Lou Wanted Shirley? Lou wanted love. Someone good enough.

Not someone good enough in the classic sense: the girl next door who was ordinarily pretty but also smart in a 3.0 GPA kind of way. He just wanted good enough as in the bare minimum, the necessaries stripped to the bone, the female in the primitive form. He was so hungry for something, the aching idea of simply having someone, he wouldve taken the first homely and kindeyed girl who said, Hey, with the half-smile girls like so much. And eventually, like all things we desperately wish, he got what he asked for and a little more. He thought hed get a Shirley, the girl who was the solid portrait of what all his friends didnt want in high school. Shirley Morales was the kind of girl whose favorite clothes were sweaters and t-shirts with sayings like, Goin Bananas, with monkeys all over them, or Power Puff Girls throwbacks. In these shirts, she never wore bras, which for some girls, would make the shirts at least permissible, appealing to the type of irony a teenager can appreciate. But there was one problem: Shirley had thin flabby breasts and nipples that faced in opposite directions. When she would run in her gym clothes, Lou couldnt help but stare at them, imagining her walrus fins clapping together with each stroke her foot made on the pavement. The only thing Shirley had going for her was her lower half. She had a lower half sent from the comic book gods: Zatannas small waist, Huntresss muscular thighs, and the dangerously curvaceous Poison Ivys perfect behind. Lou always thought she was the Frankenstein of his comic book nightmares. He thought it was a cruel joke how she happened to have such an amazing lower half, when her top half looked like a warped version of Nightwing with thick dark glasses to match. His thoughts were interrupted when Shirley came up to him while he was sitting at his lunch table waiting for his friends. It was school picture day in 9th grade. He remembered this because, somehow, Shirley was riding the line of actually looking like a normal girl. Her typically greasy and gelled hair that was always pulled together in a tight bun at the back of her neck was freshly washed and curled. It even sort of fit her face. Her Nightwing glasses were removed to reveal big brown eyes that, though dull, werent bad to look at. She had also recently gotten her braces removed, so her teeth were really straight, though a yellow in tint. Do I have something in my teeth? she asked and tilted her face within four inches of Lous. He could see the very top of her walrus fins swinging from the movement. Lou looked around for a moment to see if anyone else was witnessing this interaction. Coast clear. No, not at all. He pulled his notebook closer and inched down in his chair, hoping to increase the distance between her face and his. She smiled and tilted backward. Shirley tried to hold his shifting gaze. Realizing he was operating more like a gassy fouryear-old she walked away unfazed and settled on the idea that Lou was embarrassingly constipated.