Down and Across

by Arvin Ahmadi

  “Uh, well, obviously the birds were planted around the zoo to . . .” I needed to come up with something clever. “To eat all the . . . From the other animals, you know.” Shit. I was initially thinking shit, literal shit, because that was my expletive reaction, but because I wasn’t a complete freak, I stopped myself. Birds eat bread, not shit. Or feces. Wait, saying feces could make me sound intelligent. Or better yet, “Bowel movements,” I said proudly.

  The girl’s face turned inexplicably sour. “Ew, what’s wrong with you?”

  She harrumphed as if I had actually splattered feces all over her cheap pink blouse and stormed off. The birds stuck around. Now I was the crazy bird person.

  Clearly Fiora had set me up to fail. She had picked up on my impressive ability to crash and burn, from the bike accident to my attempts at getting Professor Mallard’s attention, all the way to this pickup dare. She’d figured me out in just a few days. Here’s a guy who always takes the first step, and he always trips. And it is kind of funny when he trips. Like a kitten trying to climb out of a fishbowl. I took some artistic license with the last bit.

  “I hope the panda comes down,” a girl said. I kept staring ahead, thinking of the kitten, pretending not to hear an opportunity for Pickup Fail #3.

  “That might have been a more effective pickup line,” she added. “Instead of that silly bird comment. Everyone knows people who talk about birds are crazy.”

  I looked quickly over my shoulder to glance at this mystery girl. She seemed to be about my age, wearing a gray T-shirt tucked into a pencil skirt that stopped just above the knees. She was pretty. Not edgy or drop-dead gorgeous, but pretty.

  “Wouldn’t that make her crazy, too?” I asked.

  “All girls are crazy,” she said. “Except me. I’m Jeanette.”

  Jeanette shot her hand out. I stared for a second, like a prisoner of war meeting his rescuer for the first time. Then I shook her hand. It was a firm handshake, and my expression must have revealed my surprise, because she reacted immediately.

  “Firm handshake. Part two of an effective pickup.”

  “Are you picking me up?”

  “No,” she answered, as if my question were a totally reasonable one. “I’m just helping you get better at it. I don’t appreciate ineffectiveness in any form.” She paused and bit her lip. “Also, if you don’t mind me making a few more observations . . . Your eye contact wasn’t exactly direct, and your tone was hesitant at best.”

  Jeanette spoke—no, lectured—with the authority of a professor. Every word that came out of her mouth had staccato, like logs crackling in a fireplace.

  “How magnanimous of you,” I said. Big words felt right for our conversation.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I looked around, unnerved, and Jeanette raised a dubious eyebrow. She was about as interested as the clouded leopard. Fiora, on the other hand, was struggling to contain her laughter back on the bench.

  “Your choice of a pickup venue is also quite baffling,” Jeanette continued. We were only half facing each other, like stage actors reading scripted dialogue.

  “I didn’t pick the venue. A friend picked it.”

  “You’re with a friend?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “It was more of a friendship . . . contract.”

  Out of nowhere, someone handed me a small digital camera, and before I knew it, a family of Asian tourists stood posing in front of me.

  “If I were your lawyer, I would deem that contract null and void,” Jeanette said as I took two pictures—horizontal and vertical—making sure to get the panda in the shot.

  “Are you . . . a lawyer?” I gave the camera back.

  “Someday. I just finished my freshman year at Liberty University. Pre-law. I’m interning at a think tank this summer. You?”

  I’d never heard of Jeanette’s college, but the bigger issue was that I didn’t attend any college at all. There was no way Jeanette would keep talking to me if she found out I was still in high school. So I lied.

  “I’m interning for Professor Cecily Mallard at Georgetown.” I gulped and smiled from the side of my mouth, like a cartoon character. “I’m a research assistant.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “Grit. It’s the psychology of success and perseverance. I’m studying important historical figures who accomplished amazing feats by, um—persisting.”

  “That sounds like a fascinating subfield! I—” Jeanette stopped midsentence. If a face could kick itself, that was exactly what Jeanette did with hers. “Hold on. I’m sorry. This is wrong. I’m doing precisely what you did with that poor girl. I didn’t mean it. I was simply calling attention to your subpar pickup line, and in doing so, I’m now somehow picking you up. My magnanimous individual agency became a pickup line of its own. This is wrong.”

  “No, no,” I blurted, worried I was losing my one shot at winning this dare. “This is totally the universe speaking. It’s for sure, like, an act of God.”

  Jeanette’s face instantly un-kicked itself. She was beaming. “I like the way you think. Did I mention my name? I’m sorry. I’m Jeanette.”

  “Scott,” I said.

  I had the feeling that even though Jeanette had commented on my poor pickup skills, she didn’t do this very often. That put me at ease.

  “Care to check out the elephant?” I asked.

  Jeanette shrugged her shoulders. Sure, I interpreted. I looked smugly back at the bench where Fiora had been sitting. She wasn’t there.

  I didn’t actually care to see the elephant, but I thought it would be tactical to see one more animal exhibit before asking Jeanette for her number. Jeanette was generally an interested person. She wasn’t interesting, per se, but she was interested.

  The elephant was living large. It had a freaking amusement park all to itself. There were giant tire swings on metal chains, patches of trees surrounding small ponds—the space could’ve fit another zoo. The panda might have been the star of the National Zoo, but the elephant was king.

  “Wild elephants move ten to thirty kilometers a day,” Jeanette commented. “It sounds silly, but they don’t mobilize themselves purely for food and water. They have to fight boredom.”

  “Fight boredom?” I scoffed. “I fight boredom every day.”

  I thought about how Fiora would have responded to my joke. She would have scoffed right back and called me a boredom-fighting superhero. Pow! Whack! Kaboom!

  Jeanette wasn’t much of a joker. “Confining elephants to a small space with minimal autonomy can lead to serious behavioral problems. Increased aggression, chewing their own body parts, unnatural lethargy. These are all problems that would inevitably shave time off the elephant’s life span. All of this space is an investment in the elephant’s longevity.”

  “Can’t have elephant suicide,” I joked.

  “That would be tragic,” Jeanette said. “Though I can’t imagine how it would manage.”

  I could tell Jeanette was smart. Insanely smart. The kind of smart that demanded to be noticed and brought to mind words like brainy and sharp as a tack. She was the girl whose hand shot up each time a teacher asked a question—the girl who forced that teacher to go, “Does anyone besides Jeanette know the answer?” She’d sit there in her seat and squirm anxiously while no one else answered. But more than that, Jeanette’s world was black and white. No gray. Because if there was one thing I’d figured out about this girl, it was this: her brain was confident. It might look squishy like other brains, but it was made of sharp-as-anything tacks.

  Jeanette insisted on seeing more of the Asia Trail. I noticed a pattern at each exhibit: I would make a stupid comment to loosen her up, and Jeanette would follow up with an intelligent observation. We were never quite in sync.

  Take the pink flamingos. I’d never seen so many flamingos in one place. They sounded like clown cars
in a traffic jam, honking over each other! It was a beautiful cacophony of noise, but Jeanette focused on their feathers. She hypothesized that the zoo was putting artificial pigment in the flamingos’ food to keep their feathers pink. I was skeptical, but Jeanette didn’t do skepticism. She marched right up to the nearest zoo employee and demanded an answer. Everything had to be black or white, or pink . . . Anyway, the guy looked at her funny. He said he was on his way to feed the panda, but Jeanette wouldn’t let him leave, so he reluctantly corroborated her hypothesis. I patted her on the back, because that was the closest thing to an A+ I could give her.

  Inside the Bird Center, we found a pond of whistling ducks. Apparently they didn’t actually whistle very much, so I blew my own tunes. Jeanette groaned.

  “I don’t understand why Americans idolize birds,” she complained. “We name our sports teams after them: Ravens, Cardinals, Seahawks. We have state birds. We’ve even made a hobby out of bird-watching!”

  “Maybe it comes from an inner human desire to fly,” I said.

  “That would be silly. We have airplanes for that.”

  Jeanette had moved to DC two weeks ago and was intent on making this “the most adventurous summer of her life.” She’d already visited five Smithsonian museums and now she could check off the National Zoo. I suppose we had different definitions of adventure. Unbeknownst to Jeanette, mine involved asking for her number, which I checked off promptly after the Bird Center. It wasn’t an intense or exciting ask, because it felt like another scene from the script we were reading. We played our parts well. This predictability put me at ease, and the end result was weirdly satisfying. Not electrifying, not frustrating—just satisfying.

  Saying goodbye to Jeanette felt like leaving school on a regular day. It marked the completion of a task that I had to do. I walked over to the zoo’s entrance, where I found Fiora. That felt like running into a bulldozer. Literally. She shoved me in the chest.

  “Did you get it?”

  I played dumb. “Get what?”

  “Herpes,” Fiora said. “Pencil Skirt is a total slut. I could tell.”

  “Ha!” I laughed just a single laugh, like a snooty 1920s aristocrat. Or Sherlock Holmes. Ha! Elementary, my dear Fiora. “Pencil Skirt was actually super nervous. She introduced herself twice. But yes, to answer your question. I got it.”

  “Show me.”

  I took out my phone and scrolled down to Jeanette’s name.

  “Jeanette Dumont.”

  “Jeanette Dumont,” Fiora read. “540-555-8309. Got it.”

  “Got it? Huh?”

  She ignored me, tapping at her phone screen. “Have you texted her yet?”

  “No? I literally just left her.”

  “And . . . Sent.”

  “What in the—what?! What did you send?”

  Fiora showed me her phone. It was a text message:

  Hey! Scott here. It was great to meet you and hang out just now. Thanks for showing me around the animals. I’m actually going out with some GW friends tonight around U Street, care to join?

  “Fiora.” My jaw dropped. “When— How— When did you even write that?”

  “While I was waiting for the two of you to finish your lovely stroll.” She smiled so wide that her eyes became tiny slits, slicing into what little dignity I had left.

  “You’re insane,” I said. “Certifiably insane. There’s no way she’ll actually—”

  Buzz buzz.

  Fiora read the message to herself. She smiled.

  “What?” I said, leaning in to see it. Fiora turned her phone away. The phone with a text for me. “What did she say?”

  “You really must have made an impression on her, Saaket.”

  “I did?”

  She read the message out loud in a squeaky, mouse-like voice: “Hi! Yes! I would love to!” Fiora paused. “But didn’t you say you’re doing research at Georgetown? Winky face. I don’t understand why you’re hanging out with GW kids. Dot dot dot . . .”

  Fiora snapped out of her Jeanette impression. “This girl doesn’t understand why you’re hanging out with GW kids? Who the fuck does she think she is?”

  “She’s actually really smart.”

  Fiora rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. Then she smirked. “Wait. You told her you work at Georgetown?”

  “I may have taken a lesson or two from your playbook.”

  “Oh man,” Fiora said, chuckling to herself. “What have I done to you, Saaket?”

  “Well, first, you dared me to pick up a girl. And I did. So you owe me fifty bucks.”

  “Fair,” she said, reaching into her back pocket. She handed me a crumpled fifty.

  “More recently,” I continued, “you told Jeanette we’re all hanging out tonight. Mind explaining that?”

  “We’re going to a bar called Saint-Ex.”

  “All right, well, thanks for the heads-up. How am I supposed to get in?”

  “I already texted Trent,” Fiora said, unlocking her bike from the rack. “He’s going to get you that guy’s ID . . . Carlos, or whatever.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a little nervous. “I should probably get your number so we can be in touch and coordinate plans, right?”

  Fiora gave me her number and took off while I was saving it to my contacts. I ran and caught up to her, and she rode slowly as we made our way down Connecticut Avenue. I sweated even more than in the morning, but I didn’t feel embarrassed around Fiora. Because walking back with her felt like the last day of school, and parting ways outside the hostel felt like the last bell. I knew I’d see her soon, but still. Something about Fiora made each goodbye pinch like it could be the last.

  I ARRIVED AT Café Saint-Ex a few minutes early. I power walked the whole way over, because fast walking is the moving equivalent of nervous fidgeting. I didn’t want to wait outside the bar by myself, so I did a loop around the block. The second time I arrived at Café Saint-Ex, Fiora was there.

  “So where’s Pencil Skirt?” she said. “I thought of all of us, she’d be the most punctual.”

  “No clue. Maybe she panicked and changed her mind,” I said.

  Fiora shrugged. She was wearing a black tank top and baggy parachute pants, an outfit that reassured me Saint-Ex was not a fancy-pants establishment. I wore the same polo and corduroys I’d been wearing all week. Turns out there were washing machines in my hostel, so instead of spending money on new clothes, I spent some quarters washing the ones I had.

  A few minutes passed.

  “Are any of your other friends showing up?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Fiora muttered.

  She bit her lower lip, and I stared at the ground. It was going to be uncomfortable for both of us if Jeanette flaked. But she didn’t.

  “Hey, Scott!” Jeanette said, coming in for a firm hug. Her boobs pressed into my chest forcefully, which made me flinch. Then she turned to Fiora. “Hi. I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Jeanette.” She extended her arm. “Scott and I met today at, well—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the story.” Fiora shook Jeanette’s hand skeptically, fishlike. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  You know that expression . . . two worlds collide? That. Handshake. By normal standards, I shouldn’t have been invested in either of their worlds. I’d only known Fiora for a few days and Jeanette for a few hours. But here I was, orbiting aimlessly within a universe of girls.

  “Shall we go inside?” Jeanette proposed.

  “We have to wait for Trent,” I said.

  “Trent’s going to be late,” Fiora said. “He can meet us inside.”

  “Yeah, but remember Trent has that thing that I need . . . ?” I was trying to be discreet.

  “Riiiight,” Fiora said. “Your fake ID. I forgot you’re, like, a baby.”

  I gave Fiora the quickest death glare.
Jeanette giggled. “Freshman problems,” she said sympathetically, fumbling through her wallet to show off her own fake ID. “It’s my older sister Frankie’s license. She’s the wild one in the family—left Virginia, lives in Brooklyn now . . . Frankie says I should have fun this summer.”

  Technically we were all underage, but Jeanette had no idea just how “under” my age was. She didn’t need to know.

  Trent arrived what felt like an hour later with a lost expression on his face. He seemed focused on something else, muttering an excuse about how he’d gotten held up with his coworker Carlos. He hugged Fiora absently, and then he snapped on, introducing himself like a gentleman to Jeanette, who practically gawked in his presence. (She must have been thinking, Am I really with Scott when I just met this hunk?!)

  Trent handed me Carlos’s ID. “Memorize everything,” he said. “In case the bouncer gives you shit ’cuz you don’t have a five o’clock shadow like Carlos.”

  “Or because I’m not Hispanic . . .”

  I quickly memorized Carlos Barroso-Valderrama Zambrano’s insane name, height, address, birthday, and organ donor status (yes, he’ll give you his kidneys). The bouncer didn’t even ask for any of it. He just took a long look at the ID, then my face, then the ID again, and when I itched my nose, he took one last suspicious look at me. I held my breath. The others were already inside, waiting for me, watching nervously by the door.

  “Go ahead,” the bouncer mumbled.

  I shot past him and—WOW, MY EARS FELT LIKE THEY WERE GOING TO EXPLODE. I didn’t think it was possible to scream my own thoughts, but I also didn’t realize that Café Saint-Ex was actually the inside of a giant boom box. Top 40 beats blasted like hammers hacking away at my eardrums. We all followed Fiora, who led the way toward either “the back” or “a rack.”

  Did I mention it was loud?

  Saint-Ex was also packed. Everyone stood around in awkward circles, each group sardined against another. Sleazeball bros bumped into girls from adjacent circles and offered to buy them tequila shots. They drank. They spilled. They grazed hands, hips, legs, any body part available. I didn’t know where to look. My senses were going berserk.