The Boy Next Door - Weebly

To: John Trent
From: Stacy Trent >
Subject: You took my advice, didn't you?
Don't deny it. You called her. So spill.
And don't leave anything out. I am thirty-four years old, which puts me, as a woman, at
my sexual peak. I am also so pregnant I haven't seen my own feet in weeks. The only
way I can have sex is vicariously. So start tapping on that keyboard, monkey boy.
Stacy
To: Stacy Trent
From: John Trent
Subject: Monkey boy responds
You sure do talk racy for a full-time housewife and mother of two and a half. Do the other
mommies on the PTA have their minds in the gutter, too? That must make for some
interesting bake sales. For your information, what you are assuming has happened has not.
And if things continue in the manner they have been, it never will, either.
I don't know what it is about this girl. I know I am not the most debonair of men. I don't
think anyone who has ever met me would classify me as a playboy. But nor have I ever
been accused of being a complete imbecile. And yet when I'm around Mel, that's exactly how I
end up looking--probably out of divine punishment for the fact that since I met her, I've done
pretty much nothing but lie to her. Whatever it is, I cannot seem to pull off something as
simple as dinner between the two of us. As you know, my first attempt ended with us eating
pizza standing up (and her paying for her own slice).
My second attempt was even worse: we spent most of the evening in an animal hospital.
And then I very suavely added insult to injury by sexually harassing her on Max
Friedlander's aunt's couch. She fled, in romance-novel vernacular, like a startled fawn. As
well she should have: I'm sure I must have seemed like a teenager in post-prom heat.
Is this satisfying your wish to live vicariously through my romantic adventures, Stacy?
Are those toes you haven't seen in so long curling with excitement?
I almost broke down and told her after the couch incident. I wish to God now that I had.
Things have only gone from bad to worse. Because every day that I don't tell her is just
another day she's going to hate me for when she finally figures it out.
And she will figure it out. I mean, one of these days, my luck is going to run out, and
someone who knows Max Friedlander is going to tell her I'm not him, and she's not going
to understand when I try to explain, because it's all so utterly Animal House , and she's
going to hate me, and my life is going to be over. Because for some unfathomable reason,
instead of reviling me, like any woman in her right mind would, Mel seems actually to like me.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I mean, you would think that, considering what she
knows of me--or Max Friedlander, I should say--she'd hate my guts. But no. On the contrary:
Mel laughs at my inane jokes. Mel listens to my asinine stories. And she apparently talks