking around the gym every twenty seconds.

While the next-to-last group performed, she changed into her gown. She was stunning. And that, rather than her performance, is pretty much what got her into the next round. By the time it was our turn, the place was almost completely empty; there wasn't anyone left to applaud or even offer encouragement. In addition, the college guys who were judging had gotten their fill of twenty-somethings during the earlier divisions, and weren't all that excited about seeing the ten or eleven older women in the final group. Robin wasn't that enthusiastic either, but after her only real competitor fell over while trying to pull her evening gown over her head, they pretty much had no choice but to give her the title.

"You perform like that next time," I said when we were driving home, "and you're going to be out."

"Maybe next time I'll try to forget that you're also fucking my daughter," Robin snapped back at me.

I couldn't help but laugh.

"Did she tell you that?" I asked.

"She didn't have to," she said. "I know the look."

"Not as well as you think you do," I said. "Although she did offer to do my head last night."

"To what?" Robin asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.

"You know, I really like your daughter," I smiled, keeping my eyes on the road. "Last night was our last night together, and she was so cute. She said to me, very shyly, 'I want to do your head, Kenny.' I had no idea what she meant either, so I asked, do what to my head? She said, you know, suck it. And I still had no clue."

Robin had started laughing now, too.

"So I asked her straight out, 'you want to suck my head?' And she said, no, she wanted to, you know."

Robin was holding her sides, unable to get enough air to laugh.

"You really ought to go ahead with that birds and bees stuff," I said. "So at least when she wants to offer to give somebody head she knows how to do it."

"So what did you tell her?" Robin finally asked, wiping the tears away.

"I told her it was the wrong time of month," I said.

She whacked me on the arm.

"You did not," she said, laughing even harder. "What did you tell her?"

"I told her that I didn't want to do it in my car, parked on a road by a lake, when it was going to be her first time."

"She loves you, you know that, don't you?" Robin said. "That's what that look was, wasn't it?"

"I think I love her, too," I said wistfully. "Of course, her feelings may change after she finds out about me and her mother."

Robin looked over at me with a smile.

"I think we can keep it a secret," she said softly. "Now, how about we head back to my house and let me do your head?"

So Friday had been a heavenly day, Saturday turned into a heavenly day, and Sunday was hell. That's when I met my roommate, the Devil. Or The Chipster, as he wanted me to call him. As in, "hi, I'm The Chipster, you must be Kenny, huh?"

"Yeah, um, hi," I said, looking around for a square foot of space to put the things I'd brought. "This is my mom."

"Hi, how are you?" The Chipster said, looking her up and down.

"I'm fine, thank you," Mom was doing her best not to laugh, bless her soul. Go ahead, mom, laugh! "So you must have been here a while already."

"Yeah, football practice," The Chipster said. "I'm the team's new QB."

"Cubie?" Mom asked.

"Quarterback," he nodded. "Team leader, you know."

Oh, give me a fucking break. We're going to be living together for a year, and this asshole's trying to pick up my mother.

"So one of these desks is mine, right?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, dude, sorry," he said. "I been studyin' my playbook at your desk."

He swept his shit off and I started moving in.

From there, it just got worse. I seemed to have landed in some football players' hallway. Only about a quarter of us weren't jocks, and of those, I got along with maybe two or three. The jocks? There was a guy named Alec who was decent enough; the rest were simply greater or lesser assholes.

Alec was actually going to be a starting safety this year as a freshman. He kind of had to be friends with The Chipster, but he saw through him pretty quickly. It was Alec who told me that The Chipster was going to be redshirted this year. The Chipster explained that nobody wanted to embarrass the team's current quarterback, who'd be graduating this year. Alec's explanation seemed much more likely — that the coaches thought it would take The Chipster at least another four years to mature enough to play quarterback in college, and that he would finally be the starting quarterback after the rest of us had graduated.

His having been left off the playing team didn't stop The Chipster from asserting his entitlement to everything in a skirt, though. Once classes started, and football practice got cut back, Chip (Alec also explained that everyone just called him Chip) pulled out two rubber bands, a blue one and a red one, and put them on the inside of the door handle. If the blue band was on the outside of the door, he told me, I should plan on finding somewhere else to spend the night. And, of course, he laughed, if the red one was there, he'd do the same, although he told me that Friday nights were off limits for me if the team had a home game on Saturday. He absolutely had to have that time.

"To rest up before the game?" I asked, doing my best to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Holding clipboards, which would apparently be his job, was probably real hard work.

"No, man," he laughed. "I gotta get rid of a lot of energy before the game. So I'll always have a bitch in here on Fridays, dude."

Well, that wasn't that bad, I figured. The team only played ten games, and half of them were away. So that was only five Fridays. And, I soon found out, five Saturdays, since he apparently had to get rid of a lot of energy he built up during the game, too. I wondered if his willingness to expend energy on something other than football was the reason he'd been redshirted.

And apparently, my assumption that it would be limited to weekends was wrong, too. I found the blue rubber band outside the door on Wednesday night the first week, and on Monday night the second week. I found myself hoping that he'd found most of these girls off-campus, because if there were that many Handley coeds willing to sleep with The Chipster, this school's academic reputation was going to be taking a nosedive this year.

"Look," I told him when I finally got back into the room on Tuesday after my classes, "we gotta come to some kind of agreement about when this room is off-limits. Now I don't mind Fridays—" even though I'd spent last Friday night in the lounge on the third floor and my back was still killing me "—but I got eight o'clock classes during the week, and I this is where I live."

"Look, dude," he laughed. "Just 'cause you can't score any pussy doesn't mean everybody else can't."

"And just because you don't have to go to class doesn't mean everybody else doesn't. Dude."

"Hey, man," he said, "I gotta —"

"You got all day Friday," I cut him off. "I'll give you that. You get here first on Saturday, you can have that, too. But Sunday night through Thursday, no. Room's gotta be free, then, unless we both agree, in advance. Don't make me go to the RA on this, Chip."

"So you don't want a day?" he sulked. "You and your friends do it at the Gay and Lesbian Dorm then? That's probably better all around, if you know what I mean."

He perked up, apparently having found the worst insult he could dredge up. And after that, of course, the longer I went without female companionship — the following week-and-a-half would have been an eternity for Chip — the more names I got called. When he found out that my middle name was actually Gabriel, I went from 'dude' to 'Gay-bo.'

On the third Thursday we were there, I told him that the room was his for the whole weekend, and headed out. Not home, of course. I hadn't told my mother I was doing the MILF Show again, so I decided to get a motel room near the site of the intercounty competition, about an hour from where we lived. Robin showed up the next morning, and we met in the Dunkin Donuts for coffee.

"So how's school?" she asked as I brought my coffee and donut over to the table she'd been sitting at when I arrived.

"'Sokay," I said. "Only two weeks of classes so far."

She didn't need to hear right before a competition that I'd failed my first quiz in Economics, or that I'd identified Thomas Paine on a Colonial History quiz as the leader of the Massachusetts Colony, or that my English Comp instructor and I didn't see eye-to-eye on my writing ability. I mean, honestly, if, God forbid, I actually found myself inside of a paper bag, how did she think that writing would ever help me get out of it? Couldn't write my way out of a paper bag, hah!

"And the roommate?" Robin asked. I'd e-mailed her a few times, and told her a little bit about my main problem.

"Still an asshole," I said. "And since I haven't scored since I've been there — because I'm a monk, Mrs. Kennedy — he's convinced I'm gay. And he and his cronies are having all sorts of fun with that."

"Why don't you just tell him what a big MILF stud you are?" she suggested, her eyes twinkling.

"Nah, that's just playing his game," I said. "Who's got the most marbles, who's got the most girls, who's got the biggest cock."

She raised an eyebrow.

"Well, yeah," I said. "I do. But that's not where I'm going with this, ya know?"