The Mathematics of Cunnilingus
Gerard stared. Frank bounced, grinning.
"Do you even know anything about it? I mean, have you ever actually--"
Frank's hands flew into the air. "Science project! That's the whole point! Learning something!"
Gerard squinted, and he glanced around the lab. Everyone else was, like, flipping through their textbooks, pointing to topics. "Is there, um, really any science involved?"
Frank shrugged. "Mathematics, that totally sounds cooler. It's, like, probably geometry, and. I don't know. Physics or something, right? Frequency and pressure and--come on, Gerard, it's cun--"
"I heard you the first time," Gerard hissed, glancing around to check where their teacher was. He'd gone almost two weeks now without a detention, and he really did not want one now, not even for the sake of Frank's I-have-a-brilliant-plan! smile. "How exactly do you plan on learning anything about it in the next four weeks? You'd need a girlfriend. Or a different lab partner. Or a different lab partner who has a girlfriend."
Frank rolled his eyes, like Gerard was being the unreasonable one, and picked up the Science Fair handout. "It's not an experimental project, Gee. It's research. The internet is full of data on this one, all we have to do is analyze it. You have a computer, right?"
"I--uh--" Gerard's eyes actually crossed a little at the thought of Frank in his bedroom, on his computer, doing research. His voice was pathetically weak as he tried one last objection. "We're so not going to actually get into the Science Fair if we turn that in."
Frank shook his head, grinning, like Gerard wasn't even arguing with him. "We'll totally get banned, maybe even suspended. And every girl in school will know it's because we spent weeks learning how to be scientifically awesome at it. That is so much better than extra credit, come on."
Gerard hadn't actually been planning on getting extra credit. He'd been planning on... hanging out with Frank a lot for the next four weeks, messing around on some stupid science project which would totally suck and fail. He'd planned on not caring, because his new lab partner had this awesome smile, and also this weirdly fascinating laugh, and these brown-green eyes and hair that kept changing every week, and...
And also, apparently, a really profound interest in learning how to go down on girls.
Gerard glanced around the room, but... nope. There was still no one else he'd rather spend four weeks hanging out with after school, even if Frank was the straightest guy in the class and Gerard was the most pathetic.
"Yeah," Gerard muttered finally, looking down at his notebook. "But I can't work on it today, I have stuff to do."
"Cool," Frank said. "Oh, man, this is going to be so awesome, just wait. This is going to be epic."
***
In the first few months after the computer that belonged totally equally to both of them took residence in Gerard's room, he and Mikey had had a couple of mutually completely traumatizing experiences with snooping in each other's files. They'd had one argument about it, in which they both shouted a lot and didn't make eye contact (Gerard still thought it was worse for him, thinking about Mikey doing that in his bedroom, but he guessed Mikey had a point about it being a freaky way to find out your brother is into guys).
Ever since then, neither of them looked at anything they hadn't downloaded themselves. Gerard figured Frank was the type to just click on shit without observing the rules, so he spent half an hour herding all his own stuff carefully into a totally anonymous subfolder of some random folder buried on the hard drive somewhere. Then he password-protected the whole thing, and then he changed the password to something harder to guess, and then he changed it again, just in case. Then he emailed Mikey a warning that he and Frank were going to be using the computer a lot for their Science Fair project for the next few weeks, and went down to the basement to draw a lot of zombies that didn't look like Frank at all.
