Sometimes I like to make a bet with guys I meet, ask them which of us has been naked with a chick for the longest time. See, I'm not exactly suave, maybe kind of gangly, and I don't look like I score with the ladies too often. I like to make this bet with guys who think they're cool, with their hair slicked back or whatever. What they don't know is that I have a fraternal twin sister, Janie, so our naked bodies were pressed up against each other in the womb for nine months solid. It used to feel weird to make a sex joke about Janie, but I'm used to it by now. Plus, I always win the bet.
One of the reasons I don't look like I score too often is that I don't. I've made it all the way to my senior year in high school, and my only girlfriends haven't progressed much beyond platonic. This has been moderately discouraging. People say college women appreciate intelligence more, so maybe I'll prove this true next year.
Janie and I just turned 18 a couple of months ago, and our parents chose this occasion to move us into the basement. We've been asking them to let us move down there for years, and they finally agreed. It was a ton of work to get everything cleaned up and moved around, but now it's a pretty nice set up. We each have our own room, there's a shared bathroom, and then we have another whole area, the main room of the basement, where we have a TV and stuff. We spend a lot of our time in the main room. Sometimes one of us gets annoyed by the other one for a while and we go in our own rooms, but we usually get along OK for a brother and sister. It's nice not to be upstairs by our parents' room, so we can play music or make noise after they go to bed.
The nice thing about the basement is that our parents hardly ever go down there, except to do the laundry or get something out of storage. Sometimes we have to clean it up really good when a people come over to the house or something, but usually we're pretty much on our own.
Mom and Dad go downstairs to watch TV sometimes too--this is the only TV in our house. Mom and Dad are incredibly weird because they hardly ever watch TV, and Janie and I had to beg them to get a TV for the basement. Since there's just the one TV, we occasionally have minor flare-ups about what to watch. We're twins, but our taste in TV is very different. Sometimes there's fallout from these disagreements. Like yesterday Janie had a couple of girlfriends over and they were yammering about stuff like they always do, and her friends were going on and on about some show they were watching, and how this guy was so cute. Janie had to tell them that she didn't see it, and they gave her a hard time about it.
So after dinner last night, I went down to the basement to watch Monday Night Football, as I did every Monday during football season. Janie knows this, and she usually lets me watch the game. I turned on the tube and started to get comfortable to watch the pre-game show. I flopped on the floor with the remote and some Oreos. Pretty soon Janie came down, and I sort of expected her to either go in her room or sit on the couch and watch the game with me. She knows a lot about football for a girl, and I think she doesn't mind watching.
But instead, she grabbed the remote from the floor, sat on the couch behind me, and changed the channel to some chick flick. I asked her what she was doing, and she said she thought I'd been hogging the TV a lot lately and that it should be her turn for a change. She put the remote behind her on the couch and sat there watching the beginning of the movie. On the screen, a hot chick was bumbling around her apartment in her underwear, getting ready for work or something. I might have wanted to see more of this movie if it hadn't been going on at the same time as the game.
I see it this way: The game is happening right now, live. This exact game will never be on TV ever again, and football is a part of the American tradition. The chick flick will be on TV a million times, and if that's not enough, any idiot can go down to the video store and rent it anytime they want.
I tried to explain this to Janie. I said we could record the movie and she could watch it later whenever she wanted. But she said she had to watch it that night because her friends would be watching it and she wanted to be able to talk about it at school the next day. She even had the gall to suggest that we record the football game to watch later! You can't watch a football game days later when you already know who won and what happened and what the score was. She is really a mental case sometimes.
Time was counting down, and talking wasn't getting me anywhere. I walked up next to Janie and stuck my hand behind her back really fast. I got the remote. She let out a loud squeal as I changed the TV back to the game. I guess Mom must have heard her, because Mom yelled down at us to make sure we were getting along OK. We both yelled back and said we were fine. Mom micromanages us far too much. She'll come downstairs to check on us whenever she feels like it, and she usually finds some urgent undone chore. We've learned that it's best to keep Mom upstairs as much as we can.
I sat back down on the floor and held the remote in my right hand. The game hadn't started yet, but the kickoff would be in just a couple of minutes. I used my left hand to eat an Oreo.
While I still had Oreo crumbs all over my mouth, Janie snuck up behind me, stomped on my right wrist with her bare foot, and grabbed the dang remote again. This time I immediately grabbed it back out of her hand. I am stronger than she is, and she knows it. I can always pry her fingers away from something if I need to.
I put the remote in my right hand again, but this time I held it with a tight grip so she couldn't get it back. I was sitting on the floor with my hand up over my head, and she was pulling at my fingers trying to get them loose, but they weren't budging. She grunted and pouted, but it looked like she was ready to give up. I celebrated with another Oreo.
