Second Chance

by Katie Kacvinsky

  It’s an empty threat but it still pisses me off. “Stay out of this, Lenny!” I say, but before I get in my car I thank her for cooking the amazingly delicious lasagna. She responds by giving me the finger.

  ***

  I pick Kari up at 7:00. She’s wearing a skirt that shows off her slim legs and shiny red heels that show off her ankles. Her skin smells like coconut lotion and her dark hair curls loosely around her shoulders.

  When we sit down at Firefly, she unbuttons her jacket to reveal a very low cut blouse, a nice view to add to my dining enjoyment. Her lips are thin but she accentuates them with red lipstick and I can’t help but wonder what Dylan’s lips would look like if she ever bothered to paint them.

  No more Dylan comparisons. Kari has curves. Kari combs her hair. Cleans her clothes. Trims her nails instead of biting them off. She’s a woman.

  We sit down in a booth across from each other. This is already strange. Dylan never sat across from me in a booth. She wanted to be right next to me, touching hands and knees and feet and arms.

  Stop it, Gray. Kari. Date. Now. Focus.

  I clear my throat and ask her how her classes are going. I’m trying to watch her eyes, but something keeps sparkling when she moves and I realize it’s glitter lotion strategically rubbed all over her chest. Great. I feel like I’m back in Phoenix.

  Kari says her classes are “oh, you know, okay,” and I tell her mine are about the same. She asks me what I’m taking this semester and I list my schedule and she lists hers. I try to swallow a yawn, but it escapes. Small talk is up there with dental cleanings as an entertaining way to pass the time. I sit back in my chair and realize this is the first dinner date I’ve been on since Dylan, unless you count Lenny, but a taco run at 2 a.m. to satisfy the munchies doesn’t really qualify as a date.

  The waitress stops and asks if we’d like to order an appetizer. There’s this awkward moment where we both gaze over our menus and go through this polite exchange of, ‘oh, I like whatever, oh, me too,’ so we can’t decide on anything.

  “We need another minute,” I tell the waitress. She walks away and I hint that the calamari sounds good, but Kari squishes her face together and points out that it’s deep fried. I say, okay, how about the spinach dip, and she says it’s too creamy. Cream based dips are high in fat, she points out, and she might be lactose intolerant. I suggest the nachos and she says they’re usually smothered in grease. And cheese. I bite my lips together and go for one more, the coconut shrimp, which I point out is baked, not fried, and zero dairy.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” she informs me.

  I close the menu and take a long drink of water. She can have the bread basket and like it. I hope there aren’t too many carbs for her to handle and I hope the oil won’t make her skin break out and I hope she’s okay with gluten. And she better not drill me on the unfair treatment of cows when I order a tenderloin steak—bloody.

  The waitress takes our order and when she leaves Kari sips her iced tea. I slam half my Diet Coke which makes me want to belch but I hold it in which really hurts. I think the worst part about first dates is feeling self-conscious about natural bodily functions. That just sucks. There is nothing more painful than feeling compelled to hold in gas.

  I stare across the table at Kari and this heavy silence falls.

  She spins a dark lock of hair around her finger and smiles at me. We settle for conversations that feel like I’m filling out a personality questionnaire. What are you majoring in? Where are you from? What kind of food do you like to eat? Have you been to this restaurant before? Really, do you come here often? Isn’t the ambiance great? Yeah, it’s really great. I prefer sitting in booths don’t you? Yeah, booths are great. Do you have any brothers or sisters? This question used to make my stomach curl, but I’ve gotten used to it. The answer is no. Always no. I’m an only child. Next question.

  But when I tell Kari I’m an only child, her mouth drops with pity.

  “I’d hate to be an only child,” she says. I just smile because when I was little, I used to pray Amanda would get kidnapped so I could live in peace. This usually happened after Amanda stole my G.I. Joe’s and I found them hanging out with her Barbies, or when we watched The Little Mermaid everyday for a year, and she made me dress as Eric for Halloween so her best friend could be Ariel and then they suckered me into a pretend wedding where I had to kiss her friend. I used to lie in bed at night and pray for a brother (even though the thought of my parents actually having sex scared me more than the thought of being abducted by aliens and used for medical experiments). I wanted brothers to rough house with. I wanted wrestling matches that would put hair on my chest. Guys I knew that grew up with brothers have these great fishing stories. They have scars from all the fights they’ve been in. I have stories of dressing up in drag when my sister convinced me to play “beauty salon” with her and her friends.

  “I’ve always wanted a sibling,” I finally say.

  “I think it would be so cool to have a twin,” Kari says. She can’t help that she’s hitting below the belt, but the date is already as fun as a formal job interview so why not throw another awkward log on the fire?

  My mind drifts to Dylan. All our moments together were so hilarious. We killed hours in restaurants because we were babbling too much to eat and laughing so hard one of us choked or snorted at least once per meal. We were too busy analyzing the people around us—writing the biography of the cook or the bus boy or our waitress—to bother talking about ourselves. It was always an escape. We would challenge each other to do the stupidest things. Try to drink soup with a fork. Use our opposite hand to eat. Write a thirty-second commercial segment advertising the restaurant. Fit as much food into our mouths as we could and try to say a comprehensible sentence. We embraced eternal immaturity.

  I shake my head at the memory. What was wrong with that relationship? Or, worse, was everything right? Maybe Dylan’s always going to come in first. Everybody else will have to settle for a distant second.

  I stare across the table at Kari and I’m completely turned off. She’s gorgeous and sweet, but I feel nervous around her, and by the time the steak comes I barely have an appetite.

  Kari starts talking about family and then she hits me with:

  “So, Gray, do you want to have kids?” I sit up straighter. This is worse than small talk. This is serious relationship talk and we’re not even through our official screening date yet.

  “Uh,” I say. I smooth the napkin on my lap and stall. I want to tell her I’m only

  nineteen years old and parenthood isn’t an impending concern of mine at the moment.

  “I want five kids,” she announces, and stares me up and down like she’s evaluating my sperm strength. “Three boys and two girls. I already have their names picked out,” she says.

  I tell her that’s great. I tell her I love kids, which I do, not that I want to procreate any time soon. Then, she informs me she wants to live in the Southwest to stay close to her parents. She thinks Yuma, Arizona has a lot of potential and would be a great community for raising a family. She likes small towns. She eyes me critically over the rim of her glass. She wants to know what I think about this.

  I think you’re scaring the hell out of me.

  “I prefer big cities,” I say.

  “I would consider a big city,” she says, “if there was a decent income coming in.” She raises a thin eyebrow. “Do you plan on playing professional baseball after college?” she asks, pretending it’s a casual question, but I know what she’s getting at. I play my get-out-of-jail-free card.

  “No,” I say.

  She frowns. “What do you want to do?”

  “Actually, I think I want to be a gym teacher,” I say. Her eyes fall, so do her shoulders, and even her chest loses some of its giddy sparkle.

  I have to contain my smile. I’m off the hook. She’s no longer interested and for the first time tonight, I’m beginning to enjoy myself. Hopefully she won’t want dessert. Too fatteni
ng.

  ***

  I drop Kari off an hour later. I’m tired from forcing too much conversation, crabby from a date that bombed and sixty-forty dollars poorer with nothing to show for it. And my steak was overcooked. Not that I’m feeling sorry for myself.

  I end up driving down Sage Street, like a magnetic force pulled my car in this direction. I slow down when I pass Dylan’s apartment and see a light through the curtains. It’s soft and welcoming and before I know it, I park along the curb. I hear music coming from inside as I walk up the cobblestone pathway to her door. I knock and she yells to come in.

  Dylan is sitting cross-legged on the floor with a mess of photos spread out around her. She’s wearing a pink tank top, gray sweatpants and bright blue, fuzzy socks that look like fur. I already feel my mood lightening, just walking into her world.

  “What’s up?” she ask as she turns down the stereo.

  I point at her socks. “How many Muppets did they have to kill to make those?” I wonder.

  She gives me one of her killer smiles and it makes me shrink back. Why can’t Kari have this effect on me? It would be so much more convenient. But if love were convenient there wouldn’t be millions of songs and movies and books obsessing over it, or therapists and doctors consoling all the people falling in and out of it.

  I walk around the edge of the room, taking in the simple, open space, and tell her I was in the neighborhood. She scoots over and makes room for me on the rug. I stare at the space next to her. What happened to my brilliant avoidance plan? That idea lasted a whole twenty-four hours. Amazing self-discipline, Gray.

  I slump down on the floor and lean against the edge of the futon. I notice her critiquing my outfit.

  “Fancy date?” she asks. I ignore her question and pick up one of the pictures hogging the floor space. It’s just a shot of a tree trunk.

  “What are all these for?” I ask, and she tells me she’s making a scrapbook for her grandma’s birthday.

  “Cat helped me get a few baby-sitting jobs so I could afford to print them out.”

  I examine the black and white photograph. At first I’m not very impressed, but as I look closer, it appears Dylan climbed the tree and took the shot from inside the branches, angled up to the sky to catch the overhanging leaves. All the knots of the bark are exposed and textured by sunlight, and it looks like old, leathery skin, wrinkled with age. It gives it this human quality. Something about the picture is tranquil. Fantastical. I want to walk inside the shot and lie underneath all the contrasts of light and dark.

  “It’s taken from a squirrel’s point of view,” she says. I ask her what she means and she tells me it was a creative challenge she gave herself. For a day she tried to capture images from a squirrel’s perspective. She climbed trees. She took pictures from the ground. She ran out in front of moving cars. The more I look at her photos the more I see what she means. She hands me one and explains how she crawled underneath a dog’s head to take a picture of the bottom of its mouth. Its droopy jowls take up most of the shot and a shiny, quizzical eye peers down at the camera lens.

  I look at her and smile. She flinches a little, like I jolted her with an electric shock.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask. She’s just staring at me, all wide-eyed and surprised.

  “That’s the first time you’ve smiled at me since I’ve been back,” she says.

  I wrinkle my eyebrows at this. “That’s not true.”

  “Believe me, I would know. I thought I’d get at least a grin from the crack I made about bull testicles.”

  I smile again and she stares at my mouth like she’s never seen my face look happy before.

  “Wow,” she says. She touches my face. The motion is so fast it takes me by surprise and before I can lean away, she lightly runs her fingers over my cheek, to the edge of my lips. Something catches in my chest. I stare back at her and my entire body heats up. I feel the heat of her fingers travel through my skin, between my bones, tugging on the tissue around my heart.

  “Sorry,” she says and drops her hand. “I just missed that.” We both sit there, quiet, the air in the room electrified. Something inside of me is shifting again and this time I can’t fight it.

  Not good. I suck in a deep breath. She looks away and clears her throat. It sounds as tight as mine feels.

  She picks up a few more photos and starts to explain them to me. I try to focus on what she’s saying, not on this feeling in my stomach, this suffocating feeling like if I don’t touch her I’ll die.

  She hands a picture to me that she says was staged. It’s taken from a gravel road with a car heading straight for her. Her camera is aimed up at the fender and tires and there are two guys in the front seat. They have these surprised looks on their faces, like they’re about to hit her. It’s perfect.

  “These are really great, Dylan.”

  “It was a fun way to spend a day,” she says. I try and imagine her wasting a single day. I don’t think she could.

  “Have you ever tried selling these?”

  “I’d feel bad charging my grandma.”

  I roll my eyes. “No, I mean in a gallery.”

  Dylan looks down at her pictures. “It’s just a hobby. Anyone can do this,” she says.

  I shake my head. “Some people go to school for years to try to learn to be half as creative as you naturally are. I’m just saying, if you’re good at something, figure out a way to make money doing it.”

  “That sounds mean.”

  I smile at her. “It’s not mean to take money from people, Dylan. It’s called a job.”

  “You can’t make a living at everything,” she says, but it sounds more like a challenge.

  “Sure you can.”

  She taps her chin with one finger. “Okay, let’s say I love riding bikes. How do I get paid to ride bikes?”

  I start counting off reasons on my fingers. “You work at a bike shop, and you eventually open up your own store. You ride professionally. You lead sight-seeing bike tours. There are lots of ways.”

  Dylan sets her hand on my arm. “Let’s say I love walking and eating ice cream at the same time—”

  I grab her hand in mine. “No, I’m not going on one of your random thought crusades. I just wanted to point out your pictures are really amazing. I’d love to see the world from your eyes for a day.”

  I let go of her fingers, but I can’t shift my eyes away from hers even though I want to, even though I can hear a siren going off in my mind. This is exactly why I avoided being alone with her. Right next to her. The energy is too strong.

  “I mostly picture everybody naked,” she says.

  “Really? I’m jealous,” I say. She smiles and I smile and my heart is jamming away in my chest.

  “I’m jealous of your world sometimes,” she admits. “Of all these people that get to be in your life everyday. Make you laugh. Date you. It makes me realize how much of you I’m missing out on.”

  “My life is rooted down,” I remind her. “You’d hate that.”

  She leans forward to collect her pictures in a pile. I ask the question that’s been gnawing at me since Dylan showed up, passed out at my front door. The question that made me pull the car over and walk into temptation. Because I need to know.

  “Dylan, of all the places to go after Europe, why did you come to Albuquerque?”

  She rests her head against the futon and stares at the wall in front of us. I drink in her profile. Her arm’s touching mine. I feel like I’m sitting too close to a fire. Like it might scorch my skin.

  “You’re here,” she says. “You’re my hang glider.”

  “I’m, what?”

  She takes a long breath and exhales slowly. Dylan hardly ever talks about herself. But she knows I deserve an explanation. “I was trying to figure out what felt like home to me. It should have been Wisconsin or my family. At least my dogs. But all I could think about was you.”

  She turns to look at me and there’s a confused look on her face, like even she
doesn’t understand it.

  “You wanted to see me more than your own family?”

  “I love my parents, but they give me such a hard time.”

  “They’re your family,” I say. “They’re supposed to give you a hard time.”

  “I guess,” Dylan says. She picks at a piece of loose thread on the rug. She tells me it’s more than that. It’s like they’re trying to change her. “Every time I go home, my mom tells me I need to figure out my life, which to her just means settling down and domesticating.”

  “Domesticating?” I ask.

  “Yeah, you know. Married, part-time cook, part-time housekeeper, mother of 2.3 kids.”

  “Got it,” I say.

  “My sister thinks I’m fashion-challenged. She wants me to cut my hair and buy new clothes and wear jeans that are tight which just give me wedgies. I like loose fitting jeans because they’re easy to bend down and take pictures in.”

  “In case you feel like being a squirrel for a day,” I point out. Her eyes light up.

  “Exactly. But they don’t get it. They don’t see me. They just see this silly daydreamer with no ambition, like I’m lost in the world trying to find myself. They don’t get that this is who I am. Just because I’m not anchored down doesn’t mean I’m lost. I really wish people could understand that.”

  I look down at her photos and think about this. “They’re probably worried when you’re gone all the time,” I say. “They care about you.”

  “I just get tired of having to explain myself every time I turn around. Especially to my own family. I feel like they should support me.” Her face falls into an adorable pout. “And all my dad wants to talk about is college and savings accounts and whether or not I have health insurance.”

  I smile widely at the frown on her face. “You mean they want you to think about real life?”

  “That’s their idea of life. It isn’t mine,” she says. “My dad never asks me about the places I go. He doesn’t ask to see my pictures. That’s real life to me. That’s what I’m proud of.”