“So why didn’t you want to dance with me at prom?”
“I was nervous around you. That kind of thing.”
I shook my head. I had been so worried about winning prom king to impress her. So she would like me. But she already did like me. The whole time, from the beginning.
“I’m sorry, this is just kind of crazy to hear,” I said.
“It’s funny that you never knew.”
“Yeah, hilarious,” I said sarcastically.
“Not ha-ha funny, just interesting funny,” she said. “I mean, I always used to wonder, you know, what it would be like. If we were together.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did.”
“False.”
“Well, I always asked you to call me.”
“And you asked your boyfriend to date you. Seriously, you guys were together most of high school.”
“Sometimes we were broken up. And those were the times.”
“The times what?”
“When I was waiting for you to ask me out.”
I sighed and rubbed my chin in my hand.
“You’re right,” I said.
“About?”
I chuckled. “It is funny. I just had no idea.”
She shrugged again. “Well, now you know.”
“Now I know.”
We ate some more and talked some more about old times, but there was an even bigger gap between us now, because I couldn’t stop thinking about this new information. Evelyn had liked me. The whole time. She had liked me. Or at least some of the time, including the time we went to prom. It was as if I had just discovered an old lottery ticket in the bottom of a sock drawer, a scratch-off that was a big winner, but the ticket had an expiration date that had passed years ago.
LILLY MOORE
BACKGROUND
Chapter 25
One of the first things I learned at college was how difficult it is to get into a fraternity party if you don’t have a membership at that fraternity, a membership at another, or boobs. Preferably a pair. With minimal fabric standing between them and the eyes of the guy working the door.
That we lacked any of those prerequisites was why my new friend Brad and I found ourselves trying to slip in through a basement window we had managed to pry open several inches. Fortunately, we were both relatively skinny.
Why was I so desperate to get into the party?
For years, it had been my goal to find a girlfriend. When I went to college, I added to that list of objectives finding a group of close friends—a crew, if you will, who could, among other things, help me navigate the world of dating. Tony, my childhood friend from church, and I had not stayed as close during high school, so I had never had anyone to give me advice when I was trying to date Francesca and Evelyn.
That’s why Brad and I found ourselves shoving our bodies through that basement window. We thought we might meet some girls at the party. Maybe I could CFD with one of them. But even if we failed on those counts, nothing bonds two people together like a little breaking and entering. So either way I would end up with a closer friend as a result of the adventure.
We dropped from the window into the corner of a room about five feet from a makeshift bar, several kegs behind it. No one said anything or even looked twice at us. At a party like this one, I realized, there was a high ratio of people who were there to have fun versus people who were there to enforce the rules. And most of the tiny group that fell into the latter category was already stationed at the front door, turning away guys like Brad and me. The partygoers who saw us, the ones who were there purely for fun, couldn’t care less about our method of entry.
“You want a beer?” Brad asked.
“Nah,” I said.
“I’m gonna get in line.”
There were two lines for beer: a guys’ line and a girls’ line. Fraternity brothers worked the kegs behind the bar and evidently also chose which line to give priority to. The guys’ line snaked all the way across the floor of the basement to the stairwell where people entered from the front door upstairs. The girls’ line was three girls long.
Anyway, I had decided I didn’t want to drink until I was twenty-one. It wasn’t like I wanted to take the moral high road. I just didn’t like breaking laws. Unless those laws happened to be preventing me from an opportunity to meet girls, in which case I was happy to engage in a bit of trespassing via a basement window.
While Brad waited in line, I made my way to the other side of the basement, where the sticky tile floor dropped several feet to another level that served as a dance floor. It was packed with sweaty revelers. Rap music was blaring. Most people held a red plastic Solo cup in one hand and gripped the body of a dance partner with the other. Unlike high school, I saw, there was not much circle dancing at a frat party. Grinding was rampant. Virtually everyone was paired off. The guys who didn’t have a girl to dance with prowled the open floor on the higher level, watching for a girl who didn’t have a guy on her already.
I spotted a smile and a wave that seemed to be directed at me. I waved back. It was Paulette, another freshman. I’d hung out with her a few times. Not like “we should hang out sometime” hanging out. Just with a group or whatever. She motioned me over to where she was dancing with her friends.
In contrast to the semi-intoxicated bros prowling the perimeter, I didn’t want to accost a girl I had never met with a proposition to dance. So Paulette was an ideal candidate for CFDing. After all, she was probably here in search of a dance partner, right? Maybe even a boyfriend? I mean, why else would you come to a frat party? Plus, I wasn’t going to grind on her. I would just put my hands on her hips and then we would sway back and forth together. It would be fun. Good old-fashioned CFDing. Maybe that’s why she had motioned me to come over in the first place. She wanted to dance with a boy she knew. A boy like me.
It took me a full twenty minutes to work up the courage. I would tell myself: at the end of this song. No, at the end of this song. And so forth.
Finally, I just did it, like tearing off a Band-Aid. All at once I took a step forward on my fake leg so I was only a few inches away from her, placing my hands on her waist and trying to smile a friendly rather than nervous smile. She immediately snapped back, pushing my hands away like she was ripping off a pair of pants she had just discovered to be infested with spiders. “Sorry,” she said, slowing down a little as if she was worried she had overreacted. “I just don’t want to dance like that.”
The way she had instantly shoved away my hands, as if they were too grotesque to allow near her body, as if they were infected with some contagious disease, was more personal and painful than the worst-case scenario I could have imagined.
I was so shocked that for a moment I dropped my mask of confidence; the hurt was written on my face. All that time I had wasted building up my nerve. That entire internal-monologue pep talk had been for nothing.
In fact, worse than for nothing. It had led me to rejection, a violent, physical rejection.
Getting rejected by a girl you are trying to dance with is different from getting rejected by one you asked out on a date. Not necessarily worse or better, just different. When a girl says no to a date, you presume there was some logic behind her decision. She made an evaluation of you in her mind, summing up your traits, her attraction to you, your past history, your five-year plan, the make and model of your car, etc., and then she gave you her answer: no. But when a girl rejects your advance on the dance floor, it is something deeper, more instinctive, more visceral. She is at a fundamental gut level not attracted to you. In fact, she is in some way repelled by you, by your smell, by your presence, by the feeling of your body touching hers. Her rejection of you is precognitive, a pure animal reflex. The dance floor rejection has a stronger physical charge, then: Your body is not enough. I don’t want it near mine. And this charge is amplified, I think, if you happen to be an amputee, because it throws a spark on the kindling of insecurity you were already harboring concern
ing the shape of your body.
At any rate, I could not—I would not—dance in the presence of Paulette and her friends after that rejection. I was angry and hurt and humiliated. I waved a wordless good-night and turned to go find Brad.
Paulette grabbed my arm. “Wait. Stay and dance with us some more!” She was smiling. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to make up for the way she had made me feel or if she was just completely oblivious to it.
I offered no explanation. That I was walking away communicated everything I had to say.
I found Brad. “I’m leaving.”
“Now?”
I nodded tersely.
“You want me to come with you?”
“If you want.”
He looked around, surveying the room, and then back at me. “All right. Hold on.” He downed his beer in a single gulp, tossing the cup into a nearby trash can, and we left out the front door. Despite my anger, or perhaps because of it, I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder and smile at the bouncers as we exited, pushing through the crowd that was trying to get in. Suckers.
Brad and I sat outside and I told him what had happened and he listened. I had to admit: Having a friend to talk about it with did not make me feel better. Not completely, that is. But it did feel better than holding it all inside.
Chapter 26
As you may be aware, most formal dating relationships in college, in the rare cases that they actually exist, start with hooking up. If a couple hooks up enough times, and they find themselves waking up beside each other with frequency, and—here’s the major turning point—going to the dining hall for breakfast together, they may be headed toward an actual boyfriend-girlfriend-type relationship. But as I said, it’s rare for couples to pair off in this formal way on a college campus, so what you get instead are what I call Ambiguous College Relationships. In an ACR, sometimes you get drunk and make out, then don’t talk for a couple of days, then have coffee together, then don’t talk for a while, then get drunk and make out again, then wonder if you may in fact be dating this person now, or whether it is merely a “friends with benefits” situation. I lump all these relationships under the umbrella of emotional confusion that is the ACR.
Anyway, since I didn’t drink or, for that matter, hook up, I still had not even kissed a girl. I was a little old-fashioned in that I was actually trying to go on, you know, dates. The difficult thing about asking a girl on a date at college is that it’s rare to be in a one-on-one conversation with her. You’re always in a group. A table at the cafeteria. A circle standing around after class. A mass of nude streakers. My point is, it’s tough to ask a girl out, or even to say We should hang out sometime, because there are other ears listening. Not only might she reject you, she might reject you in front of an audience.
It took several months past forever to spot such a perfect moment with Lilly, this girl I’d met at a Christian event on campus. She was cute, and she never asked me how I lost my leg, which I took as a sign my disability wasn’t important to her. Finally, one night, we were both in the Pizza Hut in the University Center, and I saw her get up from her table to go to the bathroom. I got up from my own table and followed her. No, perverts, I wasn’t following her to the bathroom. I was just trying to make sure the vector of her movement and the vector of mine had an intersection at the end of the aisle. Fortunately, I’m pretty good with vectors.
“Oh hey, what’s up, Lilly!” I said, as if to say, I’m so pleasantly surprised to see you here at Pizza Hut and furthermore that our vectors happened to intersect at the end of this aisle!
She smiled. “Josh! Hi!”
“What are you up to?”
“Just eating some za.”
“Excuse me?”
“Za. It’s an abbreviation for pizza.”
“Oh… okay.”
She chuckled at her abbreviation.
“My biffil—I mean, my BFFL, best friend for life—Sadie Bickley, see her over there waving—hi, biffil!—we like to make abbreves, I mean, abbreviations—for everything. Saves a lot of time.”
“Life is short, I guess.”
“So true.”
“Might as well use every syllable to the fullest.”
She nodded. “Again, so true. What are you up to tonight?”
“Meeting up with some friends later. You?”
“Samesies.”
“Now see, there it seemed like you added a syllable.”
“But ‘samesies’ is so much more fun to say.”
“Think how much time you’ve wasted saying that extra syllable twice in the last ten seconds.”
“Jeez, I guess you’re right,” she said. “Those are seconds I am never going to get back.”
“Good thing we had this talk.”
She nodded, mock-serious. “Good thing.”
“Anyway, great to see you,” I said, swinging my hand out sideways to wind up for a slap–speed handshake.
“You, too.” She smiled as our hands collided and pulled back, the fingertips locking like yin and yang. She took a step away but I didn’t let go of her hand, as if I had just remembered something I wanted to tell her.
“Hey. We should hang out sometime.”
“Totes.”
I’m not going to lie. It all felt pretty smooth.
But I took the smoothness down a few notches by adding, “What’s your last name? I’ll look you up in the student directory and drop you an e-mail.”
Brad set his fork down on his cafeteria tray. He was skeptical. “Lilly? The girl who was at Pizza Hut?”
“Yeah, dude, she has this, I don’t know, this X factor. Like this spark or vivaciousness.”
“Vivaciousness, huh?”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “And she would hate that word. She likes abbrev—never mind. You just have to meet her.”
“I’m not sure you guys would look right together.”
“How so?”
“Think about it. She dresses like a model for J.Crew, like she owns a boat. You dress like you are the crew. Like you work on a boat.”
“Very funny. I prefer to say that I dress like a model for Goodwill, thank you very much.”
“Well, let me know how it goes.”
“I will. How are things with Avery?”
Avery was the girl with whom Brad was in an ACR. They had dated some early in high school and by coincidence both ended up at William and Mary. Sometimes they made out late at night. Other times they stayed up late having Deep Discussions, as college freshmen like to do.
“Complicated.”
“They always are.”
I was waiting for Lilly at the coffee shop, wearing khaki shorts that I had made by cutting off a pair of normal khaki pants, paired with a vintage T-shirt from a city council campaign that took place in the early nineties. I had been using my artificial leg less and less; the campus was just too big to walk on it. Crutches were easier. So that’s how I was rolling today: crutches and one leg. Lilly arrived also wearing khakis, in her case a fitted khaki skirt and a light blue button-up cardigan. It was probably cashmere, and I wished I could touch it. You know, to find out for sure.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi,” I said.
We hugged.
She ordered coffee and I got an Italian soda flavored with raspberry syrup. As we sat down, I couldn’t help but notice the way her curves pushed against her well-tailored J.Crew ensemble. In church when I was growing up, we were always taught that you couldn’t help noticing a girl’s body. If your gaze lingers, however, that’s when the noticing has turned into the sin of lust. So whenever you notice a girl’s body, you are supposed to “bounce” your eyes and look at something else. But the only thing I noticed was that my eyes kept bouncing back.
We started talking, diving into a three-hour conversation of topics both deep and meaningful, the sort of discussion you hear a lot of on a college campus. Our coffee dates became a weekly event for the next month and a half. My instincts said things were going well. Whi
ch I should have taken as a sign that they weren’t.
Chapter 27
It was always tough to tear my friend Kyle away from his studying to do things other people would consider important, like, for example, eating. But tonight, we’d successfully extracted him from his books, and he, Brad, and I were sitting in the cafeteria ingesting calories and swapping stories about high school relationships. I told them a little about Francesca and Evelyn.
“So what did they say?” Kyle asked.
“When?” I replied.
“When you told them you liked them?”
I laughed. “Yeah, right! I could never tell them I liked them! You know how much risk of rejection that is?”
“Dude,” said Kyle, brushing blond curls off his forehead. “You’re telling me you’ve never had a DTR?”
“A D-T-what?”
“A ‘define the relationship’ talk. Where you tell a girl you like her. You talk about whether you two want to be together. That kind of stuff.”
“Um, nope.”
“Did you kiss either of them?”
“No, of course not. I’ve never kissed anyone.”
“Yeah, that’s probably why you’ve never had a girlfriend. Brad, back me up here.”
“I’m with Kyle,” said Brad, leaning forward. “If you never tell a girl you like her or make out with her, I mean, how’s she going to know?”
I stroked my chin. “But what if she doesn’t like me?”
“It happens,” said Kyle. “That’s life. But if you don’t have a DTR, you’re never going to know if she likes you, too.”
“I guess so.”
“I know so,” said Kyle.
“How long have you been having those coffee dates with Lilly?” asked Brad.
“I don’t know. Maybe six weeks,” I said.
“And no DTR?” asked Kyle.
“No. Of course not,” I said.
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