I Suck at Girls (8 page)

The first and most important item on the checklist was finding the right date. I didn’t usually shoot for the stars when scouting women; normally I’d only ask a girl out if I found out she liked me. I’d hone in on the characteristic I liked—or, at least, didn’t find objectionable—about her and use it to talk myself into how great our chemistry was. It was like deciding that the Olive Garden is the greatest restaurant in the world because it always has plenty of parking. But prom was the Super Bowl of high school, and I was determined to land a date who would help make it the night I’d been dreaming about for years.

My target was Nicole D’Amina, who sat a few seats away from me in my first-period A.P. English class. She was smart, mature, and composed, but not above my friends’ brand of sophomoric humor. She had won me over on a Monday morning earlier in the year when she let out a blast of laughter after our English teacher said, “Sorry for the smell. Construction workers came in over the weekend and lined the walls with caulk.” With dark brown hair down to her shoulders, sparkly green eyes, and olive skin, she was also incredibly hot.

“She has a ridiculous ass, man. It’s crazy. It is a crazy ass,” my friend Dan said to me as we walked out of class one morning during our senior spring.

“It is. She’s super cool, too. I was thinking of asking her to prom.”

“I’m not trying to be a dick, but she’s not going to prom with you. She fucks college dudes.”

“You know that for sure?” I asked.

“Not really. I just made that up. But she
seems
like she fucks college dudes. Like, I could picture a college dude fucking her, but I can’t picture you fucking her.”

I couldn’t picture me having sex with her either. Then again, I couldn’t really picture me having sex with anyone. I had never even touched a bare boob. Since my first kiss, I’d gone on a few dates, had a couple make-out sessions, and done enough dry humping to cause a rash on my thigh. But I was ready to move forward.

“I’m just gonna ask her. If she says no, she says no. No big deal,” I persisted.

“Yeah, but if she says no, then all the girls will find out, ’cause that’s the kind of stuff they talk about. Then, when you try and ask another one of them, they’ll know they’re sloppy seconds and say no.”

I resented Dan’s pronouncement that he had “dropped a fuckin’ logic bomb” on me, but he had a point. I didn’t want to risk missing what could be the greatest night of my life by overshooting and asking someone out of my league. Within minutes, I’d scrapped my original plan to ask Nicole, and decided to ask someone I knew would say yes.

That not-so-special someone was a classmate named Samantha, who was small and thin, with dark sunken eyes that made her look like a creature out of a Tim Burton movie. She and I were usually the first people to arrive at our English class, and she often came over to my desk and asked me how I was doing and whether I needed any help with my homework. She rarely talked to anyone else, so I was pretty sure she had a crush on me.

The next day, I waited until our first-period class was over and caught up with her as she was walking out of the room.

“Hey, Samantha,” I said, following her through the doorway.

“Hey. What’s up?” she replied brightly as we strolled out into the quad.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go to the prom with me,” I said confidently.

“Uh, I…”

As her voice trailed off, she started picking up speed.

I tried to keep pace. “Did you hear what I said?” I asked between breaths.

But then her walk turned into a jog, and then into a full sprint, zigzagging through the crowd like she was returning a punt in the NFL. Within ten seconds she was fifty feet ahead of me. I sprinted after her for a while, but she kept running, and ten seconds later she faked left, then made a hard right, and was gone.

A few hours later, in sixth-period P.E., I sat in the bleachers of the football field with Dan and our friend Robbie, lacing up our running shoes for a jog, and explained what had happened.

“What in the fuck?” Robbie said.

“Yeah, she just took off running,” I said.

“Why did you chase after her like a rapist?” Dan asked.

“I just chased her. I didn’t do it like a rapist,” I snapped.

Privately, I was surprised and hurt that Samantha wasn’t the shoo-in I’d taken her for. And with only nine days till prom, I was still dateless and starting to worry. Still stinging from the rejection the next day, I tried commiserating with a classmate who, I’d heard, was the only other guy in our class who didn’t have a date, a tough, stocky Filipino guy named Angel. Before fifth period, I turned to him and said, “Girls are so picky with this prom crap, huh?”

“Maybe with your skinny ass. I got a date last week, homey. She’s from my neighborhood. My brother says she likes to fuck without rubbers,” he said proudly.

I was officially the last man standing.

“I’ll go with you,” said a quiet voice.

I turned around to see Robbie’s ex-girlfriend, Vanessa, who sat behind me. Robbie had broken up with her a few months back because, as he said, “I think each of us thought the other one was dumb.” Her offer seemed a little strange to me, and maybe she wasn’t Nicole, but she was cute and Robbie had always said, “She gets crazy.” In light of her offer, I entertained a brief fantasy in which “getting crazy” involved drinking, dancing, boob touching, and maybe even virginity taking. I smiled at Vanessa and said I’d need to talk with Robbie but would love to go to prom with her.

As we were walking to baseball practice after school, I asked Robbie if he was okay with me taking his ex.

“You can do her in the butt for all I care. I’m totally fine with it,” he said.

And so I accepted Vanessa’s gracious offer the next day in class.

“I just don’t want to go in a limo with Robbie and your friends,” she said, picking at the eraser on her pencil. “It has nothing to do with Robbie, though. You can tell him that,” she added.

I was disappointed that I couldn’t ride to prom with all my buddies and their dates, but I was going with a cute girl and optimistic that it still might be the best night of my life.

The following Friday evening, I drove the two miles to Vanessa’s house and picked her up in my mom’s 1992 Oldsmobile Achieva. I was wide-eyed with excitement. And also really sweaty, to the point that I pulled the car over right before I got to her house, unbuttoned my shirt, and toweled off my armpits with an old T-shirt. Vanessa looked fantastic. She was wearing smoky black eyeliner, and her hair looked like a thousand golden curly fries. I was wearing a black and white tuxedo I’d rented from the mall; it was two sizes too big, but I chose it because the teenage salesman told me I looked “like a straight-up pimp with a degree in pimping” when I tried it on. My dad thought I looked like “a penguin with AIDS.”

Before we took off, Vanessa’s mom asked to take a picture. “Put your arm around her,” she barked from behind her camera while the two of us posed awkwardly in their driveway. My palms were sweating from excitement, and when I removed my arm from around Vanessa’s shoulder, I saw a dark spot on her dress where my hand had been.

On the ride to the prom Vanessa was strangely silent. I fiddled with the A.C. for a while and then finally tried to break the ice.

“Everything okay?” I asked cheerfully.

“What did Robbie say when you told him you were going to prom with me?” she asked.

“He said he was fine with it,” I responded tentatively.

“That’s it? He said he was fine with it?”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say
exactly?”
she asked again, the muscles in her jaws clenching.

I recalled the butt-sex comment and gulped. “That was the only thing he said. That he was fine with it,” I repeated.

“All he said was ‘I’m fine with it?’ He must have said
something
else.”

“That’s it. That’s all he said. I swear.”

“FUCK HIM! He’s fine with it? He’s
not
fine with it! He’s a fucking lying piece of shit!”

We sat quietly in the car as she stared out the window looking like a convict being hauled off to prison. When we arrived at the glass-walled downtown San Diego hotel where our prom was being held, I parked my mom’s car in the underground lot and reached under the seat to grab the bottle of peppermint Schnapps I’d bribed a homeless man to buy for me earlier that day. I offered Vanessa the first drink and she grabbed the handle and pounded it like she was trying to forget a memory from the Vietnam War. We traded swigs in complete silence for the next five minutes until I couldn’t feel my face. Then I tucked the near-empty bottle back under my seat and we got out and started walking toward the elevator.

As the Schnapps started kicking in, I began feeling a little confrontational.

“You didn’t really want to go with me, huh?”

Vanessa turned to me with a look of disbelief.

“Are you a retard? My ex-boyfriend is in there with some other girl,” she said, starting to cry. “I need to sit down or I’m gonna puke,” she added.

We wobbled across the dirty red carpet through the hotel lobby, decorated with tacky brass lamps, green polyester chairs, and a few women I assumed were prostitutes. As we walked past them, one raised her hand to her nostril, covered it with her thumb, and blew a snot rocket onto the ground by her feet.

We pushed through two double doors at the far end of the lobby and entered a huge dark ballroom that contained three hundred or so of our classmates swaying to the chorus of “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men. Our class had voted for a Rastafarian prom theme, so the room was strewn with pictures of Bob Marley and stickers that said “One Love,” most of which had been defaced so that “one” was crossed out and “Butt” was written in its place.

Vanessa and I sat on the opposite side of the room from the dance floor, near a spread of stale chips and crackers, curdled dips, and cheese cubes from Safeway. That was where we remained for the rest of the night, mostly in silence, watching our classmates laughing, dancing, and chatting it up while Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” and “Return of the Mack” played on continuous loop. The scowl on Vanessa’s face made sure none of my friends came near us, which, I’m pretty sure, was her goal. Nicole passed us a few times on the way to the bathroom, and though I wanted to say something to her, all I could muster was a smile. The dream of a dancing, boob-touching, bully-punching, virginity-losing prom was now dead, and there was no other way to spin it. I was disappointed and felt stupid for letting myself get so excited about one dumb night and for thinking it might be any different than the rest of high school. I slumped down in my chair and shoved a handful of nacho cheese Doritos into my mouth.

By the time the DJ announced the next song would be the last, most people had been sweating through their tuxedos and dresses for hours, and the whole place smelled like a bathroom stall in a public library. As Dave Matthews’s “Crash” began to play, all my classmates grabbed their partners and made their way to the dance floor—but one look from Vanessa told me I should follow her to the nearest exit and take her home.

“I’m drunk,” she hiccupped after a few minutes of driving in silence. “I’m sorry I called you a retard. I hope I didn’t ruin your night,” she added. When we arrived at her house, she got out of my mom’s car and walked up her steps without looking back.

As I sat there in the car watching her front door close behind her, I took a deep breath. It was ten
P.M
. and my senior prom was the exact opposite of everything I’d hoped. Even in the worst-case scenarios I’d dreamt up, it had all gone wrong because I’d punched out somebody I hated and gotten dragged away by the cops. This was a total letdown.

I couldn’t let the night end this way. I decided to turn my car around and head back toward the San Diego harbor, where the school-sanctioned, casino-themed after-party was being held at a restaurant called the Bali Hai.

When I got there, my sophomore history teacher, Mr. Bartess, was standing at the door with a clipboard. He glanced at me, scanned the clipboard, and shook his head.

“I have you marked as being here already. I’m sorry, no ins and outs. It says so on your ticket. We can’t have people leaving to go do cocaine or something and then coming back in here, on cocaine,” he said.

“But I haven’t been here. And I don’t do cocaine.”

“Listen, you might be right, but that also sounds like something someone who left the after-prom to do cocaine would say. That’s why we have no ins and outs, so I don’t have to be the judge.”

I didn’t have the energy to keep arguing. The muffled sounds of music and laughter inside the Bali Hai drifted away as I walked along the boardwalk, which hovered just ten feet above the glassy ocean surface, back toward the lot where I’d parked. It was pitch-black out, save for the lights of the skyline glowing across the bay.

As I neared my parking spot, I noticed someone about twenty feet away, struggling to heave a large rock into the water below. When I looked closer, I realized who it was: Michael, the toughest kid on my Little League team, my partner in the greatest homeless man’s porn heist our little suburb had ever seen, and the most fearless person I had ever known. I hadn’t stayed in touch with Michael since those days; all I knew was that he’d been expelled from our high school in tenth grade after he’d gotten into an argument with a classmate, then grabbed the kid’s bicycle, rode it two miles down to the cliffs above the Pacific, and hurled it into the sea.

“Hey,” I yelled, walking toward him.

“Fuck you! I’m allowed to throw rocks, dickhead,” he hollered back.

“No, it’s Justin Halpern,” I said.

“I know.”

He set the large rock down onto the concrete and walked toward me. He was wearing a wife-beater and slacks, and had a collared shirt tied around his head like a bandana. His body had leaned out since our Little League days, but his face had hardened, and he looked as intimidating as ever.

“Is there still a magician in there?” he asked, pointing at the Bali Hai.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t get in. They said I’d already shown up and wouldn’t let me back in.”