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First Time for Everything Page 31


  “Out of what?” I asked, hoping I could shake him off.

  “Oh, knock it off,” he snapped at me. “We can all laugh at Goldilocks, but the truth is you met a bunch of assholes, but that doesn’t change the fact you keep looking.”

  Was I that transparent? Was everything I was going through that obvious to everyone? I felt even worse as I wondered how much they had been talking about me behind my back.

  “Okay, look, you’re not going to listen to me, so let me try something I do know you’ll listen to. Logic. You’ve talked to, like, what? Four guys total? Out of how many? Millions? So what’s your sample size? Like, less than a millionth of a percent. You can’t make any kind of determination based on that, and you know it. It’s like giving up killing Onyxia because you didn’t get her mount to drop the first time. You know how rare that is, so if you’re not willing to grind it out, then why bother?”

  For those of you that don’t speak fluent nerd, allow me to explain. Onyxia is a dragon in World of Warcraft, and she can drop a dragon that you can mount and fly around on. The percentile chance of her dropping said mount is about 0.002 percent. Which means if you want that dragon, you need to kill her. A lot. As in a lot, a lot. It was an obscure reference but one he knew I would understand, since I am still hunting that stupid dragon.

  In more ways than one.

  “You’re a great guy. You’re good-looking, funny, smart, and you know who you are. What you’re looking for is stupid rare, and if you’re going to give up after four tries, then you were never in it for real. It’s not you, it’s just hard. If it wasn’t hard, then everyone would be in freaking love. You want a good guy? A real guy who is worth you? Then you have to grind it out, dumbass, not give up after a couple of tries.”

  I felt my eyes begin to water as I realized what he was saying was right.

  “Now stop crying, get up, and go talk to that incredibly hot guy before I realize I was wrong and might be gay after all.”

  We both laughed, and I stood up and hugged him. “Thank you.”

  He hugged me back. “We’re going to be friends forever, dude, so I need to set you straight now, because I ain’t going through this in college.”

  He patted me on the back and then stepped back. “Now go get him, Goldilocks.”

  I took a deep breath and looked over to where the boy was sitting by himself.

  Steeling myself, I walked over to him. When I got close, he looked at me with the bluest eyes I had ever seen in person and smiled.

  It was the moment I realized what Brandon was saying.

  I wasn’t too young or too naïve, and I wasn’t too confused.

  I was just right and needed to find the guy who would see that, no matter how long it took.

  JOHN GOODE is a member of the class of ’88 from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, specializing in incantations and spoken spells. At the age of fourteen, he proudly represented District 13 in the 65th Panem games, where he was disqualified for crying uncontrollably before the competition began. After that he moved to Forks, Washington, where against all odds he dated the hot, incredibly approachable werewolf instead of the stuck-up jerk of a vampire, but was crushed when he found out the werewolf was actually gayer than he was. After that he turned down the mandatory operation everyone must receive at sixteen to become pretty, citing that everyone pretty was just too stupid to live, before moving away for greener pastures. After falling down an oddly large rabbit hole, he became huge when his love for cakes combined with his inability to resist the commands of sparsely worded notes, and was finally kicked out when he began playing solitaire with the Red Queen’s 4th armored division. By eighteen he had found the land in the back of his wardrobe, but decided that thinly veiled religious allegories were not the neighbors he desired. When last seen, he had become obsessed with growing a pair of wings after discovering Fang’s blog and hasn’t been seen since.

  Or he is this guy who lives in this place and writes stuff he hopes you read.

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