I AM FREAKING OUT. Stuart texted again, telling me he gets off work at six p.m., so I would be heading there after school toward the end of his shift and hanging out with him for three hours at the very least. AT THE VERY LEAST.
Okay, I text him.
“What time will you be coming in?” he asks.
If I respond within five minutes, is that too eager?
What if I’m trying to do to Stuart what Maddie said I was doing to her?
But I wasn’t doing that to her. I swear to you and all the saints, Future Sam, that I was never trying to use Maddie.
I can’t tell Stuart about NPC. Who knows how he’ll react. If he freaks like Maddie, then I’d be down to no one.
Is ten minutes too long, like I’m not interested, more of a friend thing?
I go with eight minutes, because he had taken the initiative to text me first, but I realize I pretty much forced him into saying it was a date the last time we hung out. So, right in between. Statistically sound.
Oh my god, I only have one nice outfit, which I already used. My glasses are smudged. I’m wearing clogs, cutoffs, and a huge sweatshirt that says DAN & WHIT’S SURPLUS because Puppy threw up all over the clean laundry this morning and my only other option was a shirt my dad bought me as a joke that says GOT CHOCOLATE MILK?, which, of course, has a chocolate milk stain by the collar because, yes, I do “got chocolate milk,” thank you very much.
This is an outfit that says, “I am just a normal, ambitious, laid-back young woman who does not have a debilitating disease.” Right?
It is not traditionally feminine, but if Elizabeth Warren worried about what she wore, she wouldn’t have time to condemn corrupt banking practices. Oh god, he said, “See you in a bit.” Okay, I will see him in a bit. I will see him in a bit for the second date of my entire life and perhaps the last because watch me forget my own name. Watch me enter the Canoe Club and everyone I know is there, like an intervention. And the entire NPC Clubhouse (as I have taken to calling them after receiving two newsletters) is there with their wheelchairs and tropical shirts to say, Surprise! We paid your crush to pretend to like you so that you wouldn’t feel more socially alienated than you already are! But you’re one of us now! You’re a shooting star!
Maybe I should be nicer to people.
Maybe I should have worn the chocolate milk shirt.
Oh god. Screw him. I mean, it. Sorry. I meant “screw it.” Freudian slip.