Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love by Maryrose Wood Read Free Book Online

it painful? It sounds pretty unpleasant.”
    The pigeons suddenly take off with a coordinated flopping of their semi-useless wings as Jacob skids to a stop on his Razor scooter right in front of us.
    “Matthew, dude!” he exclaims. Jacob is always blond, but now he’s really tan and his hair is bleached platinum by the sun and ratted into little funky-whiteboy dreads. “And gracious greetings to the Lady Poet.” He bows to me, medieval-courtier style.
    “Nice melanin production, Jake,” says Matthew, standing up and giving Jacob one of those back-slapping guy hugs where they bump chests but their faces never get near each other. “How was the trip?”
    “Oh, dude, my sweet mama is such a nutcase when she’s opening a new show. I pity her anxiety. Whoops, apologies, Mr. Cracker!” He’s just stepped on the last of the saltines. “It was cool hanging out on the beach, though, playing my sitar. The good people of La-La were totally appreciative.”
    “That’s nice,” I say.
    “It’s because their spirits are all malnourished from the filthy air and soulless Hollywood vibe,” Jacob says, smacking his arms to keep warm. “You guys wanna go on the swings?”
    We gather our ’bucks cups and our backpacks. I take special care to slide Matthew’s essay into a safe spot in my notebook so it doesn’t get crumpled.
    There’s a small playground at the uptown end of Madison Square Park. Unlike us Free Teenage Children of the Pound, who can wander wherever we like as long as it’s relevant to our project du jour, the little kids are locked up in classrooms during the day, daring each other to eat paste and learning how to fold cootie catchers. So we’ll have the swings all to ourselves.
    Jacob is a virtuoso of the Razor scooter, doing hairpin turns and popping ollies and weaving in between horrified senior citizens at incredible speed. He circles and swerves around me and Matthew as the three of us head toward the swings. This makes his voice cut in and out, so I can’t hear all of what he’s saying.
    “You should swear off the ’bucks, man—
something
—the mallification of America—
something something
—corporate java mind control —something something something —a caffeine-laden tool for global domination— Oh, this is cool, people. Watch this.”
    Jacob accelerates on his scooter and jumps off it directly onto a swing, landing on his belly and arcing through the air as the confused Razor crash-lands against the fence.
    He flips over onto his butt and starts whooping and pumping his legs and having a grand old time. It seems the only way we’re going to get any interview material from Jacob is to take to the air. Swings make me queasy, but science is not for wusses, as I’m beginning to learn.
    It takes a while to calibrate our swinging so we’re all moving forward and backward in unison.
    “So, Jacob!” I yell. “What’s your experience of love?”
    “I love New York, baby!” he crows.
    “That’s great, buddy,” shouts Matthew. “But we mean love, love. Romantic love, FM-radio-love-song love.”
    “You mean love with chicks?” Jacob says as we all pump our legs.
    “Sure! If that’s the way you swing!” Matthew says, making us snort with laughter.
    “There was this one girl,” yells Jacob. “She was it for me, I mean IT. I will never, ever”—we’re all getting breathless now—“ever, find someone as perfect as her.”
    “Who, man? You never mentioned a girl,” says Matthew.
    Jacob stops pumping, so we do, too. “She was riding the L train,” he says, sounding wistful. “I watched her put on her lip gloss all the way from Lorimer Street to Eighth Avenue, even though I was supposed to change at Union Square.” We’re slowing down, down, down. “Then she got off the train. She was wearing orange sneakers. I will never see her like again.”
    “When was this?” I ask, trying not to sound suspicious. Frankly, I am not sure this qualifies as a Love Phenomenon. And that