What do the stars feel when they look at Us?

Chapter 1: Girlfriend Pt. 1

I have a girlfriend. It's very nice having a girlfriend. My friends talk a lot about her boobs. Boob. Beeb boob.

I don't think too much about her boobs. Or about her in general. There are a lot of things I don't think about. Like grades. Or how all the traffic lights around the world have to be in some sort of sync. Or Hitler. Which, now, that I think about it, doesn't make much sense because I am thinking of all of these things right now.

The point is, I don't care about her boobs. It's not that I don't care about her. I know her name. Linda. And I know where she lives. I know her cat. I know her cat is eleven years old. I know that one of her paws got badly hurt in a fight with a stray. I like Linda's cat. Its fur is full of bright colours. Like white, orange, beige.

Cats don't have boobs, right? That's also something on the list of things I don't think about. Or don't want to think about. That's gross right? Is it gross?

After I looked it up on the internet I found that people liked cats with boobs. I didn't think it was very strange. Just not for me.

Linda and I went to kindergarten together. My favourite hobby was breaking sticks. Whenever playtime started, I set out to find the greatest of sticks so they could be broken by my own hands. Or feet. Or legs. I injured my kneecap once, during the great war of sticks.

Linda was great at watching. Sometimes it felt like the earth turned so she could see new things. It's not that everything revolved around her. Everything revolved so it could be seen by her.

Linda is my girlfriend. Is Linda my girlfriend? She is, right?

It happened back when she was still boobless and I destroyed wooden existence for fun. It was the kneecap incident.

Somehow I thought it was a very good idea to climb onto a stone and jump onto my targeted stick. It was a very bad idea. It hurt like hell.

She told me she'd be there for me. That she'd always be there for me. And so she was.

No one forced her to do it. As I said, I don't think about her too much. And her apparently appealing feminine attributes somehow left me unimpressed.

I'm pretty sure about not being gay by the way. I found that out when I looked up the cat thing.

-

A lot of that seemed to change when I met Pedro. He wasn't very interested in Linda's boobs either. He was from a different school. And different from many of my other friends.

Pedro talked a lot about books that don't make any sense and why they don't make any sense and why it's great that they don't make any sense. He was always ecstatic when he found rhyming in profound sentences.

I met him at my part-time job, sorting books at the local library. My mom showed me the ad in the newspaper. It sounded like a quiet workplace and some easy money. And because I didn't care too much about schoolwork either way and had a lot of free time on my hands, I applied.

So, obviously, meeting Pedro was a nightmare at first.

He was talkative. And friendly. Likeable.

The first thing he asked me about was my favourite book.

That's how he judges people when he first meets them, he told me.

I told him it was Ari & Dante by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.

We went to search for the book.

"Aristotle? What a weird name for a main character", he said. I disagreed.

He had lent and read it until the next day.

After finishing it he asked me if I was gay.

So I told him the story about the cats with boobs. He was unimpressed.