Phat Love Part One

The Cheating Dilemma

1.

I’ve got two girlfriends...

No, that’s not true; I’ve got one girlfriend — Julie — and one...other girl.

If you’re young, you know that “phat” means good, cool, nice, even excellent. Everybody I know would tell you my girlfriend Julie is this kind of phat. She’s popular, smart, nice, and she looks great. I mean, REALLY GREAT!!!

Long pretty hair that’s always perfect. Her body, tall and slender but not skinny: slim waist, fairly large breasts, and shapely legs. Her complexion is gorgeous; her teeth straight and blindingly white; her hands slender, fingernails perfect. She wears clothes that never look slutty, but always look sexy. Honestly, I can’t even tell you how she manages this but she does.

She walks tall and confident, striding into rooms or down a hallway at school like she owns the world. Her family is rich but not spoiled, lord it over you rich, just well off and comfortable. She has like a billion friends and zero enemies. She’s pure phat!

Julie and I have been together since the start of our ninth-grade year, and now we’re eleventh graders, almost at the end of our junior year. We started having sex last year. Careful, always protected sex.

We had been dating for all that time and it finally just happened. When I say it “just happened,” I don’t mean it was some passionate slip-up. Julie was totally in control; she had it all planned out like a military operation: time, place, conditions, condoms — I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d checked out our horoscopes and the seven-day weather forecast.

Even though we have sex, Julie is a good girl. I’m not saying that she’s Mother Theresa, or serves meals to the homeless, or trick-or-treats for UNICEF, or any of that other crap that “good” kids supposedly do. But Julie is kind, smart, and generous.

And let’s be honest, for some people — I think A LOT of people — if a girl has sex, she’s bad (slutty, whorish, filthy). If she doesn’t “put out,” she’s good (angelic, pure, all innocent and shit). Period. If you doubt this, think of all the kids who make a big deal out of saying they are into “waiting” to do it.

You know who I mean: goody two-shoes kids...Jesus-freaks...student body treasurers...school hall monitors, etc. Some kids sign abstinence promissory notes with their churches or parents, go to Bible camps, and put on a huge show about how celibate they are.

But believe me, a lot of kids, including some of them who claim to be so “good,” actually aren’t “waiting.” Most of the time you find out about one of these saintly kids “slipping up” by something bad happening to one of them: a girl suddenly moving far away halfway through her senior year; some little skinny fashion plate suddenly showing up trying to hide her growing belly under huge sweatshirts. And, of course, the ultimate rumor, “Did you hear so-and-so had an abortion?”

But here’s the thing with Julie. We don’t now, and I’m pretty sure never will have anything you could ever call “adventurous” sex. I’m not enough of a pig to go into details, but “adventurous” to me means imaginative and lively, and even the good kind of nasty. Sex with Julie ain’t that.

Being with her in bed is okay, but that’s it; it’s just okay. The bottom line is that for whatever reason, maybe because of how she was raised, or maybe because she just doesn’t have much of a sex drive (do girls even have sex drives?), or maybe because it’s me she’s with — but whatever the reason, Julie is repressed when it comes to sex.

That’s Julie, my girlfriend.

If I’d never had sex with anybody else maybe I wouldn’t even know that it’s not all it could be with Julie. . .

But then, along came Sam...

Sorry, I mean, Samantha.