Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy Read Online Free PDF Page A

combination of worry, wine coolers, and a dash of melon Schnapps. Cameron biked home on his beat-up ten-speed, and I scrubbed the house and my mouth for two days. It was a near-perfect teenage evening.
    A month later, my friend Karen announced that her parents were going out of town, and she also wanted to throw a party and have B4 play at it. Clearly, I had set a new standard. No longer was it acceptable to play mix tapes on your ghetto blaster. That was so 1987.
    The boys took the gig, and I helped them set up their amps, pedals, and cables on the orange shag carpet of Karen’s basement. While Cameron turned on his amp and checked his pedals, I daydreamed about my future as the band’s tour manager, of how I’d walk around, yapping orders in a sleek-fitting pinstripe suit. I’d still be with Cameron but sleeping with Robby on the sly. This would go on for years. It was the closest I’d ever come to having career goals. No wonder I didn’t get into the IB Program. They didn’t offer a course called “Infidelity and Cover Band Management.”
    Cheryl had to study for a brain biology test or something, so I’d have to sway to the band on my own. On their set break, Camerongrabbed my hand and pulled me into the make-out room. In Karen’s house, it was the furnace room. Only Freddy Krueger would find it romantic, but it was all we had to work with. After a lot of fevered making out, Cameron told me that he wanted to go down on me for the first time. My eyes lit up. Finally! Yes! I was on track, taking steps toward the ultimate objective. I was positively giddy as he slipped off my ruffled skirt and black Jockey-for-Her underwear, tossing them haphazardly into the abyss of the boiler room. I lay back on the cement floor as he dove in between my thighs. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I felt was . . . light punching, like he was cramming his face into me. After about a minute of that I felt something wet, and then nothing. I opened my eyes and half sat up. There was Cameron, looking back at me, his head framed by the V of my legs, his face covered in blood.
    I know exactly what this sounds like—but trust me, it wasn’t that. If I had that story, I’d surely tell it. Apparently some unlucky combination of Cameron’s excitement, the dry furnace air, and his amateur technique had caused his nose to bleed. I grabbed his T-shirt and tried to sop up as much blood as I could, but it was gushing uncontrollably.
    “We need to get some ice or a towel or something,” I said.
    “We need to get Robby!” he whimpered.
    “Wait!” I yelled, but before I could find my skirt or my underwear, a sliver of light fell on my thighs. Robby had slipped in and was now staring at me, my half-naked body in plain view.
    I watched Robby’s eyes move from Cameron’s face to my thighs and then dart back to Cameron’s face. Searching for a way to concealmy embarrassment, I finally looked Robby square in the face and said, “What? You’ve never seen this before?” As if his lack of experience, not my state of bloodied nudity, was the humiliation here. As if I were saying, “That’s right, this shit happens all the time when you hang out with Ophira Eisenberg!” I followed it up with a frantic plea for him to fetch some ice and a towel. Robby, wide-eyed, nodded and ran off. With him gone, I scrambled around the floor and finally located my skirt; my underwear was never to be seen again. Abandoning the still-bleeding Cameron, I rushed out and found Karen, the hostess. I held her by her boney shoulders and backed her into the yellow guest bathroom. “What have you heard?” I demanded.
    “Just that Cameron got a nosebleed but it’s not nothing that Robby’s never seen before.” All those double negatives added up to a major positive, and I fell in love with Robby even more for keeping his highly kissable mouth shut. I told Karen I needed a minute and shoved her out of the bathroom. Underwearless with specks of dried blood on