The talk with Mum really scared me. She and my sisters having so much trouble with everything was pretty worrying. I really wanted them to be okay. That was the most important thing in the whole world to me. As long as those silly girls were happy, and surviving, and enjoying themselves as best as they could, then I was okay too. Mum said they weren't okay. I hadn't talked to them myself, but I didn't have time to do that. I should have talked to them. They needed my help, too. I would talk to them once I was done. We'd all sit down and have a nice long chat about everything and anything. That would be nice.

I hoped they weren't too sad, mad, pissy, or whatever other emotion that could possibly be coursing through their grieving, pre-pre-menstrual bodies. Well, one of them was already menstrual. The other ones weren't menstrual yet. I forgot why I knew the ins and outs of their cycles. It was pretty terrifying stuff, all the girl issues. Guys didn't have too much that changed. We got bigger, we got hairier, and we noticed our junk a whole hell of a lot more. That was about it.

Girls had it rough in the puberty department. Hair. Hair in all the same sort of places guys got it, but over the course of a few thousand years, girl hair was no longer socially accepted. The second you got hair, you would have to spend the next 80+ years getting rid of it. Not exactly a convenience.

Hair was the least of a girl's worries. Weird fat bits started popping up all over their bodies. Their bums got bigger, rounder, softer. Their hips expanded all out to get ready for baby-making. And then there were the boobs. They started out as nondescript, happy-go-lucky, what-the-hell-are-we-even-here-for nipples. Puberty struck and in rushes a huge injection of boob juice. The possession of the boobs must have been a frightening, painful and altogether thankless journey. The bra was possibly the most uncomfortable-looking piece of clothing to be designed since the lip-plate thing from Africa, strapping the boobs in like a pair of angry balloons that just wanted to be free.

The real kicker, and something that us boys never had to worry about, other than a mildly more sour disposition for the rest of the month, was the period. Sweet gentle Jesus, what a terrible burden to bear for the better part of one's life. Impossible emotions, inability to get comfortable, and blood gushing from your nether regions for a week every month is something that you would just never get used to.

My sister and Mum had already synced up their cycles, in that bizarre way that women do when they spend too much time together, but apparently my sister's was all out of whack because something else in her life was causing her hormonal imbalance, and that was in turn sending her period for a loop. It had something to do with Dad, and me not stepping up to the plate yet. I hated knowing all this stuff, but it just went to show me that I had to hurry up before my sister lost the ability to have children or something like that.

I still didn't have quite enough money to get to Spain to take care of the bullfight. Spain would have to wait a little while longer.

My book wasn't going very well, either. I hated writing journals, and even though I wrote in it fairly often, it was little more than a place to pour my thoughts. The tree day was a highlight, but I was pretty sure no publisher would ever want to take a look at my pitiful memoirs. Hopefully Hemingway just wanted the candidate to write a book.

There was only one option left. I had to talk to Jodi. We'd been on one date, but I had to speed things up about ten years. The wooing process of dating for a while, moving in together soon after graduation, breaking up for a bit because we wanted to see other people, getting back together in a big gushy 'I never stopped loving you' scene, starting our respective careers, getting married, buying a house together with money from our wedding and a dead relative, setting up our nest, and then finally settling down and starting a family had to wait.

How hard could it be to do all that crap after you had a kid?

There was one question that was lingering in my mind, hanging out in there like a niggly bacteria that won't quit no matter how many shots of penicillin you threw at it.

Was I ready to be a dad?

I was ready biologically to be a father, but father and Dad were different things. Every man on Earth, unless he'd been castrated or was a monk with a vow of celibacy, had the ability to become a father. You didn't even have to have sex to become a father. I had this weird cousin who made his entire income for a year being a sperm donor, and I was sure there were kids all over the place that were from his stockpile. I didn't like shaking hands with that cousin any more.

'Dad' was a different thing entirely. 'Dads' were usually, but not always, married to the mum. It was happening more and more often that kids were being born as bastards. Bastard was a really old term from the Middle Ages that meant your parents weren't married, and back then it could really ruin your life if you were a bastard. People looked at you like you were something dirty, like you shouldn't have been born and you were really a burden on society. That wasn't so much the case now. Lots of people thought marriage was an antiquated institution that was really only important to people who followed the rules all the time and didn't know how to live free. I didn't know how I felt about marriage one way or the other. Maybe the people that thought marriage was a waste of time were just afraid to make commitments to anything other than their own needs, or maybe marriage people really were adhering to an ancient ritual that was holding society back. Maybe everyone was a dick but me.

A dad took part in a kid's life. He helped them learn how to walk. He sang them songs. He showed them how to play catch, and supported them in whatever they chose to do with their spare time. I had this one uncle whose son wanted to go into ballet instead of hockey, and the uncle had gotten all weird and started wondering if his kid was gay or something.

I didn't like that uncle much.

Real dads weren't always the biological father of the kid. Sometimes the biological guy made the sperm thing happen, then took off and never came back. Sometimes both biological parents weren't ready to have a kid, so they put the baby up for adoption. If the baby was lucky, some really awesome couple would adopt them and raise them to be a good person. The dad in that case would be a real dad.

My dad was a real dad, in all senses of the word.

He got really frustrated every now and then, and occasionally said things that weren't the nicest things in the world, but he always had our best interests in his heart and wanted us to do our best at everything.

I wanted to be an even better dad than my dad had been. I wanted to never get frustrated, and never say things that hurt my kids' feelings. Everything they did would be the best version of that thing that had ever been seen by a parent in the history of families. I would drop everything if my children needed help, and always listen to their side of the story if they had potentially done something they shouldn't have. If a train was going to smash into them because they'd been tied to the tracks by a dastardly villain, I'd stop the train with my face if I had to.

The real trick now was to talk to Jodi. This was a few leaps and bounds from holding hands down the hallway like we had been for the past little while. We hadn't even fully kissed on the mouth yet.

Where would I start? 'Hey Jodi, I'm really enjoying the time we're spending together, you're a really special girl, have my baby?' That didn't sound like something she'd readily agree to. It sounded like something an insane person would ask.

On the other hand, I wanted to be with Jodi after the whole baby debacle was dealt with. I didn't know about marriage or even moving in together just yet, and I was probably going to have to at least see her every day to help take care of the baby. Maybe I was supposed to be the one to take care of the baby, and she was supposed to visit me every day. All the list said was 'have a son,' not necessarily take care of it. I really wanted to go that extra step, though.

Hemingway had written the rules a few decades ago, so I thought it couldn't hurt to modernize his man list just a little bit. 'Have a kid' was what I was going with now, because I knew a little too much about basic human reproduction to believe that I would be guaranteed a boy if and when Jodi agreed to my request. I would take my chances with what I got, and if Ernie didn't like it, he could go back to Cuba and sip dead man whiskey for the rest of time.

If I wanted to be with Jodi for potentially the rest of my life, which was looking to be a little shorter if I didn't get my act together and start practicing for the bullfight, we would have to start things off with a strict honesty policy. No lies, no secrets, no hidden agendas. Just straight up, tell it like it is and mean it honesty. It was the only way that any relationship ended up working and lasting such a long time. I'd lost count of how many friends I'd lost over the years, simply because our friendships were based on stupid, frivolous things that didn't matter to anybody.

I didn't want my relationship with Jodi to become like everyone else's. No one else ever seemed happy in their relationships. If anyone would understand, it would be Jodi. Not even Viktor would get this one. He was a good friend, but if he was a girl and the potential love of my life that had been sitting right under my nose for all this time, I don't think he'd carry my baby and raise it with love and guidance. He'd shove it at his mother and go find dumb things to do.

The morning's classes were English and Math, and I was so completely distracted during both classes that I answered 'cosine, tangent, and hypotenuse' for Shakespeare's birthplace, and 'Stratford-upon-Avon' for triangle bits. Both teachers took notice, and sniggers rippled through the students. Big Ryan Berk threw an eraser at my head, and because he played baseball and was a pitcher it really hurt. I called him a ditchpig, which he didn't understand, and when I tried to explain that a ditchpig was such a useless creature that all the other pigs looked at him and made him live in a ditch and made him eat their feces every day because they had to get rid of it somehow, he just threw another eraser at me, and this time it hit me in the eye.

Ryan Berk had been a bag of dicks since Grade Eight, when I'd started junior high. I had apparently somehow wronged him on the first day of school, and he'd made it a personal mission to antagonize me for the rest of our educational careers. It didn't help that while I'd maintained my scrawny physique, he'd packed on fifty pounds of muscle and a foot of height since Grade Eight. He'd gone out with Sarah Bilkworth for a while, but she dumped him when he cheated on her with some girl from another town.

I rubbed my eye, calmly got up, and without really knowing what I was doing, slapped Ryan Berk in his stupid face.

I didn't know what came over me, but the censoring part of my brain and body that would have normally stopped me from doing such a brainless thing was so preoccupied with the Jodi issue that I had struck the boy before my head even knew what was happening. My hand registered the hit, and the pain zipped through my entire body. I had hit him really, really hard. It was loud, and everyone dropped what they were doing and stared at me. A pencil fell. Holly Mowatt's left boob jiggled as she swung her whole body towards Ryan to see if he was okay.

"Will, what have you done?" Ms. Sarkozy, the math teacher, shrieked. She always saw kids like Ryan Berk as charity cases, and gave him way too much leeway where tests were concerned. Naturally, an average student that wasn't living up to his potential like myself was seen as a waste, but someone with little to no brain power but a modicum of athletic prowess like Ryan Berk was given every possible chance the teachers could think up.

Ryan stood up, every simian muscle along his overdeveloped body rippling and anxious to rip me apart. I glanced over at Ms. Sarkozy to see if mercy would be granted and my life would be spared until another day, but a sick satisfied sort of gleam was evident in her bespectacled eyes. She was happy for her precious Berk. I had a weird image of Ms. Sarkozy building Ryan Berk in a lab and training him up as a bad behaviour deterrent, and just holding him back for the rest of his natural life. The amount of facial hair he was capable of growing in Grade Ten certainly supported my theory.

"Kick his ass, Berkie!" screamed Holly Mowatt.

"Berkie?" I asked, unable to stop myself. Poncey little nicknames like 'Berkie' made me retch.

"You got a problem with Berkie?" Ryan Berk asked.

His voice was low. James Earl Jones low. Barry White meets Darth Vader low. Maybe if Darth Vader, Barry White and a double bass all had sex and produced a baby, then there would be a fair representation of how low Ryan Berk's voice really was.

"Interesting question, Berkie," I said. "You've been picking on me since Grade Eight, you've pantsed me so many times in front of people that I think my balls have climbed back into my body cavity to hide their shame, and in general you've gone out of your way to make me hate you for the past four years. One would be inclined to say that I did have a problem with Berkie."

"Pull his pants down again, Berkie!" Holly Mowatt bawled. 

"Pants! Pants! Pants!" chanted the class, descending into chaos.

I chuckled to myself, amused by the irony of having just read Lord of the Flies as our last assignment in English before we moved on to Shakespeare. Berkie reached down, and with a fair amount of difficulty, pulled my belted and tighter-than-usual jeans down to my ankles. The underwear went with the pants, and there I was, standing naked from the waist down in front of thirty sixteen-year-olds. Had I not been in a very similar situation at the end of Grade Ten, I would have been very upset. Instead, I felt relaxed.

Very, very relaxed.

So relaxed, in fact, that it wasn't until Ryan Berk cursed loudly that I realized I was peeing all over him. The whole class let out a raucous screech, and Ryan Berk actually started crying.

It was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen.

Ms. Sarkozy was shouting things I didn't care about, and I finished my pee and pulled up my pants. I strode out of the room, certain to be expelled from school with no hope of being picked up by any of the other schools in the district because I would forever be known now as the peeing kid, but at that exact moment, with the face of Ryan Berk weeping as I peed all over his legs was enough to keep me smiling for at least a little while longer. I was feeling so great, I decided that right then was as good a time as any to ask Jodi my insane question.

Jodi was in Art while I had Math, and I peeked in through the small window built into the door to see what she was making. Art class was always a bit baffling to me. A complete subjective, for lack of a better word, subject. Your grade was entirely based on someone's opinion. I didn't take Art, simply to eliminate the element of taste from my grading process.

She was near the back of the class, huddled over in deep conversation with Michaela Lee. Girls with boys' names with an 'a' on the end had every right to actively hate their parents. I waved frantically to get Jodi's attention, and after a few seconds, she finally turned toward the window. She waved back, but I didn't get the enthusiastic smile I was hoping for. I got a concerned look, but she stood up and went to ask the teacher if she could leave. I ducked out of the way before the teacher looked over at the window and saw my ridiculous face smearing up the glass.

The door opened and Jodi slipped out, closing the door carefully behind her as she left. She walked over to me and looked at me as if I'd grown an arm out of my face.

"Did you pee on Ryan Berk?" she asked, before I could even open my mouth.

"How the hell do you know about that already?" I retorted. "That was literally eight seconds ago." 

"Rajin texted Michaela, who showed me."

"Ah, modern technology."

"Did you do it?"

I smiled and nodded. I couldn't help but still feel good.

"Yeah," I said. "And if the situation was presented to me again, I'd still pee on him."

The look on her face was indescribable. She either hated me, or had a popcorn kernel stuck in her teeth and was using her tongue to try and get it out. I had once spent three days working a piece of kernel skin out from behind my back left molars. My tongue had ached for a long time after that adventure.

"Did he cry?" she asked. I nodded, and almost burst out laughing.

"Really quite a lot," I said. "I didn't know a six-foot-four, two hundred and fifty pound dude was allowed to cry."

I was pretty sure Jodi wanted to be mad, and do the responsible thing and tell me off for what I did. I was also glad I knew Jodi better than that, and happily accepted her high five and the hug she gave me afterwards.

"Well done," she said, rubbing my arms and generally making me feel pretty good about myself. "Someone should have done that to that ditchpig a long time ago."

"I know," I said, and seized my opportunity while she was laughing and in a good mood. "Do you want to have a baby with me?"

My words hit her harder than my hand had hit Ryan Berk's face. Her look was even more stunned than his had been, and I didn't know if it would ever change.

"What?" said Jodi.

I couldn't have expected more.

"Do you want to have a baby with me?" I repeated. I reached for her hand, but she pulled away.

"Are you serious?"

I nodded.

"Seriously?"

I nodded again.

"What?"

"Do you want to have a baby with me?" I asked.

She looked at me as if she was trying to see if I was joking or not. "You're really serious, aren't you?"

"Yes, I am."

"When?"

I breathed deeply. "Now." 

"What, like right now?" she bawled. "Like right now, now?"

I waved my hands in denial. "No, not right now now. But within the next little while would be fantastic. I've got a deadline."

"You've got a deadline?"

"Yeah, I've got a deadline. My family needs my help, and I need your help to help me help them. Do you get it?"

"No," she said. "I really don't. How does us having a baby help you help your family?"

It was time to tell her about the whole thing. The whole stupid man list that I didn't think was stupid at all. A lot of people would, and would even call me crazy for attempting such a thing. Jodi wouldn't. She would understand.

"You know that my dad died?" I said. Great way to start, I thought.

"Yeah, kind of hard to miss that one," she said.

"Fair enough. Well, after he died, one of his old friends came up to me and said that I was the man of the house now. I didn't know the first thing about being a man, let alone being the man of an entire house. I needed some help, so I started asking around. Viktor told me about Ernest Hemingway, and how he was widely considered to be one of the manliest man ever to walk to the planet. You with me so far?"

Jodi nodded. "I think so. I still don't know what the hell it has to do with us having a baby, on purpose, at sixteen, but I'm with you."

"Good. So...where was I?"

"Ernest Hemingway."

"Ernest Hemingway, right. Well, one day in the bathroom, I came across this list."

"A list? Like a grocery list?"

I gave her my best pretend outraged face. "Yeah, a grocery list. Eggs, bacon, become a man, broccoli, have a kid, cookies. Just like that."

She didn't even fake laugh. That was a bad sign.

"No, it's this list of four things, four Hemingway approved pinnacles of manhood. Plant a tree, write a book, fight a bull, and have a son," I explained. It still sounded slightly insane when I listed it off like that.

"Fight a bull?" Jodi hissed, echoing my sentiments. "You do realize that Hemingway was around for World War I, don't you?"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"I'm just saying, some of his ideals might be considered a little antiquated today." 

I shook my head. "I don't care. My family's hurting, and I need to fix them."

She got very quiet. The only sound in the hallway was my breathing. I was a pretty loud breather. My left nostril was slightly bigger than my right. It was kind of annoying most of the time, and made me want to dig out the septum dividing the two nostrils and create one single supernostril.

I hated silence.

The longer the silence, the more carefully the person was censoring themselves.

Jodi was doing some major censoring. She finally looked up at me and opened her mouth as if she was going to say something. Nothing came out. Her mouth shut again. She took in a deep breath through her nose, and let it out very slowly.

"I need some time, Will," she said. "I need some real time to go and think about it."

At least she wasn't jumping up and running away. Had I been a smarter, wiser, or just better person than I was, I would have seen her reaction of needing more time as a gift to me. That meant she was considering it in depth, like a smart person would if faced with an insanely difficult decision.

"How much time?" I asked, not using any of my wise brain or patient brain.

She shrugged. "I don't know. Enough time to really think it over."

"We talking a day?" I asked. "A week?""

"I don't know, Will. You just need to leave me alone with this for awhile so I can think it over, okay?"

"Look, Jodi, I'm really sorry, but I need to know right away. I'm rapidly running out of time to save my family."

Jodi bowed her head. "I'm afraid then, dear Will, that my answer is going to have to be no." 

I wonder what Ernest Hemingway was really like.

They, as in the they that apparently know everything including the weather, say that he was an unhappy man.

A bit surly at times.

Tendency to drink heavily.

Rabid smoker.

Loved sports.

As I piece it all together, I see one startling point staring me in the face. There is, well, was, only one other man I ever met that matched the exact description of Ernest Hemingway. Hell, they even both had moustaches. And they were both dead.

The other man was my father. 

He was all of those things, and more. An ornier bugger than him, you're unlikely to ever meet. 

Did my father have a set of rules for manhood? Had I at least managed to get a few of them under my belt before he died? 

Or had I so long and so far to go before I reached man status that he died early on purpose to avoid telling me I'd never get there?

Let me go with the theory that God is a man. God is sitting up there on the throne of heaven, watching us humans, his pathetic little favourite creation, milling about our minutiae riddled lives. We value stuff more than animals, and have taken the Earth, this rarest of rocks that can actually support countless billions of species, and spent the last 10,000 years raping it. Agriculture was the worst thing to happen to the planet. We got lazy, we got fat.

Adam is born. No one said how Adam was born, he just arrived. Man. The first one. Pink, at least according to most illustrated kids' bibles I've ever seen. Adam's as pink as a Valentine's card. God goes crazy and rips one of Adam's ribs right out of his body, and then makes a chick out of that rib. Eve. Woman. Born of man.

What sort of trials did Adam have to go through to become a man? It seems to me all he had to do was be created. There's that one painting where God is reaching down from heaven and pointing a finger down towards Earth, and Adam is pointing back up towards God and lounging all sexily on a hillock. It might have just been a tuft of grass. There are angels involved. They might just be those fat little kid angels; the cherubs, I think. Is that all Adam had to do to become a man? Lie down on the grass like a gay tiger and be pointed at by God?

If that was it, then what the hell was Ernest Hemingway's problem? Why did he think that becoming a man had to be this arduous task? I think my Dad subscribed more to the Ernest Hemingway ideology. Do everything yourself, never ask for help, and get mad at anyone that offered it to you. All while you're getting progressively drunker over the course of a day.

I was pretty sure he never planted a tree. The other three, maybe. Have a son, yes. Write a book, sort of. He wrote lots of poems. Bizarre, nonsensical poems that went nowhere and were usually written on the backs of napkins and the inside covers of textbooks. Fight a bull, I had no idea. The man was such a mystery with his past that he could have actually been a toreador at some point in his life and I would never have known about it. 

I'd go the Adam way, if I had my way. Lying down on a mound of grass sounded really good right about now. 

The gay tiger part, not so much. I would so be the woman in a gay tiger relationship.