Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies

by Laura Stampler

  She doesn’t let me answer the rhetorical question, and kicks me out of her office to take a call.

  What am I supposed to do?

  Since I know Kristina is in the middle of a Skinny B’s shift, and since I suspect she’ll be ever-so-slightly pissed that I never got around to returning her calls over the weekend between the IDs and the going out and the subsequent hangover, I turn to the closest thing to a real confidante that I have here.

  I call Ben from the open kitchen during an emergency Diet Coke break. He barely lets me finish asking if he’ll please, please, please set me up on a date by tomorrow before he says a resolute “no.”

  “Why not? Are you worried I’d embarrass you or something in front of your lacrosse bros?”

  “It’s not that.” His voice trails off.

  “Then what is it?” My stomach is in knots. “I need you.”

  Silence.

  “What about that pretentious guy? Why don’t you ask him?”

  Carter.

  “He’s not pretentious.” I bristle. “Besides, I don’t want to go on a bad date with him.”

  “Wait, it has to be a bad date?”

  Ugh! I wasn’t going to say that. Now he’ll never set me up with one of his friends.

  Maybe I should just go back to Union Square and find that cult guy. I’m sure that would be a disaster.

  But Ben surprises me. “I think I know someone who would be perfect. Give me a little time to see if he’s free.”

  An hour later I get the following text.

  Ben:

  1:30 tomorrow. Meet by the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. Get ready to meet the most hypocritical guy at Saint Agnes.

  23

  IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR a horrible date.

  The colors in Central Park pop so vividly that if I were to post a #nofilter photo of it, people would comment that I was lying. The grass is never really that green and the sky is never really that blue.

  But this is real life. And as I approach the bronze Alice in Wonderland statue, I go over different ways I can torpedo this date in case it’s going well. God forbid.

  I finally call Kristina on my way from the office to the park, knowing that she’s in between swim and her Skinny B’s shift.

  Luckily she doesn’t seem too pissed at me for being MIA over the weekend. Since we aren’t FaceTiming, I can’t see any of her tell signs of lying, so I’m just assuming that she’s telling me the truth.

  “I don’t think I’m a good source of advice on this one, Harper. Usually I aim to have good dates. What do you know about the guy?”

  “Basically nothing. Dog Walker”—which is how I refer to Ben with Kristina—“only sent me his yearbook picture. He said that he knew what he was doing but wanted to keep the mystery alive. I just know his name is Anthony.”

  “If things aren’t going sour, you can always bring up a no-no first date topic.”

  “Like?”

  “Ask about his ex-girlfriends?”

  Children are running around the sculpture, dripping ice cream from a nearby stand, and climbing all over Alice, the White Rabbit, and, my personal favorite, the Mad Hatter. As I approach, however, I make out my date looking down at his smartphone screen, leaning against a metallic mushroom.

  Poor guy has no idea what he’s signed himself up for. He looks normal and totally inoffensive from here. He isn’t even wearing a Saint Agnes–related athletics shirt, which, after hanging out with Ben and seeing his friends on Instagram, I worried was the unofficial summer uniform of every guy who goes there. He’s wearing a dark blue polo shirt and is actually pretty well dressed, even if he is preppy. I really hope Ben knows what he’s doing in blindly setting me up on a bad date.

  “Hey,” I say, careful not to startle him on his phone. “You must be Ben’s friend, Anthony.”

  He looks up.

  “You’re Harper?” he asks. “Sweet. I was worried you were going to be ugly. Since Ben said you were so desperate for a date and all.”

  “Ben said what?”

  “But you’re hot!”

  “Um, thanks?”

  This is not off to a great start.

  Instead of going directly into bad-date mode, I ask him if he wants to grab an ice cream since it’s so hot.

  “Nah, I can’t,” he replies. “I’m a freegan.”

  “Well, the Popsicles shouldn’t have dairy.”

  “No,” he says. “I said freegan not vegan. I don’t believe in buying stuff. Ever. My money isn’t going to the capitalist machine.”

  Ben, you freaking genius. This I can work with.

  I start asking Anthony questions immediately, both because it’s my job and also because I’m curious as hell. The freegan scavenges for things like food (that his parents don’t pay for) and other necessities.

  His new edition iPhone?

  “Found it in a bathroom.”

  I think that’s called stealing, but I let it go. For now.

  “And, no offense, but aren’t you wearing a Burberry shirt?” He definitely is. I can see the check print, familiar from shirts in Aunt Vee’s closet, lining the inside of his collar. “Isn’t that really expensive and against your code of ethics?”

  “It would be if my mom hadn’t bought it for me. It’s okay because I never touched the money, so I’m clean.”

  I might need to Wikipedia freeganism later, but I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to work.

  “If you want to treat me to ice cream though,” he adds, “then that’s cool.”

  Yeah, this is definitely less ideological opposition to corporate America and more opportunistic cheapskatism.

  I already have enough material for a blog post, but I remember what McKayla said about pushing the limits. Turning a neutral date to bad, and a bad date to atrocious. As obnoxious as he is, I need to up the stakes.

  I have a plan.

  “I would get us both ice creams, but I don’t have any cash on me,” I lie, “and I doubt the little cart accepts Visa. I am really hungry though.” (Another lie. I grabbed leftover sushi in the open kitchen before I left.)

  “What would you do for food right now if I weren’t here?” I ask.

  He looks over at a little kid dropping his SpongeBob SquarePants Popsicle on the ground. The child picks it up and then, good citizen that he is, throws it in the garbage.

  Freegan raises an eyebrow.

  No!

  I ask, “Is there another option?”

  NO, FORAGING FOR ROOTS DOES NOT COUNT AS A LUNCH DATE

  I’d never met a salad bar I didn’t like. Until I did.

  When it comes to the early stages of romance, a lunch date is generally considered a safe bet. It’s a step up from a casual coffee but doesn’t have the same pressure as going out to dinner. Not to mention the fact that if a guy wants to hang out in daylight hours, he probably wants to get to know you intellectually rather than just biblically.

  This week, however, I found myself on an outing so bizarre, so entirely unappetizing, that not only has it turned me off lunch dates, but it also might have turned me off lunch as a whole.

  It all began in Central Park.

  Might we be having a picnic? I wondered, anticipating a spread of seedless grapes, French bread, and hard cheeses.

  If only.

  It turns out that my date, a setup through a soon-to-be-disowned friend, was a freegan. That means he has turned his back on consumerism and has decided to scavenge for food and clothes rather than buy them.

  He eats out of garbage cans, is what I’m trying to say. Not because he’s impoverished, which would be tragic and not the stuff that dating posts are made of. But because reaching his arm—decorated by a Rolex his mom bought for him—into a bag of fly-infested refuse so as not to have to pay for his own ice cream is his thing.

  After I made it clear that I wouldn’t be participating in Dumpster diving, the freegan offered our alternative: “We’re going foraging!”

  Now, the
only foraging that I’ve ever participated in involved foraging through Netflix to find a good show to binge watch. My guess that that wasn’t what he had in mind turned out to be right.

  “No, we’re foraging in the park for food,” he clarified. “It’s like apple picking, but with roots!”

  Let me tell you, apple picking it is not. Because apple picking is a carefree, minimally difficult activity that always yields sweet, delicious rewards that are lethal only if you’ve pissed off the wrong Disney villain. Foraging is the polar opposite.

  Crouched in the brambles of Central Park, I ruined a pair of shorts, got dirt under my nails, and succumbed to tasting a bitter root that my date then momentarily worried he’d misidentified as nonpoisonous.

  The Folly Forager spent a lot of the time whining about how the really good edible weeds only come out at the end of the summer. Pokeweed, jumpseed, and Japanese knotweed will grow in the shadows, hiding from the sweltering August heat. I doubt they taste any better.

  While dandelions make for great flower necklaces, they leave something to be desired in the raw snack department.

  In the future, I think I’ll stick with the more traditional salad bar.

  Don’t Carpe that Effing Freegan!

  Harper

  24

  Ben:

  U aren’t mad at me r u?

  Harper:

  No! Why?

  Ben:

  U said u were set up by a soon-to-be-disowned friend.

  Harper:

  That was just for dramatic flair. Creative liberties and whatnot. I love you for that setup.

  Harper:

  I mean, not love you love you

  Why am I so awkward? I try to refocus the conversation with a triple text.

  Harper:

  It was just a good bad date. Don’t think we’ll be double-dating w you and Delilah tho.

  At the end of the date, it was the Folly Forager who ended up rejecting me, saying we had philosophical differences that couldn’t be overlooked: Not only did I refuse to eat a suspicious-looking mushroom for fear of inadvertent poisoning but I bought a water bottle from a hot-dog vendor to wash down the roots’ bitter taste. (“I thought you had no money,” he said, catching me in my lie from before. “That’s so wasteful when you could have gone to a water fountain. But if you were going to buy a Dasani anyway, the polite thing would have been to offer to get me one too.”)

  Kristina:

  You tore him apart.

  Harper:

  I know! It went exactly as planned.

  Kristina:

  You don’t think it was a little harsh?

  Harper:

  Um . . . no.

  Actually, I think this conversation is kind of harsh.

  Harper:

  Aren’t you the one always BEGGING me to mock your conquests to you?

  The only thing I see as being different this time is the fact that instead of making fun of her dates, I’m making fun of my own.

  Kristina:

  Yeah, but that’s just to me. This is to the whole world.

  Kristina’s not the only one who gets to know I’m funny anymore.

  At first I was a little worried about snarking so hard about a guy that I actually went out with. Playing it up for laughs. But when I got going, I found out that McKayla was right—it was fun. (Not to mention the fact that, on the date, the forager made it clear that he was not the “chick-lit” Shift demographic, so I think the chances of him reading the story are slim.)

  Harper:

  Whatever. I gtg.

  Kristina:

  I didn’t mean to be negative.

  Kristina:

  Srsly I’m sorry. It was good!

  I put my phone in my bag, push Kristina’s underwhelmed reaction out of my mind, lean back in my chair, and watch my story inch up the Leader Board. McKayla was right about that, too: Bad dates are clicky. Right now my blog is the seventh most popular story on the site.

  There’s only a month of the internship left, a month until McKayla decides which of us Shift Girls gets to be immortalized in the magazine, and it’s a pretty even race. We’ve all been on the Leader Board at this point, but sometimes what does and doesn’t do well seems like a roll of the dice. (“Why did no one click on my amazing artist interview, but everyone clicked on my article about how Miley Cyrus’s knee looks like Seth Rogen’s face in some pictures?” Gigi lamented.)

  But I think I have a shot. My blogs have started to get a following—“A very small following,” McKayla pointed out, but a following, nonetheless. I’m getting way more Twitter followers and some readers are even e-mailing me their dating stories.

  The person who isn’t e-mailing me is Carter.

  As the day wears on, staring at my inbox gets more depressing. No, PR person, I do not want to try “MatchBook Teen! A revolutionary dating app for the younger set!” I don’t want to meet total strangers on my phone. (Creepy much?) I want the quasi stranger I already know is a damn good kisser.

  And so I succumb to my obsession. I give in and e-mail him first.

  I could write him a novella, packed with hidden references to the things I already know he likes based on my extensive . . . let’s call it “research.” But I manage to wrestle away my bad, long-winded impulses and maybe overcorrect. I just send him one word. No capital letters. No punctuation:

  FROM: Harper_Anderson@Shift.com

  TO: carter@deviant.com

  SUBJECT: (No Subject)

  hey

  He writes almost immediately. Like he was waiting for me.

  FROM: carter@deviant.com

  TO: Harper_Anderson@Shift.com

  SUBJECT: Re: (No Subject)

  Please tell me you didn’t ditch me this weekend for the freegan. I could have provided much better story fodder.

  “What do you guys think?” I ask Gigi and Sunny. Jamie’s in her own world, Abigail’s in a health meeting, and Brie is off very pragmatically rearranging the lipsticks in Shift’s beauty closet based on shade. She’s even using a color wheel.

  “No!” Gigi says in horror. “Oh, Harper, no. You e-mailed him first?”

  “It’s fine,” Sunny assures. “Sometimes you need to be aggressive. And he also made the tactical error of responding two minutes later. You’re even.”

  The three of us huddle together to discuss my response strategy.

  FROM: Harper_Anderson@Shift.com

  TO: carter@deviant.com

  SUBJECT: Re: (No Subject)

  I don’t know if I should be offended that you didn’t like my article or intrigued as to what better fodder than foraging you possibly could have provided.

  Even though our office e-mail automatically updates every twenty seconds, I keep refreshing my inbox.

  FROM: carter@deviant.com

  TO: Harper_Anderson@Shift.com

  SUBJECT: Re: (No Subject)

  I didn’t say I didn’t like your article. It had lots of bite. You’ll learn that I like biting. But that’s why you should have come to Maverick on Saturday. It was a Paris Review editor’s birthday. As a serious writer (I think?), I thought you’d be interested in the connection for when you’re ready to move on from Teen-M-Z.

  “Paris Review?” I say longingly. He thinks that one day I could maybe write for the Paris Review? My mom has subscribed to the quarterly literary journal since forever.

  “Maybe we should have gone to Maverick after all,” Gigi says.

  “I can’t believe you two!” Sunny’s voice gets high-pitched. “You’re focusing on entirely the wrong part of his e-mail.”

  “So what should we be focusing on?” I scan Carter’s message again.

  Sunny reads the sentence slowly. “ ‘You’ll learn that I like biting’?”

  Gigi and I don’t register.

  “He’s basically saying he wants to have sex with you!” Sunny shouts, a little too loudly. Jamie looks in our direction, and Sunny lowers her voice back down to a whisper. “He definitely wants to have sex
with you.”

  I still don’t say anything, not because I still fail to register, but because each one of my synapses has exploded and now burned out. I feel comatose.

  Other than Bobby McKittrick, no one has wanted to have sex with me before. (And Bobby would have sex with literally anybody.)

  “Are you sure?” Gigi asks.

  “What should I do?” The synapses are working again.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the dating expert?” Sunny says. Gigi raises her eyebrow. Just the one. I feel as if I’m half an inch away from being exposed, a contingency I probably should have come prepared to deal with. Oh God.

  “Umm, I might lose objectivity when I’m actually interested,” I say. Sunny and Gigi look skeptical. “As opposed to when I’m just, you know, fooling around.”

  Sunny sighs. “I say ignore it. But definitely let him know you’re down. Subtly. Actually”—Sunny, surprisingly strong for her size, pushes my rolling chair away from my computer and takes my place at the keypad—“I’ve got it. Just let me do it.”

  FROM: Harper_Anderson@Shift.com

  TO: carter@deviant.com

  SUBJECT: Re: (No Subject)

  Maybe we can get together with the Paris Review people this weekend. Or just with each other.

  I can’t believe that I just said that to him. Or that someone pretending to be me said to him on my behalf. Am I more nervous that he’ll say no or yes?

  Carter doesn’t make me wait for long.

  FROM: carter@deviant.com

  TO: Harper_Anderson@Shift.com

  SUBJECT: Re: (No Subject)

  No can do. I’m going to the Hamptons this weekend. Maybe when I’m back.

  “I’m going to the Hamptons this weekend, too, with some boarding school friends,” Gigi says, reading over my shoulder. Then, as an afterthought, she adds, “Care to join?”

  Oh my God, Gigi is inviting me to the Hamptons! That’s one of the fanciest places where the fanciest New Yorkers go to get out of the city on hot summer weekends. There are beaches, pools, gigantic mansions . . . and me?