30 First Dates (3 page)

*  *  *

"So what are you going to do now?"

She glanced over at him. They'd already run six of their nine miles, but Ben wasn't the slightest bit winded. She supposed she shouldn't be surprised. He'd somehow found time, in the middle of finishing his dissertation, to train for and run the Seattle Marathon in November. Still, she was a little jealous.

"I don't know," she said between breaths. "I might try to get out of town for a while. School's gonna be out in, what, a month and a half?" She took in a deep pull of air. "Maybe I'll book a one-way ticket somewhere."

He raised an eyebrow. "Well, that sounds all right. Maybe I'll go with you. But what I meant was what are you going to do
right
now? Are you going to tell Mark?"

She concentrated on the sound of their running shoes on the sidewalk for several yards. Her two soft thumps to every one of Ben's solid thuds.

"I really don't know. I feel like I'd be being disloyal either way. I've been friends with Hil forever, but I'm friends with Mark now, too. He needs to know what he's getting into." She paused, her eyes narrowed. "Although I do think he already has a pretty good idea."

She looked over at Ben, anxious for a male perspective, but he didn't answer.

"She must be damn good in bed," he finally said. "I don't know why else on earth somebody would want to marry her."

Erin grimaced. "That's disgusting on so many levels. Not to mention so not helpful."

"I'm kidding, E." He was quiet for a few steps. "She probably just lies there like a mannequin, waiting for him to worship her."

Erin reached over and punched his arm as they turned off their old street and headed back toward the school, a path so familiar she could run it with her eyes closed. As they paused at the corner and waited for a minivan to pass, she shot him a disgusted look.

He laughed and lifted both hands in mock surrender. "Kidding, kidding." His feet hit the pavement again as the van made a left turn. "God knows this thing needs a little levity."

"You got that right."
Thud. Thump thump. Thud. Thump thump.
They took the next block at a quicker pace.

"I really don't know what to tell you," Ben said after several minutes. "If it were me, I would want to know. But if it were the other way around, I don't think I'd tell another guy's fiancée on him." He paused, finally a little out of breath, and Erin felt a perverse twinge of satisfaction. "I don't know all the intricacies of this woman stuff. I mean, yeah, you've been friends with her your whole life. But as far as betraying her confidence, well, she just betrayed the hell out of you."

Erin couldn't argue with that.

"I wish I could convince her to tell him herself. It's obvious she isn't ready for marriage."

"Obvious to you." He paused. "Besides, that would require you talking to her."

Erin pursed her lips. She hated situations like this, because she almost never got them right. She'd always found it easier to get along with men than with women. Even at work, she gravitated toward the few male teachers in the teachers' lounge.
I like my first idea best.
Avoid Hilary for the next month and a half, then get on a plane. She squeezed her eyes shut, ashamed of herself for entertaining the thought. A soft breeze wafted over her damp skin, and she luxuriated in the fleeting coolness.

"I think that's the solution, Ben. Tell her that either she tells him what happened or I will." She paused. "I'll tell you one thing, though. I'm
not
standing up at their wedding, watching her walk down the aisle with a mental picture of her covering up her boobs while Jeffrey zips up his pants. It's not fair to me, and it's surely not fair to Mark."

"Well, there you go," Ben said.

They covered the last two miles in silence.

*  *  *

That night, feeling more tired than usual after a run, Erin hadn't found her way out of her funk. She stayed in the shower longer than usual, taking time afterward to rub Aveda mango-mandarin lotion all over her legs and arms before slipping into her favorite nightshirt—turquoise, with tiny purple flowers. She collapsed onto her bed, staring into space for so long that when she finally snapped out of it she had to think for a second about what she'd been planning to do. She shook her head and stood up, reaching over to grab her journal from her dresser. It lay open to the page where she'd scrawled out her 30 by 30 list almost five months earlier.

"I'd better get cracking at this," she mumbled. She'd be thirty in less than fifteen months, and so far she'd scratched only one item off the list—No. 18, Bike 20 miles nonstop. And that one, she admitted, wasn't much of a reach for her. Exercise was her safety net. It came easy.

She sighed and examined the full list. It was pretty ambitious.
Should've made it when I was sober
, she thought, smiling to herself. But then, where was the fun in that?

Erin's 30 by 30:

1. See Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower

2. Learn to snow ski

3. Run a marathon

4. Take salsa lessons

5. Hold a full conversation in French

6. Read War and Peace

7. Watch every Academy Award Best Picture winner

8. Attend a protest

9. Crash a wedding

10. Throw a real cocktail party

11. Journal every day

12. See what it's like to be blonde

13. Attend the opera

14. Taste wines in Napa

15. Invest in the stock market

16. Join a nonprofit board

17. Shoot a gun

18. Bike 20 miles nonstop

19. See U2 from the front row

20. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge

21. Skydive

22. Call parents more

23. Find Ben a woman

24. Ride a motorcycle

25. Skinny-dip

26. Give vegetarianism a try

27. Stay out all night clubbing

28. Pick a doctoral program

29. Get a tattoo

30. Start a blog

She chuckled a little at No. 11:
Journal every day.
She hadn't picked up her journal since the day she'd written this list. In fact, she hardly ever picked it up. She'd started keeping a journal as a pre-teen, but then as now, she only wrote in it when she was upset. She'd often thought that if some unknown future child or grandchild or great-grandchild ever found it in an attic and read it after her demise, they'd think she was either terribly frivolous or terribly depressed, because all she'd ever chronicled was heartbreak. She shook her head and kept reading, giggling again when she reached No. 23. She'd been making fun of Ben when she'd written that one down, but secretly it was a real goal. He'd had his share of girlfriends, but none who were good enough for him.

She shook her head and skimmed the rest of her list, pausing at No. 30.
Start a blog.
Great plan. Just one little problem: she had nothing to blog about—except completing the items on her list, and that had been done before.

She lowered the journal onto her lap and sighed.
What was I thinking? It's not like I have a trust fund.
She didn't have the money to do half the things on her list. To complete every item she'd have to travel to both ends of the country
and
across the Atlantic.

"Not at all daunting, Erin," she muttered aloud. "No, not at all. Piece of cake."

She stared at the list a few seconds longer and reached into the drawer of her nightstand for a pen.
Might as well get started.
She flipped the page and began filling it with her boxy, precise handwriting:

It's happened again. Another boyfriend, another disappointment. Why do I ever expect anything different? Since I haven't written in here in ages, here's the story in a nutshell. I met Jeffrey Thraxton three months ago at Hilary's twenty-eighth birthday party. OK, first of all, who has a twenty-eighth birthday party? Only somebody who's really, really self-centered, right? Yeah, well, I'm pissed at her right now, so I'm sure that's affecting my judgment just a bit. I'll get to that. Anyway, so Jeffrey was there with a friend who works with Hil. We were at this sushi place near SMU and he was sitting next to me. I'm left-handed and he's right, so we kept bumping elbows when we were using our chopsticks. He was so bad at the chopstick thing that I attempted to show him how to use them, which wasn't easy since we were holding them with different hands. We were laughing our heads off, and he was so cute with that British accent. I'm such a sucker for a damn British accent. Anyway, so fast-forward three months. We've gone out seven or eight times and I'm thinking, "Well, maybe." We were having fun, or at least I thought we were. He was the first guy I'd met since Noah I'd actually considered going on multiple dates with, let alone sleeping with. So yeah, about that. Thank God I didn't, because earlier tonight I walked in on him with Hilary. Yes, that's right. HAVING SEX with Hilary. But again, why would I expect anything different? Hilary's been treating me like this our whole lives. I should've turned around and never looked back after the Bryan Powell thing in seventh grade. She's been doing this to me since
seventh grade
. WTF? Why do I keep putting up with her? Why do I keep putting up with men? Will I ever find anybody worth anything? Will I ever find anybody who won't completely, effing screw me over? Maybe I should just give up.

Erin read over what she'd written and laughed out loud. She'd done it again—filled an entire page with misery and angst, the two adjectives that described her love life better than any others. What was it Ben had said in the bar?
"Is this a list thing? You want to get married before you're thirty?"
She chortled again. Yeah, like that could happen. With her luck, she wouldn't even find another guy to date by then. It wasn't that far off.
How depressing.

She stared up at the ceiling and contemplated turning off her lamp, but she was too worked up to be tired. She grabbed the TV remote from her nightstand and clicked it on, flicking through channels for something that could get her mind off Hilary, off turning thirty, off men. She stopped at an old episode of
How I Met Your Mother
and watched the last ten minutes. It was the one where Ted stole the blue French horn for Robin, and Erin laughed at the sweet silliness of it, her tension starting to ebb. When the show ended, she started flipping channels again, stopping on a rerun of
The Bachelorette
.

She smiled. "Trista, my old friend," she murmured.

She watched the last thirty minutes of the episode even though it was ages old and she'd seen it before. As she watched Trista hand a rose to Ryan, her heart swelled for them, and she wished, for one tiny fraction of a second, that it was her standing in Trista's place.
If only it were that easy. If only I had twenty-five guys lined up in front of me, thinking, "Pick me! Pick me!"

Unfortunately, real life and reality TV had absolutely nothing to do with each other, Erin thought. She couldn't find one guy who could keep it in his pants long enough to make the rose ceremony.

She rolled her eyes, switched off the TV, turned off her lamp, and wished she had a remote control that could switch off her thoughts.

The Big Idea

April: fourteen months to thirty

Monday at work, the logistics of completing her list was foremost on Erin's mind. She thought about it in the morning while she was laying out plans for the day's classes; she thought about it after her lectures, while her students worked to complete their in-class work—she even thought about it while helping students with the equations in their homework assignments. A couple times her space-outs were embarrassing.

After the bell rang dismissing her fifth-period AP geometry class, two of Erin's favorite students approached her desk. One, a raven-haired, svelte Hispanic beauty who could have but didn't run in the mean girls crowd, stood behind the other, a shy, studious girl with wavy auburn hair and a wide mouth who reminded Erin of a young Julia Roberts. She smiled at them.

"What's up, Fiona?" she asked the red-haired girl. "Do you have a question about the homework?"

Fiona pushed her purple cat's eye glasses up the bridge of her long, straight nose and laughed nervously. Cristiana, the dark-haired girl, pushed a piece of paper into Fiona's hands and nodded significantly at her friend.

"Um, we um, just wanted to give this to you," Fiona said. She thrust the rumpled paper toward Erin, looking abashed. "We saw it on the bulletin board in the art hall. We thought it was stupid for it to be there, because none of us are old enough to apply, but, we thought. Um. We thought maybe—"

"We thought you'd be
perfect
," Cristiana gushed. "We could have just nominated you, but we thought maybe we should tell you about it first."

"Just think about it," Fiona said, turning around so fast she stumbled over Cristiana's foot. They left the room quickly, both giggling. Erin's brow furrowed as she stared after them.

She glanced down at the rumpled sheet of paper in her hands. It was pale yellow, with a pin hole near the top where it had been tacked onto the bulletin board, and a gray smudge ran down one side. It appeared to be an ad for a casting call, and at the top were the words,
"The Bachelorette."
Underneath, it read,
"The search is on for eligible men and women who are ready to find true love!"
Below that, in smaller letters, it read,
"Do you or someone you know have the charm, style, and personality to be our next star? If so, apply or nominate someone now!"
Erin glanced over the rest of page, which contained contact information and an abc.com web address. She continued scanning to the bottom, where she saw in tiny print the words,
"All applicants must be at least twenty-one years of age."

She shook her head slowly, not sure whether to feel flattered or insulted. She chose the former and laughed to herself before crumpling up the sheet of paper and tossing it into the trash can beside her desk. Then she rose from her chair, walked to the large whiteboard at the front of the classroom, and began to erase the examples she'd scribbled there in the past hour. While she was doing that, her sixth-hour students began to trickle in and take their seats.