Have you ever watched a beautiful woman play volleyball?

Yesterday, during a game, Penelope was serving the ball and I watched her like she was a work of art.

She was wearing a white shirt and white shorts, and I could see the outlines of her white bra and white panties.

Her skin was pale white. Milky white. Cloud white.

So she was all white on white on white, like the most perfect kind of vanilla dessert cake you’ve ever seen.

I wanted to be her chocolate topping.

She was serving against the mean girls from Davenport Lady Gorillas. Yeah, you read that correctly. They willingly called themselves the Lady Gorillas. And they played like superstrong primates, too. Penelope and her teammates were getting killed. The score was like 12 to 0 in the first set.

But I didn’t care.

I just wanted to watch the sweaty Penelope sweat her perfect sweat on that perfectly sweaty day.

She stood at the service line, bounced the volleyball a few times to get her rhythm, then tossed it into the air above her head.

She tracked the ball with her blue eyes. Just watched it intensely. Like that volleyball mattered more than anything else in the world. I got jealous of that ball. I wished I were that ball.

As the ball floated in the air, Penelope twisted her hips and back and swung her right arm back over her shoulder, coiling like a really pretty snake. Her leg muscles were stretched and taut.

I almost fainted when she served. Using all of that twisting and flexing and concentration, she smashed the ball and aced the Lady Gorillas.

And then Penelope clenched a fist and shouted, “Yes!” Absolutely gorgeous.

Even though I didn’t think I’d ever hear back, I wanted to know what to

do with my feelings, so I walked over to the computer lab and e-mailed Rowdy. He’s had the same address for five years.

“Hey, Rowdy,” I wrote. “I’m in love with a white girl. What should I do?” A few minutes later, Rowdy wrote back.

“Hey, Asshole,” Rowdy wrote back. “I’m sick of Indian guys who treat white women like bowling trophies. Get a life.”

Well, that didn’t do me any good. So I asked Gordy what I should do about Penelope.

“I’m an Indian boy,” I said. “How can I get a white girl to love me?” “Let me do some research on that,” Gordy said.

A few days later, he gave me a brief report.

“Hey, Arnold,” he said. “I looked up ‘in love with a white girl’ on Google and found an article about that white girl named Cynthia who disappeared in Mexico last summer. You remember how her face was all over the papers and everybody said it was such a sad thing?”

“I kinda remember,” I said.

“Well, this article said that over two hundred Mexican girls have disappeared in the last three years in that same part of the country. And nobody says much about that. And that’s racist. The guy who wrote the article says people care more about beautiful white girls than they do about everybody else on the planet. White girls are privileged. They’re damsels in distress.”

“So what does that mean?” I asked.

“I think it means you’re just a racist asshole like everybody else.” Wow.

In his own way, Gordy the bookworm was just as tough as Rowdy.