“You seem weird,” she said. Her half-eaten chicken Caesar salad sat before her, oh, so ever close to those breasts.
He fumbled a response that could have passed for the mumblings of a retarded person. She smiled at him, one jagged tooth protruding over the others in the upper corner of her mouth, her black hair hanging straight behind her like a curtain. At school she wore her hair up like all the other girls. Different hair presentation meant something, at least according to websites Tyler had read. It could mean the girl thought he was special enough to do something different; it could mean the girl was hoping for a special evening; or it could mean jack special shit.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For … ?”
Retarded mumblings again. Every time he tried to respond, his eyes ventured down to those breasts and an alarm went off in his brain: LOOK AT HER FACE, AT HER FACE! But that shouting command only fumbled up his words even more.
“How’s your cheeseburger?” she asked.
“Good,” he said without the slightest mumble.
She glanced around; her smile faded. Cheerful Charlie’s Diner was fairly well-packed with the late-evening crowd. The diner was a 1950s throwback with plush red seats and booths, vintage signs (a Coca Cola advertisement featuring a green-haired elf-type person with huge, hungry eyes and a Coke bottle top for a hat always gave Tyler the creeps every time he ate here), and a giant juke-box that didn’t play music but lit up and flashed sometimes like a strobe light. The oldies music came from ceiling speakers. Tyler didn’t know any of the songs and, it seemed, neither did Sasha.
There was no diner in Stone Creek, but Charlie’s was only a few miles out on Route 51. The place was open 24 hours and Charlie, the Charlie of the restaurant’s name, was a round-bellied guy who often played Santa at the Newburgh Mall in December, and who didn’t harass teenagers the way the staff and owners at many restaurants did, especially after dark.
This place was a typical stop for kids from school. Tyler thought he recognized some kids in the back, but they were too busy shooting spitballs at each other to offer Tyler a frontal view. Tyler had known that other kids might be here, of course, and had weighed the potential awkwardness of some kids mocking him with the comfort Sasha might feel at going to a familiar place. He hadn’t read that advice on any website; he had reasoned that one out himself. The websites had suggested fancy dining; fine dining, they called it. Fine dinning, they asserted, was the easiest way to get a woman’s clothes off. Aside from getting her drunk or drugging her, of course.
So,” she said when her gaze returned to the table. “That movie kind of sucked.”
Tyler had taken her to a movie first in hopes that he could build his courage during the flick and then really put on the moves over dinner. The movie was a stupid horror flick about a girl trapped in a basement with a monster that resembled a toad. Tyler enjoyed when the girl stripped to her underwear before getting inside a sleeping bag with her equally hot, and equally near-naked, friend: did girls really do stuff like that? Sasha watched the movie with her body leaned away from him for most of the film, and didn’t want any popcorn, which left Tyler eating an entire bucket. The butter he had plopped on top of the popcorn had tasted so good but now, as it mingled with the ground beef from his burger, he felt the weight of it like a brick sinking into his bowels.
When the toad-thing leaped out of the basement’s darkest corner with its huge mouth full of teeth and its scream echoing in the theater like an explosion, Sasha jumped in her seat and grabbed his arm. When the monster bit off the girl’s foot (gallons of blood squirting all over the girl and the monster), Sasha screamed and squeezed his arm, a genuine squeeze. Tyler smiled and stole another glance at those breasts.
“Yeah,” he said. What could he say? You ever strip to your underwear and climb into a sleeping bag with another girl?
Sasha’s cellphone was out and she was texting. She yawned. Though her salad was mostly uneaten, Sasha was obviously done with dinner and if he didn’t say something clever or somehow get her interested in him again this date was over.
She snapped her phone shut and stared straight at him as if she hadn’t noticed him before. Her breasts—LOOK AT HER FACE!—jiggled when she placed her elbows on the table on either side of her salad and rested her chin on her folded hands. This pushed her breasts together and made them even larger.
“I don’t have to be home for an hour,” she said.
“Oh.”
She smiled and her snaggletooth incisor seemed larger than before. Someone who has such a physical imperfection, even a slight one, is good at concealing it. Paul hid his braces for three years in middle school by never fully smiling at anyone. Tyler had been one of the only people who knew for sure that Paul had braces. That meant Sasha was smiling larger now, which was good. Or it meant her tooth was growing.
The waitress, dressed in a blue apron with a cartoon fat man over her chest, one pudgy thumb up, asked if she could take their plates and they both nodded. Plates in hand, the waitress inquired about dessert. Sasha asked for the check.
She turned back to Tyler. “I’m glad you asked me out.”
“Me too,” he said.
“You’re a sweet guy.”
A sweet guy who has masturbated to thoughts of you for almost nine months, he thought and immediately scolded himself for being so perverted. If she sensed his longing, his desperation, she’d end the date right now.
The websites stressed that women wanted “action” as much as men did, but women were always turned off by desperation. If a guy wants a woman too badly, the woman will often turn him down. Women want to know there’s interest, but they also want a challenge. A website also recommended jerking off before the date to help calm anxiety. Tyler found his favorite porn site and started but his father kept walking back and forth outside his room so he stopped. If Sasha went down on him, if that was even a possibility, it wouldn’t take long to finish.
“There’s a place near my house where we can hang for a bit, if you want. Then you can drop me off.”
Tyler nodded because he couldn’t swallow the lump in his throat to speak. He paid the bill, left five bucks on the table, and let Sasha give him directions to their next stop.
Sasha lived in a mobile home that had been converted into a somewhat normal-looking two-story house with a concrete front porch and an extension off the back, which served as a game room and her mother’s bedroom. Two large perfectly pruned bushes stood guard on either side of the porch. A light was on upstairs and another, a red one, flickered in a downstairs window, probably from a TV.
“Nice,” Tyler said and hoped he didn’t sound surprised or sarcastic.
“Nice bushes, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
The house was one among hundreds in the Hidden Hills community, a name contradicting the numerous hills and valleys that comprised the individual properties of the mobile homes. The kids at school called this place Trailer Trash Town, the homes Trashy Trailers. Even the students who lived here, and there were more Tyler suspected than those who admitted it, used the term. Better to acknowledge the shitty choices your parents made than to delude yourself into thinking you were normal.
“Keep going,” Sasha said. “I don’t want my mother to see us.”