BEANER O’BRIAN’S ABSOLUTELY GINORMOUS GUIDEBOOK TO GUYS
Naomi Nash

Chapter One

boy (noun): 1) a young male person. 2) a junior version of the mature male, lacking the sophistication of the grown adult. As a species, they are frequently prone to. . . .

"Prone to what?" I asked. Usually I love the first blank page in a notebook, when it’s still clean and white and waiting to be filled with thoughts. I’d only captured thirty words on paper, though. Two of them were the chapter heading. I was pretty sure they might not count. Four thousand, nine hundred, and seventy to go, and word number thirty-one simply wasn’t coming to mind.

I was in a world of hurt.

"To acne," said Taryn. She had been reading over my shoulder as I wrote.

I turned my head and gave her a dirty look. "Not. I was thinking about something like, they are prone to blah blah blah which as an adult manifests itself as yodee yodee yo. I want to make this project sound as professional as possible."

Mandy lay on my bed, bouncing one of my pillows on the soles of her feet in time to the XT music channel. "Prone to believing unrealistic media portrayals of female beauty, resulting in. . . ." She had already started to giggle at our reactions to her unexpected wordiness. ". . . unsatisfying marriages and an increased divorced rate . . . what? My mother’s a psychologist, hello!"

"Hel-lo?" Carrie echoed from where she sat at my desk. Carrie lately doesn’t like getting her outfits creased by lying on beds, or dirty from lying on the floor. I could never work out whether she was insulting my cleanliness or merely being quirky. "Not every boy is like that. They’re not all constantly fantasizing about the girls of Baywatch, Smut-derella."

"What’s it about, then?"

For a minute, while Carrie gazed off into space, she seemed to lose touch with reality. If I’d been a movie director, I would have cued the dreamy music right then and zoomed in for a close-up. The camera could have caught the slight bite of her lip, the way her eyebrows rose in the middle, and even her unfocused expression as she considered the question. "It’s about feeling you two are the only people in the world." Her eyes flicked back to Mandy, her eyebrows crashed down, and she tucked one corner of her lips into a scowl. "Not just sex and lust-aciousness."

"But there’s sex involved, isn’t there?"

Carrie returned to flipping through her fashion magazine with a flounce and a smirk. The silence meant that we weren’t going to hear any dirty little details about her and Rick.

If I could direct my life on film, I’d have total control of how it came out. A minute ago with Carrie, at scene’s end I would have yelled "Cut!" with her gazing off into space, wistful and tender. No one needed to hear Mandy turning the conversation back around to sex, the way she always did. Besides, if my life were a movie, I could do retakes. Wouldn’t that be the coolest?

"Dictionary definitions aren’t going to get your paper written, Beaner," Carrie told me. "If you want to write about boys, you need some experience. Before Rick. . . ." I saw Mandy and Taryn roll their eyes and start a conversation of their own. Before Rick, Carrie had been totally silly like the rest of us. Maybe even sillier. Before Rick, whenever S.W.A.K. came on XTreme Video Request Carrie used to waffle over whether Scotty or Wyatt was cuter. Before Rick, Carrie had an absolutely huge poster of Justin Timberlake on the wall of her bedroom, not to mention a hundred photos of singers and actors and athletes cut from magazines.

After Rick, though, she’d ripped down every single one of those nummy, hunky guys and traded in Us and People for articles about how to make your tummy look trimmer. "Before Rick, you wouldn’t believe the things I thought about boys. I thought they were rude. I thought they were disgusting and smelly. I thought they had nothing but sex on their minds."

We looked over to the bed, where Mandy was leaning over the edge to explain, ". . . . told me that when guys reach a certain age, all the hair falls off the top of their head and starts to grow out of their ears, so they buy this paint that’s kind of fuzzy and every morning they like, spray the bald parts so it looks hairy, but sometimes they leave fingerprints in it . . . ."

"Girl, you’re lying!" Taryn screamed, laughing so hard that my bookcase rocked when she kicked her heels against it.

"If you two are finished," Carrie announced in her no-nonsense tone. Although she was going to be a sophomore like us next year, Carrie is a year older and never lets us forget it. "When’s this writing project due, Beaner?"

I looked down at the page. Word number thirty-one still wasn’t getting written. "The first day we go back!" I gulped down my bitterness at The Lancashire School’s requirement for creative projects over summer vacation. It was bad enough that three-quarters of the year I had to wear their tight, scratchy uniform. Summer was when I was supposed to enjoy myself! "Less than a month! I don’t know how you guys got so lucky. You didn’t have to spend your whole summer slaving over a stupid paper."

"You’re the one who picked creative writing for your summer project," Taryn pointed out. "I have to do a photographic essay!"

"Big deal. Everyone in Miss Benson’s class knows you load up some black and white film, head to Union Square Park, and take snapshots of homeless people."

Taryn gave me a look of scorn. "I know you know that’s not true, and I know you know I know, so just so you know, I’m giving you a break. We’re not allowed to take photos of the homeless anymore, not since they found out about the kids who’d been giving a homeless guy money to lie down in the gutter with an empty bottle and pretend he was unconscious."

"And I’m working on my watercolor portfolio," Carrie said, "And Mandy is . . . what are you doing again?"

"I finished already." Mandy reacted to our blank stares by abandoning the television, sitting up on the bed, and glaring back. "I was in that group violin recital at the little church in the Village last month! You were there! Don’t you remember? God!"

"Oh yeah," the rest of us murmured. Carrie had nearly fallen asleep in our pew that night, and Taryn and I had marked up the back pages of one of the hymnals with several games of Dots. We’d been there, all right, suffering through three hours of scratchy violin concertos and something called a rondo. It nearly had sent me rondo the bend.

Suddenly I felt a desperate need to scream. If only I’d started this stupid project weeks ago! "Thirty-three days until school starts," I said, stabbing at my calculator with my pencil. "That’s only forty-seven thousand, five hundred and twenty minutes. I’ll have to write over nine and a half words a minute at that rate, and I haven’t written any in the last two!"

"Nine words a minute doesn’t sound too bad," said Taryn. "That’s only like, one word every seven seconds."

"I have to sleep sometime!" It came out sounding like a screech. "When am I supposed to have a life? I wish I played the stupid old violin."

"Hey!" Mandy protested. "I had to memorize!"

A knock at my bedroom door interrupted our bickering. When it swung open, Jasmine poked her face through the opening. Her skin was white and soft, like a glistening pearl. She must have spent the afternoon moisturizing again. "Hannah, do you mind if I come in?" The question was moot, since she was already standing in the middle of the room. Hannah. Ugh. I don’t know which reeked more: my awful real name, or my worse nickname.

"Hello, Mrs. O’Brian," chorused my friends. I hated the way they all gazed at my stepmother with adoring eyes, like she was some fabulous movie star who had jetted in from Hollywood merely to say ta. Even Carrie had set aside her magazine to study Jasmine’s outfit, memorizing her sleeveless white top and the long flowing pants that puddle on the floor around her impossibly long legs, and memorizing the long swoop of her jet-black hair and the shine of her long, expensive earrings. Yes, that ensemble was Jasmine’s equivalent of wearing sweats around the house. In her hands my stepmother carried what looked like a piece of two-by-four.

Jasmine had the delicate laugh of a Walt Disney cartoon princess. You could almost picture little blue birdies alighting on her shoulders and squirrels and chipmunks running along carrying the hems of those elegant pants as she twirled and sang about what a chippy-dippy-yippy day it was. And then it would all crash down the minute she opened her mouth. "What’s the dilly-o, yo? I do wish you girls would call me Jasmine," she corrected. "I’ve brought snacks for your . . . what do you homegirls say these days? When I was your age we called our get-togethers rap sessions. Do you still say that? Rap sessions? No?"

I wanted to die. As if things weren’t bad enough, her mouth kept flapping! "Are you chillin in your crib, hos? Word!"

Oh god! When Jasmine asked the last question directly to Taryn, I actually wanted to commit matricide. It’s hard to point a finger and accuse someone of prejudice, though, when you know she’s only being her normal, totally-out-of-it self. Taryn didn’t even seem to notice. She looked up at Jasmine with puppy-dog love in her eyes and said, "We’re kinda hangin’ out."

"Well! Hanging out. Isn’t that the da bomb?" Jasmine knelt down and set the snacks upon my little footstool. I could see now that it wasn’t a two-by-four she’d been carrying, but a rough slab of wood that had been sanded smooth and varnished until shiny. "I’ve brought you a little French rustic afternoon casse-croûte for your ‘hanging out.’ Pacific wild sockeye smoked salmon, duck liver pâté, some St. Andre triple cream brie, Roquefort, some crusty baguettes, and mixed honeydew and strawberry topped with crème fraiche."

With the exception of the old guy who grabs himself and says "Hey girly! Hey girly! Hey girly!" to me every time I step on the subway, my stepmother is possibly the most embarrassing person in the world. "What in hell’s so rustic about that?" I snapped, wishing she’d leave us alone already.

"Now Hannah, I know you’re at an age where you think it’s the hot-diggety-dog to impress your friends with coarse language, but I don’t think your father would appreciate it." Obviously my stepmother doesn’t know my friends very well. They were probably more impressed I hadn’t said worse. Jasmine’s hands clasped her hips and she tilted her head to the side. For a woman obsessed with keeping her forehead wrinkle-free, that was as close as her expression got to annoyed. "And it’s rustic because I’ve staged it on an antique plank I bought in the sweetest little boutique on Canal Street. It’s originally from the Shanxi province of China," she added. I could see Carrie absolutely eating up that detail.

"Thank you, Jasmine," my traitorous friends said in unison.

"Later, homies!" she said, obviously pleased they’d used her first name.

I glared at the others until the only trace left of Jasmine was the scent of her expensive perfume. "You guys are scum."

"She’s so beautiful," said Mandy, sighing, before she flopped back over to see what was happening on the XT.

"She’s twelve years younger than my dad."

"She’s so glamorous," Taryn said.

"She’s twelve years younger than my dad!"

"I so want to be her." Carrie munched on a little slice of Pacific cross-eyed salmon as she stared at the closed bedroom door.

I sat back down on the floor. Much as I hated to admit it, the strawberries looked awfully good. "Didn’t you hear how she totally insulted Taryn?"

Taryn was too busy figuring out the brie to reply. "Oh, she was joking around," said Mandy. "I wish my mom was funny and beautiful."

"I didn’t notice any insults," Taryn said, finally using a strawberry to push some of the soft cheese onto a piece of bread. She sniffed at it and made a face before taking an experimental nibble. "I think Jasmine’s great."

"Yeah? Well, you don’t have to live with the tragic consequences of your dad’s sad little midlife crisis, or Jasmine’s artistic gay friends, or her Japanese expressionistic paintings, or her stupid Chinese floorboards." Taryn stopped eating. I heard Carrie breathe in sharply. Mandy’s eyes bulged at a spot over my head.

"Hannah." I heard a voice from above and behind me. When I craned my neck around, Jasmine stood in the door once more. My insides suddenly felt as if a giant clammy hand had reached in and given them a good washday wring. How much of that had she heard? Word processors came with an Undo command. Why wasn’t there one for my life? "I wanted to remind you we’ve rescheduled your final bridesmaid’s dress fitting for tomorrow. Please don’t disappoint your sister. Again. I’ll leave you to your hanging, now." Once more she let the door slip closed behind her.

Jasmine’s cameo appearance felt like a slap to the face. Totally on purpose I’d hid out at Dad’s office and skipped my scheduled appointment the week before. I don’t know why, when I don’t want to do something, I curl up in a ball and hope that it goes away. It never does. When I uncurl, the thing I’m dreading’s always still waiting for me.

"What color is the gown?" Carrie immediately wanted to know.

"Pillow mint," I said, heaping another indignity onto my already hefty pile. "Molly picked out a color called pillow mint. It’s worse than awful."

"What color is pillow mint?"

"Lime sherbet green, only more nauseating."

"What kind of sleeves?"

"Puffy." I held out my hands wide, cupped into a circle, to show her. "The skirt boufs out at the bottom."

"I want a photo," cackled Taryn.

Photos? I had forgotten weddings always had photographers! Oh man! Only three weeks until I’d be in a pillow mint bridesmaid’s dress being photographed, when I already had a project to write, and now a stepmother I’d have to be extra-nice to because she’d probably heard me open my big fat mouth to speak my mind about her. Three weeks until I was stuffed into a hideous gown that made me look like a demented bag lady and stood up in front of God and the congregation of St. Blaise so my sister could become Mrs. Anas Aloul.

Honestly, sometimes I thought that Molly had only made me a bridesmaid so she’d look all the prettier in comparison. "That poor plain girl with that awful frizzy hair," I could imagine people whispering, "Who is she? The sister? You must be joking. But Molly’s so pretty! And the mother, wasn’t she once a model? Oh, stepmother? You’d never know that little mouse was an O’Brian, looking at Jasmine and the bride. So lovely!"

That was me, plain old Hannah. Hannah the pal. Beaner O’Brian. If my plain face didn’t turn you off, my baby nickname sure would. When I looked up, I caught Taryn regarding me with an odd expression. "Your face was twitching," she explained.

Of course it was twitching. I was about to have a good old-fashioned, stress-induced freak-out.

As if reading my mind, Carrie put down her magazine and pronounced, "Beaner’s got too much on her plate, that’s all." Who was she, my high school counselor?

"She’s got a month until her project’s due!" Mandy pointed out. "That’s nothing to get stressed out over."

"But the wedding’s in three weeks," Taryn said. "She’s got all that running around to do."

"She should’ve started her project earlier, then. She’s known about the wedding for ages."

"I am in the room, right?" I asked, tired of being referred to in the third person. "I didn’t suddenly kind of vanish? Hello? Can anyone see me sitting here, about to require therapy?"

Carrie’s voice was unusually gentle when she reached down and took away my notebook. "Listen, smartypants, you’re blowing everything all out of proportion." She ripped out the first page, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket.

I wanted to bawl. "Those were thirty perfectly good words!"

She handed back my notebook. "What assignment did you take? Writing something about the opposite sex, wasn’t it?" I nodded. Why had I thought it would be so easy, when I saw the list of topics on Mr. Greenwald’s bulletin board? What did Hannah O’Brian know about the opposite sex? I’d never date like Mandy or Carrie. Boys liked me, sure, but only as a friend. I was the boys’ gal pal, the girl they could joke around with, tell entire movie plots to, or play soccer with in Central Park. What in the world did I have to say about the opposite sex?

More to the point, in the looks department I wasn’t anything like my older sister Molly. I wasn’t a Carrie. I certainly wasn’t a Jasmine–but who was? I was only a sub-ordinary person with an insane stepmother, a father who thought I was still ten, a lunatic sister driving me nuts over her wedding, and a stupid paper due the day I got back to The Lancashire School in September.

"Summer projects are supposed to be fun. So enjoy it! Write about how girls can catch a guy quick and easy, a kind of Sex and the City thing. Here. Take dictation." Carrie cleared her throat. "A Guidebook to Guys, by Hannah O’Brian." She had to be kidding me. My chances of meeting a hot guy in a month, much less catching him, were absolutely zilch.

"Hannah O’Brian’s Guidebook to Guys," said Taryn, laughing. "That makes her sound like an expert."

"No one calls her Hannah, though. Beaner O’Brian’s Guidebook to Guys," said Mandy, bouncing my pillow off the wall.

"Oh yeah, I can really see her handing that in," said Carrie. "Beaner O’Brian’s Big Book of Boys."

"You know," I reminded them, feeling the sting. "I am here in the room with you freaks."

"Hah!" said Mandy, flopping over and sitting up. "Beaner O’Brian’s Absolutely Ginormous Guidebook to Guys!"

"Ginormous is so not a word, Mandy-pants," said Carrie.

"It is too. It’s gigantic and enormous all in one. Oh! It’s on!" She flopped over to the other side of my bed and turned up the volume on the television until we could all hear the familiar opening music to XTreme Video Request.

"You act like you’re twelve, not fifteen," I told Mandy. "You don’t see Carrie peeing her pants because the show’s on." Carrie had picked up her magazine again and was pretending to flip through it in a bored manner, but over the top of the pages she would now and again flick a glance at my little TV. It’s funny–for years we had watched this show together, and although we all were still glued to the set whenever it came on, we’d somehow reached a point where we pretended we didn’t care about it. Mandy was the only one honest enough to admit she still loved the show. Why was that?

Taryn had joined Mandy on the bed, where they both sat with crossed legs as Aaron Grady’s face filled the screen. For the top VJ on the most popular show on the XT, Aaron Grady surely managed to look bored all the time. "We’re comin’ at ya live from Times Square," he said, while a bunch of kids in the studio audience whooped and hollered from the pillows and rugs around the floor, "with your five favorite hottest and sexiest videos picks of the day!" Massive cheering. "We got two today from one of the hottest bands out there, and they’re kickin’ it off with number five. Down one from number four yesterday, it’s S.W.A.K., bringing it at ya from their latest release, Party on the S Dub. . . ."

"It’s ‘Fly Tonight’!" Mandy said, bouncing on the bed. "I think Scotty looks so fine in this video."

"He does look faaaaahn!" said Taryn, teasing her.

"Faaaaaaaahn!" Mandy agreed, then started singing along. "Flyyyyyyy! Flyyyyyyy! We’re gonna fly tonight, it’s gonna be all right!" Her soft, timid voice harmonized with the S.W.A.K. boys on the a cappella section of the song before the beat kicked in.

I really wasn’t in the mood for our usual XTreme Video Request ritual. Maybe my friends had been right. Instead of late July, I should have started the project when we got out of school. It’s not as if I hadn’t known about Molly’s wedding. The ceremony was all I’d heard about for an entire year. Flowers blah blah reception blah blah place settings blah photographer blah blah shoes blah freakin’ blah to infinity and beyond.

I suppose I hoped this project was one of those things that would disappear if I closed my eyes long enough. The only thing that had vanished, though, were my thirty original words. I was back to square zero. While the others watched the TV or in Carrie’s case, pretended not to, I took my notebook and went to sit in the window seat, where I could look out at the city.

Even when I was in the worst of moods, which lately seemed all the time, I loved gazing out at the city skyline. I couldn’t see anything more than the immense–Mandy might have called them ginormous–high-rises that loomed over our smaller apartment building, and the sliver of green that was the park way down at the end of the street. At night though, I could sometimes peek into the other windows and see other lives going on, and forget a little about my own.

Maybe I’d been doing a little too much forgetting, lately.

A guidebook, hmmm? I might be able to handle that. While the others hummed and sang their way through videos from S.W.A.K. and Sistas on the Verge and Tossing Guppies, I stared at the blank page and willed the words to come. Half an hour later, S.W.A.K. was back again with the video chart topper and I’d still written nothing.

"Huffin’ and a puffin’ thought you’d blow my house down, girl, you didn’t guess it but I knew you was a clown . . . You thought I was a suckah but I knew you was a freak, girl, I couldn’t help myself, we met when I was weak," Mandy declared in time with Kendrick.

Taryn stared at her. "White Jewish girls really should not rap. Like, ever."

I sighed. Okay. Fine. I’d moped enough. I had forty-seven thousand four hundred and ninety minutes to write a project that sure wasn’t writing itself. A guidebook could be a good idea. I mean, who better to write one than a person who really needed it the most? I could give girls like me a fun account of the differences between the sexes! I could catch myself a faaaahn boy and write about how I got him.

Where could I catch myself a few cool and cute guys, though?

"There he is," Taryn called out, pointing at the television as the XTreme Video Request credits rolled over the last of S.W.A.K.’s "When I Was Weak." I looked up at the screen. "There’s your dad!"

XT Talent Producer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry O’Brian

Our ritual ran the same each day–I could even predict what was coming next out of Mandy’s mouth. "Beaner, when is your dad going to get us in the XT audience?" Gack. Same question every afternoon, five days a week!

Mandy had given me an idea, though. Where could I meet a lot of really cute guys? Why not at the most popular music video station on the planet? Maybe this boy-catching thing might prove easier than I’d thought.