Free I Suck at Girls by Justin Halpern Page A

with her a few months back because, as he said, “I think each of us thought the other one was dumb.” Her offer seemed a little strange to me, and maybe she wasn’t Nicole, but she was cute and Robbie had always said, “She gets crazy.” In light of her offer, I entertained a brief fantasy in which “getting crazy” involved drinking, dancing, boob touching, and maybe even virginity taking. I smiled at Vanessa and said I’d need to talk with Robbie but would love to go to prom with her.
    As we were walking to baseball practice after school, I asked Robbie if he was okay with me taking his ex.
    “You can do her in the butt for all I care. I’m totally fine with it,” he said.
    And so I accepted Vanessa’s gracious offer the next day in class.
    “I just don’t want to go in a limo with Robbie and your friends,” she said, picking at the eraser on her pencil. “It has nothing to do with Robbie, though. You can tell him that,” she added.
    I was disappointed that I couldn’t ride to prom with all my buddies and their dates, but I was going with a cute girl and optimistic that it still might be the best night of my life.
    The following Friday evening, I drove the two miles to Vanessa’s house and picked her up in my mom’s 1992 Oldsmobile Achieva. I was wide-eyed with excitement. And also really sweaty, to the point that I pulled the car over right before I got to her house, unbuttoned my shirt, and toweled off my armpits with an old T-shirt. Vanessa looked fantastic. She was wearing smoky black eyeliner, and her hair looked like a thousand golden curly fries. I was wearing a black and white tuxedo I’d rented from the mall; it was two sizes too big, but I chose it because the teenage salesman told me I looked “like a straight-up pimp with a degree in pimping” when I tried it on. My dad thought I looked like “a penguin with AIDS.”
    Before we took off, Vanessa’s mom asked to take a picture. “Put your arm around her,” she barked from behind her camera while the two of us posed awkwardly in their driveway. My palms were sweating from excitement, and when I removed my arm from around Vanessa’s shoulder, I saw a dark spot on her dress where my hand had been.
    On the ride to the prom Vanessa was strangely silent. I fiddled with the A.C. for a while and then finally tried to break the ice.
    “Everything okay?” I asked cheerfully.
    “What did Robbie say when you told him you were going to prom with me?” she asked.
    “He said he was fine with it,” I responded tentatively.
    “That’s it? He said he was fine with it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did he say exactly?” she asked again, the muscles in her jaws clenching.
    I recalled the butt-sex comment and gulped. “That was the only thing he said. That he was fine with it,” I repeated.
    “All he said was ‘I’m fine with it?’ He must have said something else.”
    “That’s it. That’s all he said. I swear.”
    “FUCK HIM! He’s fine with it? He’s not fine with it! He’s a fucking lying piece of shit!”
    We sat quietly in the car as she stared out the window looking like a convict being hauled off to prison. When we arrived at the glass-walled downtown San Diego hotel where our prom was being held, I parked my mom’s car in the underground lot and reached under the seat to grab the bottle of peppermint Schnapps I’d bribed a homeless man to buy for me earlier that day. I offered Vanessa the first drink and she grabbed the handle and pounded it like she was trying to forget a memory from the Vietnam War. We traded swigs in complete silence for the next five minutes until I couldn’t feel my face. Then I tucked the near-empty bottle back under my seat and we got out and started walking toward the elevator.
    As the Schnapps started kicking in, I began feeling a little confrontational.
    “You didn’t really want to go with me, huh?”
    Vanessa turned to me with a look of disbelief.
    “Are you a retard? My ex-boyfriend is in there