The Other Side

Chapter Ten

Instead of making good on her threat to have Mindy do her fair share, Lynette managed to find a second job. Mindy and Nolan had a good laugh over the fact that it was also at the mall, but at least it kept her out of the house more. With her gone most of the day and part of the evening, Nolan and Mindy had free run of the house.

            At the moment, they were hanging out in the living room. While Mindy sat at one end of the couch struggling through a stack of homework, Nolan sat at the opposite end watching the third installment in the Terminator series. He couldn’t believe those movies were still around. The second one came out the year before he died and that was a long ass time ago. Talk about beating a dead horse.

            It wasn’t just the Terminator franchise still cranking out movies for a concept that was cool too many years ago. All the major horror movies did it too. Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth and The Nightmare on Elm Street were still at it. They even had those crossover films that put Freddy and Jason in the same movie in some kind of battle against each other.

            That kind of crap made Nolan glad he no longer had to pay to see movies. Hollywood scriptwriters could’ve come up with something better if they wanted to, but they were content to sit back and make fat cash off a tired concept. Star Wars was the biggest offender of all. They made three new movies after the others blew up and then called them the first episodes.

            “Did you have a lot of girlfriends in high school?” Mindy blurted out.

            A red alert warning went off in Nolan’s head. No matter how hard she tried to make it sound that way, that wasn’t a casual question. Why did girls always want to know how many other girls a guy was with before them?

            Nolan shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it depends on how many you think is a lot.”

            “You mean there were so many different girls you lost count?” Mindy asked.

            Shit! That wasn’t what he was going for. “I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”

            “Did you have sex with any of them?”

            “Um, a few of them, I guess.”

            Mindy laughed. “Either you did or you didn’t. There’s no guessing.”

            “All I meant was that I don’t know how many girls I had sex with,” he explained.

            As soon as the words left his mouth, Nolan realized the flaw in his strategy. That made him sound like one of those sex obsessed guys that girls were always bitching about. Of course, it wasn’t really his fault. He was screwed the minute she asked the question.

This was another of those things a guy couldn’t win at. If he didn’t answer the question at all, he had something to hide, probably the fact that he was the male equivalent of a slut. If he gave a number that was too low then he looked like a loser. If the number was zero then he was a liar. They never believed a guy was a virgin, even though every guy was at some point in his life. If the number was too high then it opened up a whole different set of questions. How many girls were there? What kinds of things did he do with them? Were the others better than her?

Girls could do themselves a big favor and save themselves a lot of heartache if they just kept their curiosity intact the way guys did. A guy never wanted to know how many guys his girl was with before him. Too many and she was a slut so he had to start worrying about catching something from her. Either that or he had other people talking shit about her for being a slut and him for being so desperate he’d date a slut. Too few and she didn’t know what she was doing which meant he had to take the time to show her what to do, which turned sex into work and sucked the fun out of it.