Boy Minus Girl Read Online Free

joke about stuff like that.
    “So, tell me, kid, you got a girlfriend?”
    “I’m working on it.”
    He holds up
The Seductive Man
. “Yeah, well, don’t you believe any of this new-age, sensitive-guy bullshit. It won’t get you halfway to first base.” He flips to the back cover and the soft-focus photo of the author: a bald, middle-aged man with a gray beard and black turtleneck, his sensitive face tilted a little, his caterpillar eyebrows furrowed thoughtfully. All he needs is a pipe to look like Mr. Sanderson, my science teacher—and a permanent bachelor.
    “You can’t tell me this douche bag is getting any,” Uncle Ray says.
    I dutifully crack up, mostly to cover my humiliation.
    He thumbs through the pages and reads in a lisping voice. “ ‘The first rule to making her love you is to be your kind, interesting, sensitive self. Women want a friend first and foremost.’ ” He snaps the book closed, causing me to flinch, and flings it onto my desk. “No. They. Don’t. Chicks want excitement and fun! Lots of it!”
    This is why I
love
Uncle Ray: he’s the only grown-up I know who talks to me like I’m a man.
    “Is that your secret to getting women, Uncle Ray?”
    He smiles. “Y’know, guys’d pay top dollar for tips from a pro like me.”
    “Take it off the fourteen years’ worth of birthday and Christmas gifts you owe me,” I shoot back.
    He looks a little taken aback; then his lips crinkle into a smile. “I like how you do business, kid. C’mon, I need a smoke.”
    We go outside and settle on the front-porch steps. He sticks a cigarette in his mouth, lights up, takes a long drag, and gives me a sidelong glance. “All right. First, you need to lose the Linus look.”
    I glance down at my beige corduroys and orange-and-white-striped shirt.
    “Those pants’re way too big on you,” he says, his cigarette bobbing up and down with each word. “Women like to see a man’s ass and package, least a hint of it. And that shirt says, ‘I watch
Benny Hill
and jerk off in a gym sock.’ ”
    I love
Benny Hill
. How’d he know? Howard and I have seen every episode.
    He sucks on his cigarette and blows smoke rings into the still air. “And what’s with the ’do?”
    “What about it?” I touch the back of my head.
    He closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Carter’s out of the White House. Time to enter the eighties.”
    Is this the reason girls don’t go for me—because I’m a fashion disaster? I’ve always taken pride in what I wear, but what if I am totally out of it and don’t know it? Suddenly I feel like Stanley Johnson, the greasy-headed geek in my class who wears corrective shoes and snorts when he laughs.
    Uncle Ray mashes out his cigarette on the top step, flicks it into Mom’s rosebushes, and rubs his hands together. “You got good raw material, kid. Revamp that look and go get ’em.”
    For the next hour, in front of the bathroom mirror, I experiment with my “’do.” Mom has always cut my hair the same way, ever since I was in the first grade. I try watering down the cowlick in back, but it keeps popping up like a nerdy weed. I try parting my hair on the right, but the way it sweeps across my forehead, I resemble a pubescent Hitler. Parting it down the middle, I look like a loaf of Home Pride bread. Do I have “problem” hair? Will it doom me to the life of a virgin? Will I still be spending my nights with Mom watching Johnny Carson when I’m thirty? Are the African tribeswomen of
National Geographic
the only naked females I’ll ever see? Is the Skin So Soft bottle the only—
    “Les, darling!” I hear Mom call out from downstairs. “Time to wash up for supper!”

    We all sit at the kitchen table eating Mom’s chicken chow mein, a dish we have maybe once a year when company comes over. Is she trying to impress Uncle Ray? To appear more worldly? Dad’s mood is soaring, thanks to Uncle Ray, who keeps refilling Dad’s glass with red wine from a big jug marked Carlo