Chapter Twelve

“I’m glad you came to me with this problem Luka,” his dad’s deep scratchy voice came through the computer speakers.

“Yeah, so what should I get her?”

“Whenever you buy a present for a female you have to think very carefully. A gift speaks volumes. What do you want your gift to say?” His dad leaned forward and peered at him through the screen.

“I dunno… happy birthday?”

He rolled his eyes. “Why do you want her to have a good birthday?”

“Because… I guess because she’s my friend?”

He gave a curt nod. “Okay, good. You want a gift that says, ‘I’m glad you’re my friend.’”

“Yeah.”

“Just friends?”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure her dad would kill me if I tried for anything more than that. ”

“Okay. You need to be careful that it can’t be interpreted as a girlfriend gift, so you want to stay away from flowers and chocolates, and jewelry is borderline.”

“What do you mean, borderline?”

“Well obviously you’re not going to get her a ring. The only time you ever give a girl a ring is if you’re asking her to marry you. Necklaces…” He bit his lip and shook his head. “…probably not. You might be able to get away with a bracelet, so long as it’s not elegant. Actually, come to think of it, just avoid jewelry all together.”

“Okay… so what should I get her?” He returned to his original question.

“I can’t tell you, I don’t know the girl. You’ve got to listen to her very carefully. Take notice of the things she likes and the things she complains about and then get her something that will make her life a little bit better.”

“There isn’t some master gift that all girls like?”

“Well… yes and no. In my experience all girls like scented candles. If you are really stuck you could get her a scented candle, but only use that as a last resort. Your gifts say a lot about you. You want your gift to say, ‘I am listening to you,’ not, ‘I bought you a candle because I couldn’t think of anything else.’”

“Oh. Okay.”

As the days ticked down towards Carlie’s birthday, Lucas listened to her and watched her very carefully. The problem was, all Carlie and her friends talked about for the rest of the week was the pros and cons of different brands of makeup. His dad had said not to buy her jewelry so obviously he couldn’t get her earrings, and he knew nothing about makeup, so it kind of left him at a dead end.

On Friday afternoon, at a loss to know what else to do, he googled ‘Gift Shop’ and rode his bike up to a line of trendy looking stores along LaTrobe Terrace in Paddington. He wandered in and out of them looking for a candle. There was a lot of stuff that he had no idea what you would do with. Little glass jars with ornamental stoppers as lids, furniture that looked like someone had gotten sick of refurbishing halfway through the job, a shop that sold nothing but brightly colored beaded jewelry… it was all quite bewildering.

Finally he stepped into a store called ‘Buba and La,’ which in his estimation had a high probability of carrying scented candles. It was one of those stores that was decorated so that you felt like you sere stepping into a picture from a fashionable magazine. It was light and airy and there were pretty things all around the place. There were glass bowls full of delicate shells and shelves artfully arranged with vases and wooden boxes.

There were two guys in their early twenties chatting. A taller blonde guy was leaning on the counter to a coffee bar and a darker guy was restocking a shelf. Lucas thought they must be Buba and La. They were both dressed in fitted jeans and brightly colored polo shirts and the friendly, open way that they were talking to each other belied a relationship that went beyond working together in a gift shop. They were probably the owners.

Lucas felt relieved. Even if they didn’t have scented candles, gay guys knew all about women and gifts and stuff like that. Surely they’d steer him in the right direction.

“You right mate?” The blonde one, who Lucas decided was Buba, asked. “Do you need a coffee?”

Australians and their coffee. After puking up a cappuccino all over the Governor Lucas was taking a break from coffee. “No, I’m looking for a present for a girl.”

“What sort of present?” La asked.

“A birthday present?” Lucas said, unsure of himself.

“Did you have anything in mind?”

“Um… a scented candle?”

“Oh, we usually carry them but we’re all out.”

“Do you have anything like a scented candle?”

“Ah…” La tilted his head to the side.

“There are those scented soaps,” Buba interjected. “Show him the soaps.”

La took him over to a corner of the store where there were wicker baskets full of neatly wrapped bars of soap.

“Do girls like soaps like this?” Lucas asked.

La furrowed his brow and said, “Ah… well…”

But Buba cut him off. “Chicks totally love soaps. They think if they use fancy soap it’ll turn them into a supermodel or something. You should see my sister’s bathroom… totally overflowing with soaps and perfumes and other girly stuff.”

This comment gave Lucas the confidence he was looking for. He picked a bar of soap and was about to buy it when he decided, what the hell, why not two? If one scented soap was a good present, two must surely be great.

After buying the soaps and having them gift wrapped, it was like a weight was lifted off his shoulders. He felt so relieved. He slept like a baby that night, and the next day, at the Queensland swimming championships, he swam like a fish.

Mr. Weaver took the morning off from the bromeliads to take him to the swimming facility, which was on the south side of town. Lucas was surprised when he parked the car and came inside rather than just dropping him off near the gates. Mr. Weaver stayed all day. He sat beside Ben’s parents and when Lucas touched the wall at the end of a race he’d look up and see Mr. Weaver standing and cheering.

Near the end of the day Mrs. Weaver, Carlie, Penelope and Tamika showed up to watch the last couple of races. He won the under fifteen division of the 100 meters breaststroke and they all acted surprised and happy.

“I didn’t know you were such a good swimmer Lucas,” Penelope said. “From the way you act in Phys. Ed. class I just assumed you weren’t any good at sports.”

Lucas laughed. “I’m afraid artistic gymnastics really isn’t one of my strengths.”

“Maybe you’ll do better at rhythmic gymnastics,” Carlie joked.

It was a funny thing to say, but the reality was that Lucas needed to step things up in gym class. The grade for that Phys. Ed. was merged with the grade for health class and he hadn’t even looked at any of the material that the girls had been going over in that class.

Each Wednesday he hurried to the classroom to get the package of photocopies that Ms. Stephens put together for him before the girls got there, then he went to the library, hacked the wireless router and played computer games for an hour with the sound turned off. Needless to say, he was going to fail the test they had coming up in 2 weeks time.

His only hope of a passing grade was to ace the rhythmic gymnastics performance on the last Friday of classes for the term. It was a long shot, but he thought he just might pull it off. His mom had been a ballerina when she was young so he was planning on asking her to help him put a routine together.

There was only one more event that he was swimming in that day and so he told them all that they should go home ahead of him and he’d get a ride with Ben’s family, but Mr. and Mrs. Weaver protested and insisted that they would stay to the end.

Carlie and her friends seemed content. They were talking about how to get Tamika into ninth grade classes. She had only been kept down because she had some health problems when she was younger and she was really smart so there was actually a chance that she might be able to get accelerated.

After a while the topic of conversation changed and Carlie started talking about how fit all of the girls who were swimming looked.

“They’re all so toned and muscular,” she said. “Look at that girl in the maroon and yellow, she looks like she belongs in a TV commercial or something. I wish I looked like that.”

It was a stupid thing to say. Carlie wasn’t as muscular as the swimmers but in Lucas’ opinion she was way prettier than any of them.

Mrs. Weaver laughed at her. “Those girls probably swim for hours every day. You don’t just magically have a body like that, you have to work for it.”

“Maybe I should work for it,” Carlie said. “Maybe I should start exercising more. I should get up in the morning and run with you guys, and I should do sit ups and pushups every day.”

Suddenly something clicked in Lucas’ brain. Carlie was saying that she wanted to do more exercise. That was something that could be turned into a gift.

Before long it was time for his final race of the day, the 200 meters freestyle. Micah’s event. He always had such anxiety attached to this race. His dad always said that all he had to do was to try his hardest and it would make everyone happy, but that wasn’t true.

When he tried his hardest he would beat Micah and he’d have to look in his eyes and see the pain and disappointment and know that he was the one who’d put it there. When he didn’t try his hardest he felt ashamed of himself, as if he was lying or something. It was a loose-loose situation.

Micah wasn’t here today and so he swam his event. He felt great and he was winning until the final lap when realized that he was probably going to swim a personal record. Something about that bothered him. He didn’t want to be faster than Micah in his event, even if he wasn’t even in the same country.

It felt wrong.

He slowed down and the guy in the lane beside him powered past him to take first place. Lucas came in fourth and he had that same awful feeling that he got when he told lies.

He rode home with Mr. Weaver and the girls went in Mrs. Weaver’s car. Mr. Weaver asked if he was feeling okay.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he replied.

“Do you like swimming?” Mr. Weaver asked.

It was a weird question. To Lucas it was sort of like asking, ‘do you like breathing?’

“Yeah, of course.”

“What about racing?”

“Yeah… to a degree.”

“Why’s that?”

Lucas sighed and Mr. Weaver took his eyes off the road for a moment to glance at him.

“Anything you tell me is strictly confidential. I wont tell anyone,” he added.

Lucas regarded him for a moment. Mr. Weaver had wild, thick, dark brown hair that always looked messy and when he wasn’t at work, or defending himself against bromeliads, he wore short sleeved button-down shirts in muted earth tones with jeans and brown leather shoes that looked like they belonged on the deck of a yacht. He had a tall, narrow frame that made him look a bit like a reflection from one of those warped mirrors at county fairs.

His pale blue eyes flicked from the road over to Lucas and back to the road again.

Lucas sighed again, and then told him everything. He told him about how his and Micah’s dads were best friends and had swam together at university and how he and Micah had been friends ever since they were born, two months apart, fourteen and a half years ago. How they had always swam together with Micah’s brothers and how even though he trained twice as hard as anyone else, Micah could never keep up.

“The 200 free is his event and I always feel guilty if I beat him at it, but then I also feel guilty if I let him beat me. Today I realized that I was probably going to swim faster than Micah’s personal record, so I slowed down.”

“Hmm…” Mr. Weaver didn’t say anything for a while.

“Sometimes I feel like I want to quit, just so I don’t have to deal with it anymore, but I think my dad would freak out.”

The seconds ticked away and Lucas thought that must have been the end of the conversation, because when Mr. Weaver finally spoke he said, “Do you know the words to the Australian National Anthem?”

“No. I know the tune, but not the words.”

“The first line is, ‘Australians all let us rejoice.’ When I was younger I was an assistant producer of a TV program that aired on Saturday nights. It was my first big job and the head producer assigned the comedic part of the program to me. I’m not really all that great at comedy so I struggled for a while until I discovered four to six year old children.”

“That sounds a bit weird.”

Mr. Weaver smiled. “Okay, that did sound weird, but it saved my job. On the week before Australia Day Mrs. Weaver happened to be sick so I had to drop Carlie off and pick her up from day care. One day there was a little kid out on the play equipment singing the national anthem, but some of the words were wrong. I asked her what the words were and she said in a very serious voice, ‘Australians all are ostriches.’

“I got permission to interview her from her parents and it was a real hit. I started making a regular segment where I’d have an interviewer ask little kids questions and film their whackey responses. It was hilarious. People loved it. But what I really learned was that every person sees the world through their own eyes and interprets thing very differently.

“We expect that little kids would misinterpret the world, but I think there is a certain amount of that going on with teenagers and even adults too. You think that your dad would flip out if you told him you weren’t going to swim any more, but you might be interpreting him incorrectly. He might be happy for you to try something different.”

“Mm… maybe.”

“And Micah might find the same thing. He might find that he is good at something else and that his parents would be just as proud of him for that as they would be for him to swim.”

“Yeah but how could I tell him that?”

Mr. Weaver shook his head. “You probably can’t. But you could be the first one to try ditching swimming. If your dad got over it and wasn’t mad at you then maybe it would give Micah the confidence to try too.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. He loved swimming but it caused him so much stress. He often felt his life would be much happier without it.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mr. Weaver said. “You have an amazing talent in the water, but it is your talent and your life and you have every right to try other things if that’s what you want to do.”

Lucas thought about what Mr. Weaver had said a lot for the rest of that day. He asked to be let off at the swimming pool that he worked at because he wanted to talk to his boss, Sarah, about Carlie’s birthday present and he decided to ask her about quitting swimming too.

He showed Sarah the medals he’d won at the swimming meet and she ohhed and ahhed over them and then he said, “I’ve been thinking about quitting swimming.”

Her penciled eyebrows rose in surprise. “Quitting? Why would you want to do that doll?”

“Well, I feel like I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’d like to try something else for a change.”

She nodded enthusiastically. “Oh yes, there are so many fun and exciting ways to stay in shape. Just this morning my boyfriend and I paddled in kayaks from town to the Indooroopilly bridge and back. There’s no reason that exercising needs to be a chore.”

“Right. Well, that’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. I have a friend who’d like to exercise more and build muscle. What would you recommend?”

Sarah smiled and winked at him. “Would this ‘friend’ have just recently quit swimming?”

“Huh? No.” Carlie rarely swam. In fact he’d never seen her swim, even in her parents’ pool.

Sarah motioned with her head and he followed her lycra-clad form into the little retail shop that was attached to the kiosk at the entrance of the pool. She picked up a DVD and handed it to him.

“Burn Fat Fast,” he read the title.

“Uh-huh,” Sarah said as she smiled and nodded. “That is the best half hour workout I’ve ever found. I do it every night before I go to bed. It’s not all about burning fat. It is about building and toning muscle too. Is that something your ‘friend’ is interested in?”

“Yeah. I think so. Thanks.”

He bought the DVD and wrapped it when he got home to the Weaver’s house. Now he had two presents and he was feeling pretty confident about Carlie’s birthday. He’d done a step better than what his dad had told him to. He’d listened to her and gotten something that she indicated she would like, and he’d gotten her something that was so close to a scented candle that she probably wouldn’t notice the difference.

He was so happy that he didn’t even get annoyed the next day when both Penelope and Tamika gave her earrings. It was pretty unfair that girls were allowed to give each other jewelry but boys weren’t allowed to give girls jewelry unless the girl was your girlfriend.

Her mom gave her makeup and her dad gave her tickets to the symphony.

She got to his gifts last and he knew he had a big grin on his face when she was opening the first one. His dad had said that gifts say a lot about the giver. His gifts were going to say that he was a thoughtful person who listened to her and wanted her to smell and feel pretty.

She opened the soaps first and her reaction wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting. La at the gift shop had done an excellent job with the wrapping and she ohhed and ahhed over the nice paper and ribbons and the glamorous glossy business card that was attached to the bottom of the package, but when she saw that it was soaps a perplexed look came over her face. Her brow creased and her head tilted to the side. She lifted the soaps to her nose one at a time. The whole room was silent.

“Thanks,” she said in a restrained way.

“There’s another one,” Lucas prompted.

Carlie took a deep breath and let it out, then smiled in a determined way at the next gift as she unwrapped it.

The smile fell from her face.

She turned the DVD in her hands. “Burn... Fat... Fast...”

There was a collective intake of breath from everyone else in the room and Lucas suddenly got the feeling that perhaps the DVD was a bad idea.

Maybe he should have gotten her some private gym lessons.

Suddenly Carlie leapt from her seat and screeched at him. “You think I’m fat!”

“What? No!”

“You think I’m fat and that I stink!” She hurtled the DVD in his general direction and took off running towards her room.

“Oh no,” Penelope said.

He couldn’t see Tamika’s reaction because she was wearing a little hat with a brim that was just long enough to cover her eyes when she looked down into her lap, like she was doing right then.

“Come on,” Penelope tugged on her arm and they went after Carlie.

Now it was just Lucas and Mr. and Mrs. Weaver out in the living room with a small pile of wrapping paper on the couch and a line of gifts on the coffee table, except of course the DVD which had bounced off the wall and was lying on the floor.

He thought back to the conversation that he’d had with Mr. Weaver yesterday. ‘Every person sees the world through their own eyes and interprets things differently.’ Well, Carlie had certainly interpreted his gift in a different way than he had expected.

“I didn’t mean that she was fat or stinky,” Lucas told her parents. “Yesterday she said she wanted to work out more and my boss at the pool said that DVD was the best workout she’d ever done, and I meant to get her a scented candle but the closest they had was scented soap and Buba said that girls love soap.”

“Who’s Buba?” Mrs. Weaver asked.

“The gay guy who owns the gift shop up in Paddington.”

“Did you keep the receipts?”

“Yeah, they’re in my room somewhere.”

“Okay, let me go talk to her and see if she’ll exchange them for something she’d like better.” Mrs. Weaver got up and left Lucas alone with Mr. Weaver.

“Jeez…” Lucas sighed. “Do you ever think I’ll get it right with her?”

Mr. Weaver shook his head. “Probably not. She’s a teenage girl. Who knows what goes on in that head of hers?” He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I used to think that it would be best to just hold my breath and wait for these teenage years to be over, but after you said your brother left home when he was eighteen I started thinking. I might not have much time left with her. She might decide to leave home when she’s eighteen too. So now I think it’s best to just try your hardest and apologize when things go wrong.

“How do you feel about the beach?” He asked.

Lucas was starting to become accustomed to these quick changes in the direction of Mr. Weaver’s conversations. “I like the beach.”

“Good. I think we should all go to the beach for a long weekend before you leave to go back to America.”

That idea brightened Lucas’ day. Things actually got better. When Carlie finally emerged from her room he apologized and explained that he hadn’t meant the gifts the way she had taken them. It helped that when they went to exchange the DVD at the pool’s retail store Sarah was there and she was aghast when he explained what had happened.

“I am so sorry,” she gushed to Carlie. “I told Lucas to buy that DVD because I thought he was buying it for himself. If he had told me it was for a birthday present for a girl I would have told him he was out of his mind.”

The retail store had a bunch of swimming, running and cycling gear and Carlie exchanged the DVD for a pair of running shorts. She tried them on in the little changing room and when she stepped out and said, “What do you think?” Lucas’ mouth and throat dried up and he couldn’t reply.

He’d never seen Carlie in anything as revealing as these shorts. He felt sure the school uniform was designed specifically to make the girls look frumpy, and that included the sports uniform. On the weekends she usually wore jeans or skirts that came down around her knees. This was the first time her glorious legs had been revealed to him in all of their splendor. It took a gargantuan effort to stop himself from staring.

Sarah was explaining to her all of the features of the running shorts; the sweat wicking fabric and the athletic cut that would allow her to stride out. She started talking about the hidden key pocket that was sewn into the waist band and lifted Carlie’s shirt a little to show her where it was. Lucas got a little peak of the smooth skin of her belly and when Sarah folded the waistband down to show her the key pocket he saw the top of her lacy white panties.

He turned away quickly and strode out of the store. He was sure Mr. Weaver would flog him if he knew the thoughts running through his head right now.

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Weaver called out.

“I’m just going to say hi to the other lifeguards,” he replied without looking back.

He walked around the pool to the far end and tried to think of unsexy things. He thought about that big hairy old guy who swam every Tuesday afternoon and whom Lucas had accidentally seen naked in the locker rooms one day. That event, which Lucas had thought of as particularly unfortunate at the time, was turning out to be a real blessing in disguise, because thinking about the hairy man was claming him down.

He said hi to the two lifeguards on duty and by the time he got back to the store Carlie was back in her regular clothes and they were ready to leave to go to Buba and La’s shop to exchange the soaps.

When he walked in the door Buba recognized him and waved hello. “How did the soaps go?” He asked.

“Um… not so great. She wants to exchange them,” he motioned to Carlie.

“Oh.” Buba looked disappointed.

“I told you, Jake,” La said. “You don’t give girls soaps because they’ll think you’re trying to tell them they stink. How you ever got a girlfriend is beyond me.”

“You have a girlfriend?” Lucas asked, stunned.

“Yeah. Why? Is that surprising?” Buba, or Jake, asked.

“Um… no… it’s just that I thought you two were… well, you know… gay.”

“Ha! Dennis only wishes I swung that way.”

“Get out of here you big ape,” Dennis said as he threw a CD case across the space between the register and the coffee bar. Jake ducked and it bounced off the espresso machine and clattered to the floor.

Dennis came out from behind the register and showed the girls all of the pretty things in the store and eventually Carlie decided to exchange the soaps for a little wooden box that she said she was going to use to store all of her earrings in.

Seeing that it had been a distressing morning for all of them in some way or another, and that it was Carlie’s birthday, they all ordered cappuccinos and little slices of an amazingly rich chocolate cake. They pulled together two of the little tables in the coffee shop part of the store and Jake arranged the pieces of cake around a fancy pink candle.

“I thought you said you didn’t have any candles?” Lucas asked.

“You asked for scented candles, this one is scent-less, it’s not the same thing.”

“Yeah, but it’s still a candle.”

Jake shrugged his shoulders. “You said scented. I thought that was important.”

Lucas shook his head and decided to drop it. Carlie looked happy now and that was what mattered.

They sang happy birthday and she blew out the candle and the entire time it was as if he were watching one of those old home movies where the camera focuses on one person and you’re not even aware that there were other people in the room. After she blew out the candle she looked up at him and smiled and he felt the strangest warmth bloom in his chest and he knew he was smiling back at her without even telling himself to.

When they got back home he got on iChat and told his dad about how terrible the advice he’d given had been. His dad looked stunned and then laughed loudly when he told him the whole story. After he was done with his dad he talked to his mom about the gymnastics routine for a while and then called Micah and told him that he thought he was going to quit swimming.

Micah looked conflicted. His brow furrowed and he bit his lip. “Why would you want to do that?” He asked.

Lucas shrugged. “I dunno. I just want to try some other stuff for a while. I feel like all we’ve ever done is swimming. How come we never joined baseball teams or tried soccer?”

“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think? All of the other players will have been doing it for years.”

“Who cares if I suck at it? Why does it always have to be about being good at something? Why can’t we be content with just enjoying the things that we do?”

Micah nodded cautiously. “Okay. I mean, I’m not going to give you a hard time about it. I’ll miss you at practice, but if you want to try other things you should try other things. What do you think your dad will say?”

“He’ll probably flip out, but you know what? He’ll get used to it.”

“Good luck with that. Let me know how it goes.”

“Mm. So the Weavers are taking us to the beach in two weekends time.”

“Two weekends? Like the weekend before you come home?”

“Yeah, as a farewell party. We’re going for three days and we’re going to stay in a vacation apartment. Carlie has invited her friends. It should be fun.”

Micah grabbed his date book and was flipping through it. “You mean the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re going with a bunch of girls?”

“Yeah, three girls and Mr. and Mrs. Weaver.”

“Are you mad?” Micah asked dramatically, his eyes bulging.

“No… what do you mean?”

“The 14^th Luka… what happens on the 14^th?”

“Huh?” He didn’t know what the hell Micah was talking about.

“That’s when they lay their egg. You told me that they lay their egg on the 14^th day of the month!”

“Oh shit.”

“You’re going to be stuck in an apartment with three girls and woman all laying eggs.”

Lucas felt the blood drain from his face. What had he gotten himself in to? “What am I going to do?” He whispered.

Micah shook his head. “I don’t know. You’ll have to try and give them their space. I figured out that’s what that saying means you know. They need extra space on the day they lay their egg.”

“But we’re going to be at the beach. We’re supposed to be hanging out together all weekend.” He felt the dread spreading over his body. How on earth was he going to deal with this?

Micah took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s just calm down and think about this rationally. They probably do it in the morning right? Like when you wake up and you need to pee, it’s probably like that. Mom and Gracie always pee in the morning, just like us guys do. I feel confident that laying the egg is probably the same.”

Micah’s logic was calming Lucas down. Sometimes he felt so lucky to have him as a friend.

Micah continued. “So all you have to do is get out of the apartment early on the Sunday morning and don’t come back until you’ve given them all enough time to do their thing.”

“How long do you think?”

“I don’t know. Maybe ten minutes each?”

Lucas nodded. “I’ll give them fifteen each just to be sure.”

“Yeah, good idea. I can’t imagine that it takes longer than fifteen minutes to lay an egg.”

“Okay.” He was starting to feel better about this now that they had a plan. He’d just go down to the beach for an early morning swim and not come back for an hour… or maybe two hours just to be sure. “Hey Micah? What do you think they do with them?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they flush them.”

“No, I don’t think so. Sometimes toilets get clogged just with poop, can you imagine how badly they’d get clogged if there were a bunch of eggs going through the pipes?”

“Hmm… good point.” Micah chewed on his thumbnail for a few seconds as he thought. “This is going to sound crazy but maybe… do you think they sell them to the grocery store? I mean egg cartons have pictures of chickens on them, but it wouldn’t be the first time the food industry had tried to trick us. Remember when we found out that crab meat wasn’t really made out of crabs?”

“Yeah, but it turned out that it was actually called imitation crab.”

“What about cheese singles? They’re not really cheese are they?”

“No. You might be right,” Lucas conceded.

Micah nodded seriously. “I have a feeling about this one. I think we should suspend all egg consumption until we have it figured out. You’ll have a great opportunity when you go to the beach, I mean, they have to get rid of them somehow, right? Try to observe them and see what they do with them.”

When he got off the computer Lucas lay on his bed and thought through all of the events of the weekend and tried to arrange them in his head. Funnily enough, even after the conversation about girls laying eggs he still got a warm happy feeling when he thought about Carlie.

When he’d first found out about the menstrual cycle and had told Micah’s dad that girls were disgusting he’d replied, ‘You wont always feel that way.’ Lucas thought that maybe he was starting to understand that. The menstrual cycle was weird and creepy and gross, but it wasn’t Carlie’s fault that she had it. If she needed to lay an egg each month then it was okay with him. Anything Carlie needed was okay with him.