96% of the senior class of Texas’ Cedar Park High School is going to college, but straight-A student Brett Ferdinand is not, because he didn’t get into any of the schools he applied for.

by T. J. Clarke

It’s been a long time since we’ve had fiction on Fridays here, since the sad end of Managed Expectations. Well, summer is winging toward us again, so fiction is back too-with a serial of related stories by T. J. Clarke.

“Tell me not to kill myself.”

Dree sits down across the table from me. We are in the law library. The only sounds audible in the cavernous study hall are the furious tappings of fingers on keyboards. I think of summer storms and the sound of rain drops pelting against my window. Dree keeps her voice at a whisper. Still, a head turns in our direction. I make an apologetic face. Dree, however, smiles sweetly at the disturbed library patron, who replies with an a half-grimace, half-smile.

Dree focuses her attention on me again. Her plaintive eyes pose the same question. She wants me to say something sensible, to sooth her. But I can’t. I know she is desperate, but I have no words of comfort to offer her. I feel violated when she assaults me with these outbursts. Just as a naked body offends when it appears in the wrong place, she never chooses the right occasion for her thoughts. Instead I just look at her. She has beautiful eyes; their black irises shiny like pebbles at the bottom of a brook. I always thought she should have been named Brooke. She is so full of water, overflowing with tears.

“If you don’t like the idea, just say it. Don’t sit there and stare at me like I am some lost species of chimpanzee.” Dree picks up her bag from the ground and ferrets around in it.

“No, I don’t like the idea,” I said. From her bag she pulls out a well-leafed issue of Numéro. She finds a page and puts the magazine in front of my face, pointing at a jewelry advertisement.

“What do you think of the Russian, Vodianova? I think she is beautiful.” Models. Dree is obsessed with them. Not the models as individuals, but images of them — editorials, runway shows, candid shots of models walking down the street. She once told me that she would stand naked in front of the mirror, scrutinizing her body for its infinite deformities. I had told her not to worry, that she is beautiful. She made a face and didn’t say anything else. This time I nod. Though before I said anything else, the future lawyer sitting to my left hisses: “Shhhh.”

Dree shrugs. She puts the magazine away. Methodically, she then takes out her laptop, a notebook, a binder full of computer printouts, and a zip-loc bag with an apple, an orange and a pear in it. Today is supposed to be a study date. Instead she is packed for a picnic.

Why do you still read old men poetry? A chat window pops open onto my computer screen. Dree fixes her stare at me, then takes a bite from the pear in her hand. Bits of saliva mix with the pear juice and drip down the side of her mouth. Her lips are moist as the pear flesh, sweet and tender.

Because only old men know what poetry is.

She almost chokes on her next bite of the pear. Her cheeks suddenly turning a deep shade of pink. Her eyes smiling at me, mirthful as a magpie with its shiny penny.

And don’t quote Emily Dickinson to me. She lived like an old man, so she doesn’t count as anything but.

What about Sylvia Plath?

Now it is my turn to puff up and choke on laughter. You are not serious.

No response.

I look up and see that she is, just a little bit. She once read “Colossus” to me and took an extra long
pause after the third stanza. I like the way she reads poems, like the poet might have, letting each word be a word, each syllable evenly spaced out. In her voice, the poems sound as I imagine they should be, clean and subtle. I try to think of something nice to say about Sylvia Plath without having to sacrifice my principles, but she has already moved on and is now putting on her earphones. The pear core lies on a paper napkin, content in its nakedness; its true form revealed by the most beautiful mouth this side of the Gowanus Canal.

T. J. Clarke is the pen name of a struggling writer. She lives in Brooklyn.

Popped monocle alert: Nobody is silent in libraries anymore!

The Wall Street Journal turns an eye to Knifecrime Island and its drinky, stabby ways. Regular readers of this site will not learn much new from this video, but there is plenty of imagery of inebriated Britons in Cardiff-home of the shrieking knickerless ladette-as well as a lovely slideshow which includes a photo of drunken women walking barefoot through streets filled with urine and glass. Speaking of glass, I did learn something from the accompanying article: There are 87,000 glassings in the UK each year. That is double the number of students at Oxford and Cambridge combined.

This is a picture of an Australian chef, feeding his goats out of a hat, on his farm, which is outside of Sydney, while playing with a puppy. (For the vegetarians: here’s a picture of him investigating a plant!) I know. [OH GOD, RELATED UPDATE: Cute Boys With Cats Dot Tumblr Dot Com.]

by Ben Widdicombe

How do you sell a car to a bisexual? And if you’re bisexual, how do you want to be sold to?

Major corporations that market directly to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community tempt us to believe that such slippery questions have firm answers. Otherwise, why were we all standing there at the New York International Auto Show this week, on an unseasonable 80 degree night in April, drinking Cadillac’s beer?

Last year, General Motors hosted a gay event in the West Village to promote the new Camaro. Its senior PR and marketing staff duly came in from Detroit and answered questions like the sincere, heterosexual Midwesterners they are. I was thrilled when one executive earnestly told me that, as far as he knew, Saturn was the GM brand most popular with transsexuals. (If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, I suppose it follows.)

GM’s gay event at this year’s Auto Show was styled “A Night OUT with Cadillac”-emphasis original. And for hardcore fans of English language styling, the invitation also contained the irresistible sentence: “Later we’ll whisk you away by courtesy motorcoach to a VIP afterglow.” (That meant free drinks at the gay bar Therapy.)

At the Auto Show I asked Jason Laird-a lanky Aussie recently relocated to Detroit with his wife and daughters, whose title is “Executive Director, Product & Brand” for GM Communications-why his company was pitching the gays.

“We’re marketing cars and trucks, and the fact of the matter is, you have a broad cross-section of the community that wants to experience these in different ways,” he said.

“Obviously in the LGBT community, you’ve got people who are very brand conscious; very aware of the product they’re buying. The car generally is the most expensive thing you buy after a house, so it makes sense that you would have a direct discussion with any audience that’s interested in your product,” he said.

The answer seemed factual but unilluminating: if something is equally true of all groups, then it doesn’t help us understand the gay situation specifically.

So I turned to one of the gay GM-ers on hand, social media manager and company LGBT spokesman Joe LaMuraglia, who previously founded the homo-motoring Web site Gay Wheels.

“Having covered [GM] prior to making the decision to join them, they were one of the most progressive companies from my perspective, in that they scored well with HRC [Human Rights Campaign], but anyone I ever came in contact with from management all the way down to PR was very welcoming to what we were trying to do,” said LaMuraglia.

He also admitted that carmakers like GM really can’t know the sexuality of their customers. But he said that GayWheels had partnered with the market research firm Sorgenfrei to try and provide such information through an opt-in survey on their site.

So-Joe!-how do you sell a car to a bisexual?

“It isn’t the person’s sexuality, it’s the person’s lifestyle,” he said. “And when you’re in marketing or market research or product planning, it’s all about life-stages and lifestyles. A gay or lesbian couple in their forties with no kids are very different from a straight couple in their forties with four kids. So it’s not really that their sexuality has anything to do with the car they’re driving, it’s more where their life-stage is.”

And that, I suppose, is the unexciting truth. Isn’t it what we’ve been fighting for, all these years? With Stonewall and Silence = Death and rioting on Fifth Avenue a week after Matthew Shepard was murdered-weren’t we just demanding the right to be treated like any other schmuck with a buck in this country?

Still hoping for a “VIP afterglow” to the matter, I returned to the lanky Aussie for one last facetious question.

“So, does the Cadillac gear shift have a special feature for limp wrists?”

He looked at me sympathetically.

“You could get an automatic,” he said.

Ben Widdicombe is a celebrity and pop-culture columnist, based in Manhattan. Our model, pictured above, is Micah Jesse.

From a piece about Alex Chilton’s life as a New Orleanian: “At least twice in the week before his fatal heart attack, Chilton experienced shortness of breath and chills while cutting grass. But he did not seek medical attention, [his wife Laura] Kersting said, in part because he had no health insurance.”

by Simon Dumenco

The Awl’s Morning Market Report:

• The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up this morning as investors greeted news that Lin Yu Chun, Taiwan’s answer to Whitney Houston, also, according to the Associated Press, does Celine Dion and Mariah Carey songs. “I now have more confidence in pursuing a singing career,” the 14-year-old-looking 24-year-old told the AP. “You don’t have to be a good-looking man or woman to succeed. Just be yourself and try your best.” Curiously, Lin had no comment about the man-sized lizard with two penises.
• The Nasdaq is flat this morning as tech investors digested news that, at 5 by 6 feet, this breathtaking painting of Alan Greenspan can’t be displayed full-size on Apple’s new iPad tablet device.

NOW WITH EXTRA AIDAN! And… not much else? Let’s just say they’re holding their plot cards close to their collective enhanced chests. This worked with SatC 1! But you know how sequels are… we want bigger, faster, more! So far, as near as I can tell, the plot of this movie is identical to Jackass 2. (Maybe Sex and the City 3: The Embalming will be in 3D though!)

Barack Obama’s decision to declare himself as “black” on his census form rather than choosing a biracial option has so outraged conservatives that they can make furious declarations like this one without any sense of awareness:

The obvious contrast is between the president and Tiger Woods, who calls himself “Cablinasian-Caucasian-black-Indian-Asian. But Mr. Woods plays the game of golf, not that of race. He has never encouraged his fans to celebrate him as the first great black golfer. Yet “first black president” was always part of candidate Obama’s sales pitch. Thus, in at least this one important respect, Mr. Woods-unlike President Obama-is the free man blacks through the centuries of bondage yearned to be.

I mean… wow.