“You guys totally though I wouldn’t go through with it, but I did it,” Nick announced proudly, setting his tray down with more emphasis than needed and taking his seat at the lunch table with his friends.
“No way you asked Jennifer out,” said Dan, shaking his head in disbelief as he glanced over to where Jennifer and her friends were sitting a few tables away, as if his mind refused to accept the idea that someone like his friend would ever even attempt to get with a girl that attractive. “No way.”
Jake reached across the table to punch Dan in the shoulder. “That can’t be it, you tard. Whatever Nick’s so proud of, it’s not related to talking to or otherwise interacting with the female gender.” He sat back down and looked at Nick. “You didn’t actually talk to a girl, did you?”
“Nope,” Nick said, and he was in such a good mood that acknowledgement of this fact didn’t have its usual discouraging effect on him. “You know that BoingAlert thing I was telling you about? I just ordered it off the internet, so, in just a few short months I’m going to be a dunker.”
“He actually did it, the absolute madman,” said Dan, his look of disbelief replaced with a similar look of less-disbelieving disbelief. “I give him a week before he quits. Who wants to take bets?”
There were shouted responses of, “Two days,” “I bet he doesn’t even start”, and “More like BonerAlert when he sees Jennifer wearing yoga pants.”
Nick shook off all these insults. “I might not ever get into DTB’s dunkilations, but thanks to my imminent ability to dunk a basketball, I’m gonna get into Jennifer’s pants while you guys have mutual masturbation sessions in Dan’s basement and pretend it’s not gay because you’re thinking about chicks.”
“Lol dude, whatever,” said Jake around a mouthful of unappetizing mashed potatoes, pronouncing the common internet acronym out loud as ‘loll’. “None of us is ever getting with a chick higher than 4/10 in our high school careers, least of all you.”
—
Nick obsessively checked the package’s online tracking for the fifth time that afternoon. It had said “out for delivery” for a few hours now, and he was getting anxious. Why was it taking so long?
This time when he refreshed the page, however, the status had changed: “Delivered”. Nick hadn’t heard the doorbell ring from his bedroom on the far side of the house thanks to the video game OST’s he constantly played at too-high volume, but even if he had heard the UPS driver at the door, he was too anxious about visitors to ever greet them face-to-face. He hopped up from his chair and ran down the stairs as fast as he could, then pulled open the front door. A plain cardboard box was waiting on the front steps.
Grabbing the box and running back up to his room, Nick was glad that Becca’s door was closed and that she hadn’t seen him retrieve the package. She had been mocking him constantly for the past week about his dunking ambitions, and no amount of insults to her appearance or intelligence could deter her. He was still just as determined as ever, but her very vocal skepticism of his determination had caused doubt to enter his mind.
He set the box on his bed and immediately began ripping the tape off of it. Once the box was opened and the packing materials were hastily tossed aside, he investigated its contents, which he pulled out one-by-one as if narrating an unboxing video on YouTube: “We’ve got BoingAlert’s BoingBeginner package, let’s open this baby up and see what’s inside. Here’s the set of DVD’s, that’s expected, and an instruction manual, nice and thick, good quality paper, and what do we have here? It looks like they included some kind of nutrient supplement, it looks to be a powder, I didn’t see that anywhere in the advertising but it’s a nice touch. At the bottom we’ve got a warning placard, some regulatory thing, we’ll ignore that for now, and that seems to be everything.” He flipped over the box as if to dump out any unseen items left inside, then threw it next to the discarded bubble wrap.
He picked up the packets of nutrient powder and examined them closer; they were labeled as “BoingStuff” and subtitled with “High-performance fortified protein powder”. Nick didn’t remember seeing or hearing anything about this jump program coming with its own brand of protein powder, but was glad it was there; a lot of online forum posts recommended protein powder in order to see quicker, more explosive results.
Nick wanted to get started right away, but when he put the DVD into his PlayStation, he realized that he didn’t have any space in his bedroom to do any type of exercise. The first scene of the DVD was a shot of an empty room with a narrator explaining how much physical space was required to do the exercises described in the program. Nick began planning how he would rearrange his furniture to make space, while, in the back of his mind, the fantasy of Jennifer’s astonishment at his dunks resulting in a lengthy make-out session strengthened his resolve.