Phineas couldn’t necessarily say he disliked high school.  Far from it.  The work was harder, which was a nice change of pace.  No one was bullying him or his friends or anything like that.  His teachers were all fine.

It was just that with high school, there came a higher expectation of dating.  And he wasn’t opposed to that.  In fact, there was one of his friends that he would very much like to—

Um.  Nevermind.

It was just the… other expectations that came with dating.  He would love it if he could just, like, go on dates and hold… someone’s hand and maybe kiss them every now and then and not worry about the… other stuff.

But he was in high school now, wasn’t he?  And that stuff was expected, wasn’t it?  Shouldn’t he like the idea of it anyway?

So yeah.  There were parts of high school Phineas wasn’t a fan of.

Naturally this wasn’t on his mind all of the time.  Phineas was fairly sure no one spent all of their time thinking about romance… right?  Well, Ferb seemed to be spending a lot of energy thinking about it lately, but he was pretty sure that was for a different reason.

“So why are you researching sexualities again?” Phineas asked curiously, glancing over at the bed across the room where his brother sat.

“That’s the topic I picked for this project,” Ferb said casually, and Phineas rolled his eyes.  He was pretty sure that being the topic Ferb had chosen (which was LGBT history) had less to do with Ferb’s interest in the topic and more to do with the fact that their history teacher Mr. Duncan was a less-than-subtle homophobe and Ferb wanted to piss him off.  That way to bend the rules subtly while not having done anything that could be called out was something Phineas liked about his brother.  He supposed he was probably going to hear a lot about different sexualities in the upcoming weeks.

What he hadn’t expected was how deep Ferb was going to dive into this.

“Did you know that there are still LGBT identities in the DSM?” he asked one day at lunch.  “Asexuality and ‘gender dysphoria,’ which is really just another way of saying transgender.  Like, they are actually classified as mental disorders.”

“Have you ever heard him talk this much?” Buford hissed to Phineas.

“When he’s passionate about something?  Yeah,” Phineas replied, turning back to Ferb.  “Hey, what’s asexuality?  I’ve never heard of that.”

“I don’t know, I haven’t researched that yet,” Ferb said.  “I’ll let you know.”  He then went back into a vent on the DSM.

Ferb apparently spent most of the project on other things, though, because Phineas didn’t hear anything about asexuality until the end of the week, when Ferb brought it up after dinner, when they were both doing homework on their beds.

“Asexuality,” he said, with no lead-up, causing Phineas to glance over in slight surprise.  “There seems to be some contradicting definitions, but it looks like it’s a lack of sexual attraction.”

Phineas raised an eyebrow.  “Meaning…?”

“Like a homosexual person is attracted to the same gender or a bisexual person is attracted to multiple genders, an asexual person is attracted to no one.”

Phineas blinked a couple times.  “Is… is that a thing?”

“Well, I’ve been doing research about it, so… yes?”

Phineas blinked again, and turned and looked at the wall across from him, trying to pin a name to the feeling he was having.  Ferb seemed to have gone back to researching, which was good, because Phineas wasn’t sure what else he was going to say otherwise.  He didn’t get much other homework that night.

Okay, so here’s the thing.  Phineas wasn’t used to not understanding things.  He and Ferb had only failed to solve cold fusion by choice as kids, he felt it was pretty safe to say that he understood most things, just as a general blanket statement.

But for some reason, the idea of asexuality suddenly wouldn’t leave his head and he couldn’t understand why.   He finally caved a couple days later and ended up doing some research of his own.  It turns out there was a large asexual community on Tumblr.  Phineas didn’t go as far as actually making an account, but he did quite a bit of lurking.  There was apparently a large range of asexual people’s opinions on… sex, but the main consensus was that it wasn’t necessary to not like (or to like) sex to be aseuxal.  He ended up finding a little more research about things like aromanticism and demisexuality too, but regardless, something about everything he was finding on asexuality was ringing familiar.

He wasn’t sure what to think about it at first, and maybe ending up where he did wasn’t… the greatest idea?  But like hell if he was asking Buford or Ferb about this, and Baljeet was more likely to give some kind of clinical definition that would be the opposite of helpful.  So…

“So, what did you want to ask me?” Isabella asked, sitting down across from Phineas under the tree in their backyard.

Phineas cleared his throat and looked away.  “Okay, I um— I realize this is going to sound like a really weird question.”

“Weird by whose standards exactly?” Isabella said with a smile.  “I’ve heard plenty of weird questions from you over the—”

“What does sexual attraction feel like?” Phineas asked quickly.

Isabella immediately went bright red.

“Sorry!” Phineas said instantly, throwing his hands out in front of him.  “That was a stupid question!  I just—”  He lowered his hands slowly, and looked hesitantly at Isabella.  “I… I’m not going to take it back because I kind of still want an answer?”

Isabella looked very firmly down at her lap and bit her lip.  “Um,” she said, her voice much higher than it normally was.  “Well.  It’s like.  Um.  A pull?  Towards someone?  Like, you see them and then you want to… touch them?  I… why do you ask?”  The end of her sentence came out as a very high squeak.

“Oh.”  Phineas leaned back, fidgeting a little with his fingers.  “Okay.  That’s… weird.”

Isabella stared at him.  “What?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever… oh.”  He looked back at Isabella.  “Really?”

“Uh… yes, really.  What the heck does that mean?”

“I think I might be asexual,” Phineas said, more to himself than to Isabella.

Isabella blinked and leaned back a little in surprise, before she seemed to process what he was saying.  “Oh.”  She leaned forward to the same position she was in before, but she didn’t say anything else, and suddenly Phineas felt his heart rate pick up.

“Is— is that okay?” he asked hurriedly.

Isabella stared at him.  “What— Phineas, what does it matter if it’s okay?  It’s not my sexuality.  Why should my opinion on it matter?”

Phineas opened his mouth, and shut it again.  He didn’t know how to explain why it did without mentioning… things.  “I don’t— do you know what it is?”

“I mean… Ferb’s kinda been talking about it all week?” Isabella said hesitantly.  “It just means not experiencing sexual attraction, right?”

“I uh, I think so.  I don’t know.  There’s apparently a big spectrum on where people fall on opinions about… uh, you know.  I’m just… not sure what I think about everything yet.”

“Oh.”  Isabella seemed to hesitate for a second, before she reached for his hand and squeezed it.  “Well, that’s okay.  No one said you had to figure this all out right now.”  She seemed to hesitate again for a moment.  “Phineas, I’m so glad you feel comfortable enough to talk with me about this, and this isn’t me shutting down the conversation if you want to keep talking, but you look really uncomfortable.  Do you want to maybe go do something else?”

“Oh god, yes please.  Can we watch a movie?” Phineas asked weakly.

Isabella smiled at him.  “Sure,” she said.  They both stood up, and before he could second guess himself, Phineas pulled Isabella forward into a hug.

“Thanks,” he whispered.

“You’re welcome,” Isabella replied, hugging him back.  She leaned back with a large grin.  “Now I’m in the mood for some Space Adventure.”

“You just said that ‘cause you know that’s my favorite movie franchise,” Phineas said with a smile.

“Maybe,” Isabella said, giving him one back, and they both started into the house, things moving back to feeling better than normal.  That had gone much better than he expected.  And even though this was still very new and confusing, something warm was settling in Phineas’ chest.  This would bring good things.  Understanding more about yourself was almost always good, and he was sure this was not an exception.

…Now if only he could figure out how to tell Isabella his other massive secret.  Some other time maybe.