Chapter 26
As you may be aware, most formal dating relationships in college, in the rare cases that they actually exist, start with hooking up. If a couple hooks up enough times, and they find themselves waking up beside each other with frequency, and—here’s the major turning point—going to the dining hall for breakfast together, they may be headed toward an actual boyfriend-girlfriend-type relationship. But as I said, it’s rare for couples to pair off in this formal way on a college campus, so what you get instead are what I call Ambiguous College Relationships. In an ACR, sometimes you get drunk and make out, then don’t talk for a couple of days, then have coffee together, then don’t talk for a while, then get drunk and make out again, then wonder if you may in fact be dating this person now, or whether it is merely a “friends with benefits” situation. I lump all these relationships under the umbrella of emotional confusion that is the ACR.
Anyway, since I didn’t drink or, for that matter, hook up, I still had not even kissed a girl. I was a little old-fashioned in that I was actually trying to go on, you know, dates. The difficult thing about asking a girl on a date at college is that it’s rare to be in a one-on-one conversation with her. You’re always in a group. A table at the cafeteria. A circle standing around after class. A mass of nude streakers. My point is, it’s tough to ask a girl out, or even to say We should hang out sometime, because there are other ears listening. Not only might she reject you, she might reject you in front of an audience.
It took several months past forever to spot such a perfect moment with Lilly, this girl I’d met at a Christian event on campus. She was cute, and she never asked me how I lost my leg, which I took as a sign my disability wasn’t important to her. Finally, one night, we were both in the Pizza Hut in the University Center, and I saw her get up from her table to go to the bathroom. I got up from my own table and followed her. No, perverts, I wasn’t following her to the bathroom. I was just trying to make sure the vector of her movement and the vector of mine had an intersection at the end of the aisle. Fortunately, I’m pretty good with vectors.
“Oh hey, what’s up, Lilly!” I said, as if to say, I’m so pleasantly surprised to see you here at Pizza Hut and furthermore that our vectors happened to intersect at the end of this aisle!
She smiled. “Josh! Hi!”
“What are you up to?”
“Just eating some za.”
“Excuse me?”
“Za. It’s an abbreviation for pizza.”
“Oh… okay.”
She chuckled at her abbreviation.
“My biffil—I mean, my BFFL, best friend for life—Sadie Bickley, see her over there waving—hi, biffil!—we like to make abbreves, I mean, abbreviations—for everything. Saves a lot of time.”
“Life is short, I guess.”
“So true.”
“Might as well use every syllable to the fullest.”
She nodded. “Again, so true. What are you up to tonight?”
“Meeting up with some friends later. You?”
“Samesies.”
“Now see, there it seemed like you added a syllable.”
“But ‘samesies’ is so much more fun to say.”
“Think how much time you’ve wasted saying that extra syllable twice in the last ten seconds.”
“Jeez, I guess you’re right,” she said. “Those are seconds I am never going to get back.”
“Good thing we had this talk.”
She nodded, mock-serious. “Good thing.”
“Anyway, great to see you,” I said, swinging my hand out sideways to wind up for a slap–speed handshake.
“You, too.” She smiled as our hands collided and pulled back, the fingertips locking like yin and yang. She took a step away but I didn’t let go of her hand, as if I had just remembered something I wanted to tell her.
“Hey. We should hang out sometime.”
“Totes.”
I’m not going to lie. It all felt pretty smooth.
But I took the smoothness down a few notches by adding, “What’s your last name? I’ll look you up in the student directory and drop you an e-mail.”
Brad set his fork down on his cafeteria tray. He was skeptical. “Lilly? The girl who was at Pizza Hut?”
“Yeah, dude, she has this, I don’t know, this X factor. Like this spark or vivaciousness.”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “And she would hate that word. She likes abbrev—never mind. You just have to meet her.”
“I’m not sure you guys would look right together.”
“How so?”
“Think about it. She dresses like a model for J.Crew, like she owns a boat. You dress like you are the crew. Like you work on a boat.”
“Very funny. I prefer to say that I dress like a model for Goodwill, thank you very much.”
“Well, let me know how it goes.”
“I will. How are things with Avery?”
Avery was the girl with whom Brad was in an ACR. They had dated some early in high school and by coincidence both ended up at William and Mary. Sometimes they made out late at night. Other times they stayed up late having Deep Discussions, as college freshmen like to do.
“Complicated.”
“They always are.”
I was waiting for Lilly at the coffee shop, wearing khaki shorts that I had made by cutting off a pair of normal khaki pants, paired with a vintage T-shirt from a city council campaign that took place in the early nineties. I had been using my artificial leg less and less; the campus was just too big to walk on it. Crutches were easier. So that’s how I was rolling today: crutches and one leg. Lilly arrived also wearing khakis, in her case a fitted khaki skirt and a light blue button-up cardigan. It was probably cashmere, and I wished I could touch it. You know, to find out for sure.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi,” I said.
We hugged.
She ordered coffee and I got an Italian soda flavored with raspberry syrup. As we sat down, I couldn’t help but notice the way her curves pushed against her well-tailored J.Crew ensemble. In church when I was growing up, we were always taught that you couldn’t help noticing a girl’s body. If your gaze lingers, however, that’s when the noticing has turned into the sin of lust. So whenever you notice a girl’s body, you are supposed to “bounce” your eyes and look at something else. But the only thing I noticed was that my eyes kept bouncing back.
We started talking, diving into a three-hour conversation of topics both deep and meaningful, the sort of discussion you hear a lot of on a college campus. Our coffee dates became a weekly event for the next month and a half. My instincts said things were going well. Which I should have taken as a sign that they weren’t.