I Suck at Girls

by Justin Halpern

  After three straight days of staring at the back of Jenny’s head, trying to figure out what I should say, I finally worked up the nerve to attempt a conversation with her. I was confident that I’d come up with a pretty solid opener.

  “Have you ever taken Flaming Hot Cheetos and dumped nacho cheese on them?”

  “Yeah. It’s good,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  I said nothing else to her for the remaining fifty-four minutes of class.

  On the walk home from school that day, I started to panic. There were two days left until the dance, and if I didn’t get a date fast I was going to be sitting at home watching movies on my own when Friday rolled around. Aaron’s move had spurred all of our other friends to take the plunge and get dates of their own and the thought of me watching Predator by myself made me ill.

  I was so preoccupied with anxiety over homecoming that it wasn’t until I walked into my house, and saw my dad holding his car keys with a big smile on his face, that I remembered that today was the day of my second driver’s test.

  “Let’s shove this test up the DMV’s ass,” he shouted. He tossed me the keys to the Oldsmobile and led me out of the house. He grabbed the newspaper on our front lawn, opened the door to the backseat, and got in.

  “Why aren’t you sitting in the front seat?” I asked.

  “I’ve always wanted to be chauffeured. Two birds, one stone,” he said, reaching out and pulling the door shut.

  I climbed into the driver’s seat, started up the big silver sedan, and began my drive to the DMV. My dad opened up his newspaper and read in silence for a few moments before flipping down the top half of the paper and catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

  “Hey, real quick. I don’t want to flood your brain with a bunch of shit, but can I give you one piece of advice?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t trust your instincts.”

  “What?”

  “Your instincts are dog shit,” he said, then went back to his newspaper.

  “You’re just gonna say something like that and then start reading the paper?!”

  “Well, it’s not really getting chauffeured if you don’t get to do something like read the paper,” he said.

  “That is a messed-up thing to say to me right before the test!” I yelled.

  He flipped the newspaper back down, revealing a quizzical expression.

  “What crawled up your ass?”

  “You did,” I said, starting to get flustered.

  “Look, calm down. It wasn’t a dig. I just mean that every time you’re uncomfortable and you get the option to sit something out, you sit it out. So all I was saying to you was: when your asshole gets tight, don’t listen to your gut, ’cause you’ve filled it with shit.”

  He flipped the newspaper up once more and we rode the rest of the way to the DMV in silence. I was seething with anger the whole way there, thinking about what my dad had said. “I don’t always sit things out. He doesn’t even know what I do. He’s only around me an hour a day,” I told myself, getting angrier by the minute.

  My father’s voice reverberated in my head for the next hour, as I left him outside, checked in at the DMV, and sat in the waiting room alone. It followed me as my name was called, I led my lab coat–wearing test administrator to my car, and my test began. The truth is, I had no answer for my dad’s accusation, and it infuriated me. With the DMV employee in the passenger seat next to me, I merged onto the freeway, but this time I was so preoccupied that I did so seamlessly. I was hell-bent on trying to find an example of when I had been confronted with something tough and not sat it out. Eventually, my thoughts led to asking Jenny to the homecoming dance. “That was something tough, and I didn’t sit that out,” I thought, as I turned onto the freeway exit and made a complete stop at the stop sign. Then I remembered that I hadn’t actually asked Jenny out yet. I’d only decided to ask her out. Deflated, I made a left and pulled back into the DMV’s parking lot. I felt like a total loser.

  “You passed. Congratulations,” the test administrator said as I put the car in park.

  At first I didn’t even hear him. Then he said it again and it sunk in. I had passed my driver’s test. I had accomplished one of my two goals. My dad was wrong. I got out of the car and slammed my door in triumph.

  “I passed my test,” I announced to my dad as I met him outside in the DMV parking lot.

  “Hot damn! Well done,” he said.

  “So take that!” I said, pointing at him.

  “Take what?” he said, his eyebrows wrinkled in confusion.

  “You didn’t think I could do it. And I did it. Because guess what? I can do a lot of things that you don’t think I can do,” I said triumphantly.

  “Uh, okay. I got no idea what in the fuck you’re talking about, but whatever floats your boat, son.”

  I felt empowered, like one of those women in a Lifetime Channel movie who stands up to her husband. Now I just had to ask Jenny to the dance.

  The next day, I strode into my public speaking class and sat in front of Jenny with a sense of purpose. There would be no more pussyfooting about; I was going to straight up ask her to the dance. I swiveled in my seat to face her.

  “Hey, uh, Jenny, do you … like where you live?”

  “Um, yeah,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said, turning back around to face forward.

  I took a deep breath and swiveled once more.

  “So, uh, I don’t know if you know the dance, or if not that’s cool too?”

  “Do I know the dance?”

  “I was thinking … I didn’t know if you had a date to the dance, or if someone asked you or not, but if they didn’t or if they did and you said no, or whatever, I was wondering if you wanted … or if I could take you to the dance tomorrow.”

  That was the best she was going to get from me. I sat back and awaited her answer.

  “Yeah, okay,” she said.

  “Awesome,” I said.

  I turned back around to find our teacher looking at me. I was so exhilarated I gave her a thumbs-up and spent the rest of the period replaying my victory in my head over and over, enjoying every minute of it.

  “Dad, I have a date for homecoming, so I’m going to need the car,” I said proudly when he got home that evening.

  “Good for you! Congratulations, son. But tough shit. My car’s not a fuck palace. I’ll give you some money to take a taxi.”

  The next night, on the way home from the dance, in the back of a taxi cab driven by a guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a meth addiction, with Snow’s “Informer” playing on the radio, I leaned in and kissed Jenny on the lips. It was my first kiss.

  Could You Please Hand Me that Bottle of Peppermint Schnapps?

  If there was anything that thousands of hours of movies had taught me, it was that prom was where awesome stuff happened. It was where virginities would be lost, scores with bullies would be settled, a hugely popular band could show up unannounced and perform, and a nerdy guy could get the prom queen. As the end of my senior year of high school approached, while some classmates focused on summer plans or leaving the state to go to college, I was hell-bent on having the most awesome prom imaginable.

  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.<
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  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.