Aaron got out of the car just after I took my place on the sidewalk in front of Katrina’s house and could see that I was a little uneasy about something or another. That’s Aaron’s style, he is an emotionally perceptive person, it’s part of why he gets so much attention from the opposite sex.
“What’s wrong?” he asked even though his next words would prove that he knew precisely what was wrong, “you’re nervous about Katrina’s party for some stupid reason or another.”
“No, I mean, I have no reason to be so even if I am it is invalid so it will all disappear at once.” I said, my words all crowded together just as you read them.
“Come over here,” Aaron started to say, even though he was walking towards my side. “I’m not going to do any weird s***,” he started to say, even though I knew full well that he was probably about to do something that fell under my “weird s***” category.
I did not move, I had no need to. He had made it all the way from the street right outside of his driver’s side door to my sidewalk. He hugged me tightly.
“I want you to do something for me.” Aaron said. The “weird s***” that I mentioned earlier is beginning right now.
“What?” I asked, I gave Aaron enough time to speak but he was waiting for me. He was still waiting. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to feel my penis.” He said in such a way that would let anyone walking by at that very moment and overhearing that simple sentence know that it wasn’t an all-too out of the ordinary thing for him to say. Aaron is a lot stronger than me. When he hugs me, he’s the one that ends it.
“I’m not going to feel your penis.” I said, even though I knew he was going to make me do something like that before he set me free.
“Just a little,” he insisted, just feel it a little.
“Like with my leg?” I said questioningly, to see if there was some easy way out of this situation. Before he answered, I did a quick jerk of my leg, my knee went into the general directions of his reproductive organs. “There, I felt your dick. Need anything else?” I asked, trying to get this over with.
“Oh? Now tell me about my dick. Not about its color, because you couldn’t observe that. Not about its size, because we are gentlemen and we do not discuss size. I want you to tell me about its current state.” Aaron said rather longwindedly.
“Your dick is not hard.” I said and breathed a sigh of relief knowing that I was now probably free from his hug.
He let go of me, I stayed still, he took a step or two back and said, “my dick isn’t hard.” He said.
“Yeah, I know that, what does that have to do with me being uneasy about Katrina’s party?” I asked, trying to see if he had a reason why he had me just check his status of sexual arousal.
I had caught Aaron. He had me feel his dick for nothing. Not all that an unusual behavior for Aaron, now that I think of it.
“I’m not anxious or aroused or anything,” Aaron said, as if that somehow justified the brief homoerotic moment of that came just before, “now you understand why I did what I did.” That’s Aaron.
“Katrina got a nice house,” Aaron said, affecting his ghetto voice, we were in a nice part of the city, but to a kid as suburban and white as Aaron, any part of the city is the ghetto. “What her daddy do?” he asked me, since he knows that I know Katrina better than most people do.”
“It’s a kick-ass neighborhood, I bet people run in this neighborhood, and not for the same reason that they do in mine.” I said before getting to what he wanted. “It’s not about what her dad does, it’s about her mom,” I said with slight hesitation careful not to start blurting off intimate details of this girl’s life on the brief concrete walk linking the sidewalk to her front door. “Her mom is some big lawyer somewhere, I’m not sure what the dad does, I know he does something.”
“Cool, you still nervous, punk?” Aaron knocked on Katrina’s front door, “it’s ‘cause you wanna bang her, right? That’s why you’re nervous.
Katrina opened the door and greeted us. She kind of nodded at Aaron and smiled at me. She told me that she wanted to see more of me. What she meant was that she wanted to see me more often, but I wanted to see “more of her” in those exact words.
We came in, Aaron did his cool kid thing where he throws his jacket behind a piece of furniture with absolutely no regard of whether or not he was blocking some sort of air conditioning vent or otherwise. I very considerately placed my jacket on a hook near her staircase.
We walked around the party. It was kind of boring. Personally, I prefer boring parties to the kind of parties where the neighbors invite the police.
After a few more familiar places showed up, Katrina joined us in an unpretentious way that made her look like a guest in her own home. But do not get the wrong idea, she was still being a good host. I wanted to compliment her on her watch as it looked like mine, but she must have taken it off for some reason. I could see her tan line.
I’m pretty sure that Katrina had a bunch of cool stuff planned for tonight but for some reason we never actually do any of that stuff. We all just gather around her TV without turning it on and talk for hours. These parties are so fun and everything is just so wonderful and great. Katrina knows that party planning isn’t about planning a party, it’s about getting the right people to come for it.
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“Everyone hates these parties.” I thought and muttered as I was cleaning up my house.

“No, they don’t, they keep coming, you do a good job, kid” my dad said from the steps before he retired for the night. He wasn’t helping me clean up for the party. He was helping me emotionally. He was helping, that’s his style.

There’s a knock at the door, Dennis and Aaron. Punctual as always, Dennis was never late to school. He parked so perfectly, I miss the days of parking next to his Toyota 4Runner. Perfect people do everything perfectly, and Dennis is a perfect person.
I remember some days I would get out of car with my head full of thoughts about how wrong the world was and I’d just walk over to the driver side of Dennis’s car and look at the perfectly placed registration and inspection stickers on Dennis’s windshield. He seriously must have had rulers. Half an inch from the corner of the windshield and the second sticker was a quarter of an inch from the first and they were perfectly in a row. Not a single thing was wrong with him. Seeing him makes me miss him.
I open the door see and smile at Aaron, and am friendlier to Dennis. I only invited Aaron because I know he’d get his feelings hurt if Dennis was invited and he wasn’t.
Aaron took off his coat. Dennis, being the perfect individual that he is, removed his coat swiftly and silently and hung it on the hook on top of mine. My jacket was going to smell like his. My jacket would come closer to being a perfect jacket.
Dennis and Aaron went into my TV room, I wanted to be with them but there was still work to be done in the front room. Another knock at the door, this time it was Katie and John. Katie was quick to dart back to the back room where I guess you could say the party was and John was more interested in being polite to me, the host.
John looked around, complimented me on the house. Then he said something weird and asked to see my watch. He complimented me on how I must truly be a lady of class if I still wear a wristwatch in this day and age of cell phones. Then he took my wrist and touched the face of his watch to mine without really asking my permission.
“You’re wearing a man watch.” He said in a way that actually did kind of insult my femininity. “I can tell because the face on your watch is like the exact same size as the face on mine. Did a man give you this watch or something? That’d explain it.”
“It was my grandfather’s,” I said, giving defense for something I woke up this morning not realizing that I would need to defend. “He gave it to me a few months before he died because he knew I loved him and it would be a way for me to always hold onto him.” I said, John looked worried, like as if he had realized that he had insulted my femininity and my grandfather now on top of that.
“When he died, and you remember that day in school when they put it on the announcements thinking that I wasn’t in the building, I cried. He was gone and it was right after I decided that I was atheist now and that meant no afterlife so he was really gone. I cried deeply.” I got a little sad just dredging up the memory. “I folded my arms on my desk and slammed my head into it and heard the watch tick and I knew that the memory of him would live on forever inside of me.” I gulped, exaggerated my true emotions of the moment.
John was kind of speechless and walked away. I had won that, but I still ran upstairs to my bedroom and put the watch down on my nightstand.
I let more guests in. The guests I liked stayed longer than the ones I did not like. The party was a success.