Chapter 2

Aquanetta tried to carry on an instant message conversation with the boy she liked, but was intrigued when she came across the blog of one Leroy Blumkinstein, and found herself unable to tear her eyes away despite the obnoxious dinging and blinking of the small window in the left corner of her monitor. Philip would have to wait. As far as Aquanetta was concerned, there were two groups of people who dominated and characterized New York: the blacks, and the Jews. She didn't care about the whites, the wealthy, the celebrities, or the homeless gentlemen on the street corners, so covered and caked in grime that it was impossible even to tell their ethnicity, let alone their religious preferences. The point was, all of this fascinated Aquanetta and when it came down to it, delving into the blog-life of Leroy was a far better use of her time than chit-chatting with Philip, a white-bred, white-bread kid with a life as interesting as a bowl of vanilla ice cream, trying to think of cute and girlish one liners and peppering the conversation with emoticons and less-than-threes, while trying not to appear as if she liked him even the littlest bit. It was far less exhausting to click the "back" button repeatedly and learn about Leroy's life from end to beginning.

She imagined Leroy first thing in the morning, sitting down with his mother, reading Time and eating a bagel. There were no pictures of him on the blog, but she imagined him in khaki pants and big glasses, wearing a sweatshirt covered in sewn-on patches depicting his favorite bands and video games. She imagined him as a contradiction, because she loved contradictions. She imagined his outside as so messy and chaotic that his inside must be unexpectedly calm in order to balance it out. To put it simply - she imagined him to be unlike anybody else, and since despite the dim knowledge that he was, in fact, a real person, somewhere out in the same city as she, drinking a soda after school and dropping batteries on the hardwood floors while attempting to watch sports on TV, what she really saw was a framework for the Perfect Boy, a set of building blocks from which she could create her own vision and her own desires - she could make Leroy into whoever she wanted him to be, knowing that she would never meet him or speak to him, knowing that he would never know she had ever come across his blog in an attempt to research the differences between boy-brains and girl-brains for a science class that she detested, getting distracted and googling words like "boys" and "girls" and clicking link after link until she found herself in such a web, she wouldn't even know what to search for in order to get back there again.

Leroy Blumkinstein would become Aquanetta's obsession, like every teenaged girl has an obsession - some would be after Justin Bieber, others horses, but Aquanetta, with her mind matured to a point that she had missed some crucial steps in social etiquette and interaction and a name that she was aware came from a can of hairspray - something she would never understand, because her mother, when asked, would simply shrug - found herself instead drawn to people, and this one person in particular. And so it began that she forgot all about Philip, and the giggly flirting and fretting that most kids her age were into, and instead immersed herself in cyberspace and the people she found there, one person in particular, who began to guide her life in a way that no one would ever understand or even recognize, and move her to a point that threatened to derail her very experience as an adolescent in a big city - indeed, she became a mere onlooker in the life of another person, and began to lose her grip on the reality that there was indeed a world around her, a world in which she and Leroy happened to coexist in a way that she herself did not fully understand was real.