The End of FUN by Sean McGinty Page A

point where it becomes pointless. When you have to admit that whatever it is might not be the thing for you. Katie was a good-enough teacher, but as a student I was hopelessly distracted by the method of instruction and general circumstances of the classroom, not to mention the glimpses of pale belly I was getting every time my instructor raised her arms. I mean I was absolutely
floccillated
.

I gave up on Hula-Hooping, and Katie gave up on trying to teach me. The heater was going now and her apartment was hot, and she set the hoop aside and took off her sweater, revealing a tight black T-shirt with the words
Dirty deeds done with sheep
.
    â€œWhat’s that mean?” I asked.
    â€œ
Well, Arnold
,” she said in a teacherly voice, “it’s an appropriation of the stereotype of my people, the Basques. My sister gave it to me as a joke. I wear it for good luck.”
    â€œBasques? Like from Spain? I thought you were Irish.”
    â€œ
Half
-Irish. My mom is Irish, my papa is Basque.”
    â€œI heard a joke about Basques once.”
    â€œDid it involve sex with a farm animal?”
    â€œYeah, pretty much.”
    â€œWhen my papa was a teenager he actually
did
work with sheep,” said Katie. “Way out in a cabin in the mountains—but he was doing construction by the time I was born. Now he’s retired in Spain. He’s coming to America this summer to tell me to get a real job like my sister.”
    â€œWhat’s your sister do?”
    â€œMaite? She’s a real estate agent in Lake Tahoe. You should see the house she just moved into—it’s so obnoxious! But of course
she
was always the chosen one….” Katie ran her hands over her face. “God, I want a cigarette.”
    We went out to the balcony and she lit one up, and I lit up a smókz ™ , too, and that calmed me down a little, but when she saw me smoking my invisible (to her) cigarette, she burst out laughing.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t know. It’s just funny. Like you’re pretending.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    But I kind of was. But how could I tell her the truth? It seemed a little too late to do a name change.
    I exhaled, and my smoke digitized into a hive of BeeWear ® Bee Bonuses and Homie ™ popped up.
    > yay! to collect bonuses?
    â€œYay.”
    â€œWhy do you keep saying that?” she said.
    â€œIt’s just a thing I have to do for FUN ® .”
    â€œAh.” Katie took another drag and tamped out her cigarette on the underside of the railing. “There. All done. See? I’m cutting back.”
    I put out my smókz ™ , too, and followed her back inside, thinking about how to tell her the truth about everything, how I was actually Aaron O’Faolain, age almost 18, which if you think about it isn’t that far from 19—or 21 or 22, for that matter. And as I was working myself up, something funny happened. Back in the living room Katie suddenly spun around to face me, and it was like looking in a mirror—I mean, she was wearing this look on her face like she had something to tell
me
.
    â€œArnold—” she began.
    â€œYeah?”
    And I knew in that moment that nothing mattered, because she was going to tell me her feelings now, how she liked me, too, how she’d been hiding it all along, and she was going to pull me close and smooch me. I envisioned locking lips like they do at the end of a movie, falling together onto the couch in a tangle of limbs and clothing. I envisioned what might happen after that, but then I pulled back on that vision because no need to get ahead of myself.
    But I was already pretty far ahead.
    I stumbled into a hug with her like Frankenstein with my arms all outstretched, and as I grew closer her eyes widened, and at the last second the message got through to my brain:
    Abort mission! Subject is creeped out!
    So what happened was, instead of her falling into my arms and locking