Nerlens Noel tentatively approached his teammate at the back of the team plane. “Carl, can I talk to you about girls?” he asked quietly, not wanting to disturb the other members of the 76ers, most of whom were asleep.
Carl Landry took off his headphones and closed his laptop. “Yeah, dude, of course. That’s why I’m on the team. To give advice.”
“Cool,” Nerlens said, sitting down in a seat next to Carl. “I’ve been real confused lately. Girls are hard.”
Carl nodded. “Indeed, my naive rookie friend! Girls are complicated creatures. They possess many facets, each one more obscure and undecipherable than the last.”
Nerlens didn’t understand some of the words that his teammate had just used, but pretended like he had. “I’m starting to feel like the last vet I asked for advice didn’t really help very much.”
Carl laughed. “Which vet was that?”
“Luc Mbah a Moute,” Nerlens answered. “I think he’s on the Clips now. When he would talk he always was real confident, but then, it’s like, I get in the bedroom with my girl Moniqua and nothing works right.”
“Nothing works right? You mean you got erectile dysfunction?” Carl asked.
Again faced with words he didn’t know the meanings of, Nerlens shrugged. “Maybe. Depends on what that is.”
Carl cleared his throat uncomfortably. Clearly he had been expecting to answer questions about girls without having to address the private issues of another man’s anatomy. “Do you, uh, can you get it up?”
“Ohhhh. I got you. Yeah, that’s not a problem. But it’s like I don’t even know what to do with it once it’s hard.”
“What did Luc tell you to do? Maybe I can clear some things up.”
Nerlens tried to remember all the different, and often contradictory, pieces of advice he had received from his former teammate. The specifics were getting muddled in Nerlens’ brain. After some deliberation, he said, “Luc told me that the co…con…condos go on your fingers so you don’t knock up your girl just by touching her boobs.”
“Condoms,” Carl corrected, realizing all at once that Luc’s advice had been part of some kind of elaborate, years-long prank. “Luc might have been wrong on that one. They’re supposed to go on your willy.”
“That’s what Jerami said!” Nerlens exclaimed. “But then I read the instructions on the condo box and it sure seemed like it was telling me to put them on my fingers.”
Carl raised an eyebrow. “Did you really read the box?”
“Kinda. Well, not really. I can’t read very well,” Nerlens admitted. “I had Luc read it for me and I just looked at the pictures. But it’s working, man. My girl ain’t pregnant.” He was suddenly gripped by a panicked thought. “Wait. How do I know if she’s preggo?”
“Her stomach would get really big with the baby,” Carl explained. “So you’re probably good, although you should consider yourself lucky that you’ve been having sex all these years with the condoms on your fingers and don’t have a kid yet.”
“That’s the other thing,” Nerlens whispered, leaning in closer to his teammate. “I don’t even know if we’re doing the sex part right.”
“What did Luc tell you this time?” Carl asked in an exasperated voice.
“That’s the weird thing. Luc told Jerami that you stick it in her belly button, but then Luc told me that there’s actually a hole below the belly button where it’s supposed to go. It can’t be both, can it?” He paused while he laboriously worked out a thought. “Or maybe the holes are connected!” Then he remembered what Luc had told him when they had Facetimed in Nerlens’ bedroom over a year ago. “But then he said that Moniqua didn’t have a hole where she was supposed to.”
“I highly doubt that your girl is defective in any way. If anything, it’s Luc that’s the defective one,” Carl said.
At this news, Nerlens became slightly happier. “That’s a relief. But I still don’t know what to do.”
Carl opened up his laptop. “Why don’t I just show you? That might be easier and less embarrassing than trying to explain it with words.” He navigated to a website that looked like YouTube, but all the video thumbnails had naked women in them.
Nerlens was rapt with attention. He had never thought to look up sex videos on the internet. Carl clicked on a video with a lewd title and skipped to where the sex started. Nerlens watched for a minute before saying, “No way. That’s impossible. That’s a fake video.”
“Looks real to me.”
“Gross!” Nerlens said, looking away from the screen. But as he thought about it more, he realized that the act displayed on the screen matched with some barely-remembered fragments of information from various sources: sex-ed classes, his high-school classmates, late-night cable movies.
Carl could see from Nerlens’ expression that the video had done its job. “You think you got it, man?” He asked, closing the laptop again.
“I think so, man. Thanks.” He started to get up to go back to his seat, then sat down again. “Wait. Could you tell me the name of that site? I’m gonna need to, uh, do some more research.”