Read The Stud Book for Free Online Page A

from listening to her father’s records. She listened to vinylin her room most nights, imagining her father’s voice channeled through scratches and guitar riffs—the Melvins, the Clash, the Wipers. Romeo Void. Even the Slits and Wendy O. Williams channeled her dad, because otherwise? She could barely remember having a dad—only knew what it felt like to want him.
    The girl in the ferret neckerchief opened her eyes to offer Arena a smoke. Her eyes were dark, and her smudged makeup was even darker. For Arena, looking directly into anyone’s eyes was like looking at aluminum reflecting the sun, or a swimming pool on a bright day.
    She was bad at it.
    She shook her head no at the cigarette. “Why start something I’d have to keep doing? It’s enough to brush my teeth and change clothes.” She kicked her vegan-friendly Toms red wrap boots into the gravel. Her mom had bought her those boots. Her mom, a yoga instructor now trying to get a store up and running, was always broke but up on the good causes, and with every pair of Toms sold a poor kid somewhere got new shoes, too.
    Arena pretty much was that poor kid.
    “Who changes clothes?” This girl, total steampunk, had worked hard to look like she’d been in the same black rags since, what, maybe 1889? “Social pressure to change clothes is just a way capitalism keeps us on the rat wheel.”
    The Clash kid, in his own uniform, said, “Weren’t you, like, Goth last year?”
    She said, “Visigoth. It was a specialization, but I’ve evolved.”
    Arena said, “Smoking is the biggest corporate scam ever.”
    “Not if you buy the Indian kind.” The girl scratched her head through her mass of hair. She had rings on every finger, spiders, cogs, and crystal.
    The Clash guy said, “You sound depressed.”
    Arena asked, “Because I don’t smoke?”
    He ground the cherry of his cigarette out in the gravel. A button on his messenger bag read ALPHA NERD . He said, “Where’s your zest for livin’?”
    The Visigoth-turned-steampunk waved her cigarette. “Your spirit of adventure!”
    “American Spirits of adventure. Blue pack.” Alpha Nerd tapped his pack on the ground twice. “What’d you come out here for, then?”
    “Reading break.”
    “Right on.” When the girl nodded, her black dreads shifted in a thick mass. “They don’t let you do that in there?”
    “Not enough.” Arena found a book in her pack,
Red Azalea
by Anchee Min. Inside, the school’s hot halls smelled like crushed ants and gym shoes. If she sat in the grass of the school lawn by herself, that’d be weird. But when she sat with the smokers it was, like, sociably antisocial.
    She opened the book to a dog-eared page.
Red Azalea
was a memoir about life in Mao’s China, written by a girl assigned the role of a peasant. The author lived in barracks and slept in a room with eight other girls, each inside her own mosquito net.
    Anchee Min wrote, “I spent the night of my eighteenth birthday under the mosquito net.… The air felt creamy. It was the ripeness of the body. It began to spoil. The body screamed inside trying to break the bondage.”
    Arena knew that scream.
    “My body was in hunger. I could not make it collaborate with me.… I tossed all night, loneliness wrapped me.… The mosquito net was a grave with a little spoiled air.”
    In the school halls football players sent one another porn shots and videos of cheerleaders sucking them off, or whatever they could lift off the Internet and make look like it was their life. Lockers were decked out with raw beavers, boobs, and cocks, and slammed shut fast when a teacher walked by. Sex was everywhere—in mute shots of naked bodies, grunting videos, and jokes—but to read about sex without pictures was a totally new kind of thing.
    She was maybe the very last virgin in the whole school.
    Reading about sex was intimate. Reading about anything was like this really cool secret code from one brain to another, like ESP. Arena looked at the