"Geez, this place smells like a whorehouse," my dad bellowed.

I started to ask him how he knew what a whorehouse smelled like, but decided he probably wasn't in the right frame of mind for a wisecrack from his fourteen-year-old daughter. Besides, he was right. My slutty sister and I had both drenched ourselves in way too much perfume, the latest skirmish in our war over Marcel, the handsome, debonair French student that our parents had brought into our home, never suspecting what a turmoil it would create.

Elise and I hadn't believed it when our parents had told us we were going to have another exchange student living with us. Mom and Dad had tried it twice before, with disastrous results. Our first guest had been Keiko an annoying, enigmatic Japanese girl who seemed to hate everything about America, except the food. She had been a little chubby when she arrived, but by the time she left nine months later, Elise and I were calling her Godzilla. Instead of admitting defeat, our plucky parents decided to try again. This time our visitor was a surly, mannish-looking Swede named Gertrude. When she wasn't in school, Gertrude stayed in her room most of the time, refusing to even attempt to assimilate herself into our culture. I told my sister that some family back in Norway was probably very glad to get rid of their morose and depressing daughter for a year.

But, two strikes isn't an out, as our ever-optimistic dad likes to say, so our parents stepped up to the plate again and took another swing. Their timing couldn't have been worse. One thing we didn't need just then was more disruption in our family. The relationship between Elise and myself had been getting worse over the last few months, more than just normal sibling rivalry. It could have been described as dysfunctional at best, and close to homicidal at worst. Elise was seventeen, with cover-girl looks and the morals of a porn star. How she kept her active sex life hidden from our parents was a wonder to me. Everyone at our school knew about 'Easy Elise'. I hated her for her beauty, personality and popularity, and she hated me for being ... well, basically just for being. At fourteen, I was stuck in the role of the plain, dull sister of one of the prettiest, most popular girls in our high school. One thing I had learned from Gertrude was how to be miserable in a world-class way and my pouting was reaching world-class levels.

When our parents broke the news to us that they had volunteered to be a host family again, without consulting Elise and myself, we both reacted like spoiled brats, sulking and giving our parents a hard times, until we found out more about our guest. This time it was to be a guy, a seventeen-year-old French man-boy named Marcel. When we saw his pictures online, Elise and I had the same reaction, we just expressed it differently. I said he was "dreamy", while Elise said he was "one fuckable dude".

When we picked him up at the airport, and this time my sister and I eagerly accompanied our parents on that trip, we soon found that he was every bit as sexy as we had assumed a handsome French teen could be. I knew there was little chance Marcel would even notice me with Elise throwing herself at him, but I had to try. I needed something to build up my self-confidence, and stealing Marcel's attention from Elise was my way to do that, while at the same time irritating my stuck-up sister. This was going to be war, and I was prepared to use every weapon I could, as meager as they might be. This was more than just a battle of egos. Elise just wanted to fuck him for bragging rights, but I had decided that he was the man I wanted to surrender my virginity to. I really wasn't in that much of a hurry to become sexually active, but I was fascinated by the thought that, for the rest of my life, whenever the topic of first lovers came up, my answer would be "a gorgeous, sophisticated Frenchman".

I made the mistake of telling Elise my plan soon after Marcel settled into our guest room, and she laughed. "Meg, you've gotta be kidding. You're way too young for him."

"What do you mean? Weren't you fourteen the first time you had sex?"

"Sure, but I was already a hottie at that age. You ... you still look like a kid, no tits, no ass. You've had the same depressing hair style since fourth grade. Face it girl, you're a disaster. Marcel isn't going to be interested in you."

I knew she was probably right, but that didn't stop me from flaunting around in front of him in my skimpiest shorts and tightest tshirts. My breasts might not have been as big as Elise's, but they were big enough to notice, with some interestingly large nipples, something that Elise lacked. Her impressive mammories were topped with incongruously tiny, pink buds. I might have been fighting an uphill battle, especially considering that Marcel and Elise were the same age, but I was stubbornly resolute.

After school one day Elise invited Marcel to take a dip in our pool. I'm sure she just wanted to flaunt her body in one of her tiny bikini. I didn't want her to even have a few minutes alone with our visitor, so I ran and put my one-and-only bathing suit on.