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Chapter 15: Ben Solo Earns His "Nerra" Card

Hi, I’m Ben, Nice to Meet You Masterlist

Dudes love setting things on fire.

It’s a primal, manly urge. One that transcends planets, cultures, and species.

And it was exactly how the Pentarra boys and I decided to spend our afternoon.

We had taken the blurrgs out to a flat area, a long distance west of Pentarra’s property. As we rode, the rocky outcroppings became smaller and smaller, and sparser and sparser—until we were out in the middle of a desert clearing that featured dry brush and some cactuses, but not much else. If you faced west, you could see the unobstructed horizon: a long, flat line that stretched out forever.

We made a big heap of brush, added some wood we’d brought, and put rocks all around as a barrier. Then we lit the brush and fanned the flames till our bonfire came to life, and then we cheered and chased each other in circles and generally behaved like idiots.

It felt so freaking good. Only a week ago I’d been holed up in my cubicle writing article after soulless article, and now I was running around with a bunch of fellas screaming half-naked in the sun.

It was November, then, so it wasn’t the best season for me to go shirtless. I looked kind of white and pasty. The Pentarra boys with their deep-hued skin all teased me and gave me flak for it—all except for Mikal, that is. But I took it good-naturedly, and laughed about it, too.

When we got tired of running around, we unrolled some blankets and lay down around the fire and looked at the sky. There wasn’t a single cloud, so when you looked up, all you could see was a huge expanse of blue that almost made you dizzy. It would have been a great setup for stargazing, had it not been the middle of the afternoon.

Despite it being the middle of the afternoon, one of the guys had brought a couple of jugs of whiskey, which he produced amidst a great deal of cheers. They passed the jugs around, and drank straight out of the bottles—and even though most of them were teenagers, they sure could put away a lot.

It made me feel weird. Part of me felt like I was supposed to be setting an example for them, or something—not taking peer pressure from guys who were two-thirds my age.

Still, I ignored their goading, and took only what I approximated to be a normal-sized shot.

“I’m not in college anymore,” I said, as my excuse. (As if I had even been a heavy drinker in college to begin with.)

“College?” asked Vataash. “You went to university?”

Multiple guys looked at me with curiosity, and I looked back at them. Apparently my having been to college was something odd to them.

“...Yeah,” I said. “Is that…weird?”

“We’ve never been to school at all,” Mikal said.

“Oh,” I said. “Do you guys…know how to do math? And write? And stuff?”

“Enough,” said Mikal. And everyone laughed.

“Is college like in the holofilms?” asked Nabohri (who, after last night’s events, seemed quieter than usual—but certainly not by much).

“Well…I guess it depends if you want it to be,” I said with a shrug.

My own college experience had been pretty tame. I’d gone to a few parties with Treeso, but mostly only to be his chaperone, his wingman, or his ride home. I had spent most of my time in college either studying or putting off studying…but that wasn’t gonna win me any points with the boys.

“Did you meet a lot of women?” Vataash asked me, and I tried not to roll my eyes.

“Oh, yeah—lots of ‘em,” I said.

I was telling the truth. UNaboo has a pretty equal gender enrollment ratio. I’d met a lot of girls at school.

I had also done everything in my power to fend them off. In fact, I had often invented fake girlfriends when I was at parties with Treeso…not because I was ashamed of being single, but because I wanted to stay that way. Pretending I had a girlfriend was a quick and easy way to shut down most romantic advances.

“How many women have you slept with?” asked another of the boys—a short guy with green-brown skin, who’d obviously had enough to drink. Even so, I found myself shocked by the audacity of the question.

“Well—how many have you?” I retorted, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Ten,” he boasted.

Ten! Bro looked ten. Ten years old, I mean.

I figured he was at least fourteen or fifteen. But he had a noticeable baby face…which was maybe why he felt the need to project so much machismo.

“He lies,” said another guy. “He has not slept with anyone!”

“Ten,” the kid said again.

“Well—I’ve slept with five times as many women as you have, then,” I said to him.

And once again, I was telling the truth. Because I was pretty confident that this kid’s brothers were also telling the truth—and as you know, five times zero is zero.

I don’t think everyone would have known that, though.

“What is five times ten?” someone asked, revealing the consequences of never having gone to school.

“Five hundred,” I said with a straight face, to see if I could get away with it—and much to my surprise, I could. The group of guys all gasped and cheered and got worked up—either everyone was that dumb, that drunk, or both. Only Mikal raised a brow.

“Five hundred!” Nabohri crowed. “Then tell us, Ben Solo: who was the best of these five hundred?”

I laughed, embarrassed. Like I said, I’d made up dozens of fake girlfriends before. But I had never tried to fabricate a sexual encounter—and I knew better than to try now, when I had so little research to go off of.

“Come now,” I said, trying to play off my unease as modesty, “surely you don’t expect me to remember all their names!”

This response was witty enough to make everyone laugh—and luckily, fail to notice what I thought was a pretty obvious evasion.

“Fair enough,” chuckled Vataash, his chin in his hand. “Then at least tell us, Solo: where does Fa’nakhra rank in your many experiences?”

I stared at him for a moment to see if this was a joke. Fannie was his sister, after all. Was he actually expecting a response?

I looked around at all the guys. They all seemed exceedingly interested.

“...Why is this something you’d want to know?” I asked warily, the whiskey suddenly not sitting well. “She’s…y’know…your sister.”

“Our half-sister,” someone corrected.

“Why wouldn’t we want to know?” asked Nabohri loudly. “We will certainly never find out otherwise.”

“...What do you mean?” I asked, eyeing him cautiously. “You don’t see your sisters that way…do you?”

“Relax, Solo—we are not interested in our sisters,” someone else called out, which made me feel better—but only for about the span of a second. “But even if we were…we’d certainly choose one of the prettier ones.”

A shudder ran through me as everyone laughed. This was all very messed up.

“Hey, hey!” Vataash chastised, and I turned to look at him. “Don’t speak ill of Fa’nakhra. That is Ben Solo’s woman you’re talking about.”

“Well, he can have her,” said the other guy, and everyone laughed.

And I began to think something that, perhaps, I should have been thinking a long time ago:

…That I probably shouldn’t be hanging out with these guys.

I looked around at all of them, the throng of drunken teenagers and young twenty-somethings. And then I looked at my hands, and my body, and saw myself with them, and saw myself as one of them…and began to perceive the first signs of a panic attack. My fingertips started to tingle, and everything sounded like it was underwater. The scents of smoke and alcohol slowly began to choke me, and a scream simmered in my stomach. I began to feel sick inside.

…I decided that I wasn’t drunk enough. So I grabbed the whiskey jug as it was being passed, and set out to remedy the problem.

“Stop stalling and answer the question, Ben Solo!” Vataash called to me as I took a swig. “How does Fa’nakhra compare to your other mates?”

I thought for a second as I passed off the jug again—and then I knew how to respond.

I stood to my feet, and watched everyone snap to attention.

“With your forgiveness, good sirs, I decline to answer,” I said loudly, mimicking the way men speak on Ryloth: with one’s voice deep in the chest, and each word separated out from its neighbors. “I find this question incredibly disrespectful to Fa’nakhra. She is very important to me. I love her—really, I do. I don’t wish to humiliate her.”

I paused, scanning my audience, who looked disappointed.

…And then I allowed myself a slight smirk.

“Because, if I were to tell the truth, it would humiliate her,” I finished, and sat back down again—and everyone burst into raucous laughter.

Okay. Now I was drunk enough.

And I knew I shouldn’t have said that—but I was sleep-deprived and dehydrated and intoxicated with Rylothian whiskey and male approval. My critical thinking skills were quickly slipping away.

Boy, did it feel good to be funny! Everyone was laughing and laughing and laughing.

…Everyone, that is, but my little buddy Mr. Ten Girls.

“I think he is lying,” the boy said with measured suspicion. “I doubt he has been with any women at all.”

“Oh, you’re more than welcome to believe me a liar,” I retorted brazenly. My mouth felt like it was full of cotton, and I was losing the ability to judge how loud my voice was. “I won’t argue my five hundred, the way you feel the need to argue your ten. See—Ben Solo has no need to argue. Because Ben Solo does not lie.”

This, of course, was another funny thing for me to say.

But I was the only one who knew why.

Mr. Ten turned red in the face, and let himself fade into the background.

“Oh, pay Hakiiro no mind, Ben Solo—he is only jealous of you,” said Vataash, waving his flask. He had filled it from the last remaining whiskey jug, which was now being passed around on the other side of the bonfire. “Were you in a, what is it called—a fraternity?”

I wasn’t in a fraternity, but…that didn’t mean I had to say I wasn’t.

“Oh, yeah, totally,” I said, really getting into it now. “In fact, I was the sole human in a Gungan fraternity. Non-Gungans are not usually accepted, but they asked me to join—”

I paused, trying to make it sound like I was pausing for dramatic effect…but really, it was because I had no idea what I was about to say next.

“—because I am the only human ever to eat five Nabooian slug-beetles in the span of a minute,” I finished, pushing pride into my voice.

The actual event I was referencing was certainly less than my moment of triumph…but they didn’t need to know that.

“Gungans?” asked Vataash. “Are they not the clumsy, ugly ones, with the hideous snouts and stupid manner of speaking?”

I bristled at first. I didn’t like him talking about my friend’s species like that. For a second, I was about to climb onto a soapbox.

But: then I thought of something really funny to say instead.

“No, no,” I corrected loudly. “You are thinking of Nabohri.” I gestured to Nabohri, who was nursing the empty whiskey jug, sticking his tongue into the neck and trying to lick off whatever was left. The timing literally couldn’t have been any better.

Everyone roared with laughter (even Nabohri, who seemed to enjoy the attention), and I sat back, satisfied. Another zinger from Ben Solo—this one was my best yet, and it took almost three minutes for all the guys to calm down.

“No—Gungans are mighty warriors!” I exclaimed, once the hubbub had settled down. “Haven’t you heard of the Battle of Naboo?”

They hadn’t.

“Have you heard of the Clone Wars?”

They had kind of heard of the Clone Wars.

I frowned.

“...Have you heard of the Galactic Civil War?”

“That…is just another name for the Clone Wars, no?” asked Mikal.

I blinked. Mikal seemed like the smartest one out of all of them, and yet even he didn’t seem to have a basic knowledge of history.

True, none of them had been alive during the Galactic Civil War. But if none of them were even aware that it had happened…

“...Have you heard of the Death Star?” I asked, looking around at them. “It was kind of a big deal. It was a military space station with the ability to destroy entire planets.”

“Was?” Vataash cut in, rising to his feet. “Pentarra said that the star-killer had not been built yet. How do you know about it?”

I stared at him, not sure what to make of this bizarre outburst.

“...What does Pentarra have to do with the Death Star?” I asked.

Vataash began to look odd.

“...Nothing,” he said shiftily, sinking back down into place. “Forget I spoke.”

I scrutinized him. Had Pentarra…helped to finance the Death Star, or something?

“Ben Solo!” someone else called, drawing my attention away from Vataash. “Please! If we wanted to learn history, we would have gone to school ourselves. Tell us of the slug-beetles!”

Well, I’m never one to turn down a storytelling opportunity. So…I told them.

Perhaps you’ve heard my slug-beetle story: the time I ate five blue slug-beetles in my junior year of college, in the hopes of impressing the other guests at my first-ever house party. But I guarantee that you have never heard this version. Because in this version, slug-beetles were toxic to humans (they’re not), I was frantically rushed to the medcenter (I wasn’t), and I nearly died before getting my stomach pumped (this did happen to me once, but on a much different occasion).

Everyone was thoroughly amazed.

Everyone except Mr. Ten Girls, that is.

“He’s a liar,” said Mr. Ten (whose real name, apparently, was Hakiiro). “I watched Ben Solo eat at dinner last night. He made a face at his snorlii, and did not eat. How then could he have eaten five beetles, if he could barely stomach one snorlii?”

Wow. I really didn’t like this kid.

Everyone turned to me to see how I’d respond, like children watching an after-school fight.

Okay, first of all—I had eaten the snorlii. I hadn’t liked it, but I’d eaten it. I hadn’t finished it, but I’d eaten it.

But an argument on that point, I knew, was not the best I had in my arsenal.

“Well—you, buddy, are not a liar,” I returned, rising to my feet and swaggering over to him. Now that we were face-to-face, I could see he was a full head shorter than me. “Because although you claim to lie with women—I am pretty sure you’ve never lain with any at all.”

A chorus of ohhhhhhhh! rose up from the boys. If you have ever spent any extended time around young men, you know exactly what that sounds like.

“Oh, you got him, nerra!” cried Nabohri (who didn’t seem to remember that I’d “gotten” him, too, only half an hour earlier).

…Wait.

Nerra?

“Nerra?” I echoed, looking at Nabohri. “Me? I’m—nerra?”

“Oh, you are one-hundred-percent nerra—my nerra,” answered Nabohri, laughing. And even though I knew ol’ Nabohri couldn’t do math, I figured that one-hundred-percent had to be pretty good.

I grinned.

And I thought about what Pennie had said the night before…that when no one cares about you, the next best thing is to be craved.

…Well.

When you know no one would like you for who you really are, the next best thing is to be liked for who they’d want you to be.

Once it was getting close to dinnertime (and once we had run out of alcohol), we doused the fire and started packing up so we could head back home. Hakiiro got ill from drinking too much, so Mikal volunteered to stay behind with him for a few minutes. I got to ride my own blurrg this time, so I raced Vataash and Nabohri back to the grounds.

Vataash won—but I did manage to beat Nabohri, who cursed me with a laugh and a twinkle in his eye.

When we returned, Pennie was waiting for me at the gates with a sour look on her face.

“What’s up, Pen?” I asked, dismounting my blurrg while the other guys rode past us and toward the stables. “You look…worse than normal.”

“Pentarra requests your presence at his table,” she said rigidly.

I stared at her, my blood running cold.

“Pennie,” I said. “You promised you weren’t gonna get me killed.”

“If only he did wish to kill you,” Pennie sniffed. “No. He wants to dine with you, Ben Solo. When I told him that I find you interesting, he only laughed and told me that he finds you interesting, too. He sent me to inform you that you are to be his guest tonight at supper.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised.

I hadn’t thought I would meet Ruut Pentarra on this trip. In fact, I hadn’t been sure he even knew I existed. He was my girlfriend’s father…but it wasn’t like he was her dad. (Actually, I suspected that Pentarra’s lack of parental interaction with his children was why Pennie was so willing to have a romantic relationship with him.)

“‘Oh?’ Is that all you have to say?” Pennie snapped. “Pentarra does not often invite people to his table, Ben Solo. It is a great honor.”

“So…I’m gonna sit up there with you?”

“Not with me,” Pennie said, her voice clipped. “In my place.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised. “Why wouldn’t he want you there?”

“I don’t know,” Pennie huffed. “He did not tell me.”

“Well…okay,” I said.

Pennie waved her hand in front of her nose, and made a face. “You should wash,” she scoffed. “You reek of smoke and liquor.”

“What?” I teased, leaning in so she could smell me better. “You don’t think it’s sexy?”

Pennie bristled—which was exactly the reaction I’d hoped to get out of her.

“Not on you,” she spat.

I laughed, and pulled myself back up onto my blurrg so I could ride it back to the stables.

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