Chapter 11

Like cancer, war, and acne, the best way to avoid the pain of rejection is to take steps to stop it before it starts. That’s what I was thinking about on the last day of my junior year of high school. Francesca and I had lockers on opposite ends of the same first-floor hallway. After the last exam period was finished, I could see that she was cleaning out her locker, getting ready to go home for the summer—taking down photos and Post-it notes from her BFFs, all that. This was it. My last chance.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“Good times in geometry, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“No more geometry now, though.”

“No, I guess not.”

I took a deep breath and then unleashed the line that I had been rehearsing all morning.

“So… we should hang out sometime.”

Boom. I want to pause here and acknowledge how that line may have blown your mind with its sheer awesomeness. If you need to take a break before you keep reading, I’ll understand.

 

 

Okay. Hopefully that was a long enough break.

We should hang out sometime is so perfect because it’s nearly impossible to say no to. That’s how I first thought of it: I was looking for a way to ask out Francesca without any possibility of rejection.

Let me explain why it’s rejection-proof. First of all, it’s a statement, not a question. If you ask a girl a yes-or-no question like Do you want to hang out sometime?, you are opening the door to rejection. But by making a statement instead of posing a question, you are just sharing an opinion. And any well-mannered person knows it’s rude to disagree with someone else’s opinion to his or her face. For example, let’s say you walk up to a girl and say, I really like Tuesdays. What’s she going to say? No, I don’t think so? Of course not. She has to acknowledge that you’ve shared an opinion. Oh… yeah.

The second reason this line is so chock-full of win is that it’s general rather than specific. If you say, We should hang out next Thursday at seven o’clock, all she has to do is say, Oh, sorry, that’s when my favorite Bravo reality show, Next Top Singing Chef Model, comes on. But by using the word “sometime,” you are setting such a vague and general parameter that her only way out of it is to claim she’s already booked for every hour of the rest of her life, which would obviously be a lie. And if she’s a liar, she’s not good enough for you anyway, is she?

Finally, the line sounds casual, maybe even platonic. You’re not asking her to dinner and a movie or a walk on the beach at sunset or some other activity with a blinking neon DATE! sign on it. You just want to hang out, like, you know, friends. And if you’re just trying to be friends, it would be impolite to say no.

So I threw down the line We should hang out sometime. And Francesca was like, “Yeah, totally.”

“Okay, cool,” I said. “I’ll give you a call.”

So that’s what I did, just called her out of nowhere a week later. How’d I get her number? I looked up her parents in the phone book. Totally not weird.

“Hey, it’s Josh Sundquist. Remember me?” In high school, I always opened my calls to girls this way. Just to make sure.

“Um, yeah, of course.”

“So when are we going to hang out?”

“Well… whenever,” she said in a surprisingly agreeable tone.

“How about tomorrow?”

“All right.”

“You ever played golf at the par-three course in Bridgewater?”

“No.”

“You know about it?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Well, it’s awesome.”

“Okay.”

“So you want to go there?”

“Sure.”

I added, to clarify, “With me?”

“Sure.”

The next day, I washed the outside and vacuumed the inside of my seventeen-year-old Camry. I got one of those cardboard Christmas tree things to hang from my rearview mirror, too. New-car scent. Which, as it turned out, smelled disgusting.

I will never, ever forget how Francesca looked when she was walking down the stairs at her house. I had just rung the bell, and I could see through the window in the front door as she appeared at the top of the staircase. She was wearing sky-blue nylon surfer-girl shorts with a white spaghetti-strap top. The straps on the shirt crossed diagonally in the front, forming an X beneath her neck. Her short brown hair bounced with each step as she descended. She took my breath away. Literally. And in the instinctive human response to not being able to breathe, I started panicking. Our date was going to be a disaster of awkward silences and nervous stuttering. There was just no way I could talk to her. Not without hyperventilating, at least.

Just as she opened the door and stepped onto the porch, I thought of a lifesaving idea.

“Hi,” she said, smiling.

“Hey,” I said. “So I was… uh… wondering.”

She raised her eyebrows while I composed my words.

“Do you have any, you know, like, awesome music we could listen to in the car?”

Boo-ya! Such a good idea, right? If there were any awkward pauses on the car ride, I could just drum my fingers on the steering wheel and it would seem like I was entranced by her music instead of running low on preprepared conversation topics.

See, when it comes to girls, I’ve always believed in being prepared. You can’t leave something as important as conversation up to chance. Fact: The first time I ever called a girl, at age thirteen, I wrote a page-long list of possible conversational questions before dialing her number from the phone book. I took notes on her answers. I intended to refer back to them when we started dating once I was sixteen. As it turned out, by that time she had a boyfriend. But I still had the notes.

So anyway, I asked Francesca for a CD. She was like, “Sure, hold on.” She returned with an Ani DiFranco CD.

“She’s my favorite.”

That was Francesca speaking, not me. Because I had never heard of Ani DiFranco. Ani DiFranco’s songs, as it turns out, are best described as guitar picking played as background music while Ani, an angry, dreadlocked feminist lesbian, spouts diatribes against men. The music created that perfect mood of politically charged man-hating that I always go for on a first date. Ladies, if you’re looking to start a date off right, you can’t go wrong with Ani.

“What do you think?” asked Francesca of the music.

“Oh yeah,” I said neutrally. “Really… interesting.”

Par-three golf on a municipal golf course is an ideal first date. First of all, it’s free. That’s key when you’re sixteen years old and your primary source of income is your allowance, which has never been adjusted for inflation.

Things were going well for Francesca and me—I made some jokes, she laughed at at least one of them, and most importantly, there were zero awkward pauses—until the sixth hole.

That’s when disaster struck.