Free If You're Not Yet Like Me by Edan Lepucki Page A

completely indistinct. The first time I saw him, he was wearing loose jeans and a striped polo shirt. The requisite sneakers. When a man dresses like a boy, turn and run. That sounds like something a mother would say, doesn’t it?
    The coffee shop boasts dozens of men like Zachary. They drink their coffee, they surf the internet, they work on their scripts, their cell phones waiting dumb on the table. Later, Zachary told me he went to the coffee shop occasionally, but if we’d crossed paths before, I don’t know. Like I said, he was invisible. Until he wasn’t.
    On any other day, our interaction would have ended there, but remember, I’d recently had my bathtub faucet replaced, which gave me big lovely tits, even if they were only pretend. I’d practically glided into the place; I could have been wearing a bridal gown, or a sexy Halloween costume, or liquid eyeliner. I was pretty. I was reckless. I carried the conversation further. “You’re here to get some work done?” I asked.
    He was looking for jobs. “I don’t have internet at home,” he admitted. He’d been a temp for the last eight months, he said, since moving to L.A. from up north, where he was from, and where he had also gone to college. He asked me what I did, and I said I was a freelance graphic designer. I wish it were a lie, but it isn’t.
    “I’ve been thinking about going back to school eventually,” he said.
    “Oh yeah? For what?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “Not sure yet.”
    “You’ll figure it out,” I said.
    When I got my coffee, he gestured at the table and his sad shoulder bag. “You can join me if you want.” He blushed. “Oh, but you said ‘to go,’ didn’t you?”
    I nodded. “Thanks, though.”
    The next moment, he was slipping his hand in his back pocket, pulling out a business card. “If you want to … you know … get together.” I realized he still hadn’t placed his order; he was waiting for me to respond.
    This guy, I thought, he has no idea how invisible he is. Meanwhile, I’m invincible. It’s funny how close those two words are. For a moment I imagined myself whispering into his ear: Why don’t you just follow me home, big boy? Sometimes I do this, imagine myself intimate with men I’m not attracted to. As if getting a loser laid would be a good deed on my part. And maybe it would be. I’m not conceited, I’m not a bitch. I’m a woman. I’ve slept with men because I feel sorry for them, and if any other woman tells you differently, she’s lying. You’ll do the same thing someday.
    I know what you’re going to say: “That’s enough, Joellyn.”
    And also: “Go on. Tell me more.”
    I took the business card from between his fingers and I smiled. The smile is the most meaningless of gestures, because it can convey so much, and so little. I wanted Zachary to hold out hope that I might contact him, but I also wanted that hope to be shot through with doubt, even shame, so that if I did call him, he would be humbled. Humility is the height requirement to ride this ride, so to speak—I don’t mean to be crass. The point is, I smiled as I took his card and read it. It was plain white, with his name, Zachary Haas, written in a nondescript, serif font. Black ink, of course, and certainly not embossed. Predictably, his contact information was in the lower right hand corner. I figured he must have designed it online, or at one of those business card machines at drug stores. Do they still have those?
    Before exiting the coffee shop, coffee in hand, I smiled once again. “Goodbye, Zachary Haas,” I said, and glided to the door.
    If someone had asked me right then, “Do you plan on calling that guy?” I would have said no, and laughed big, my head thrown back. But I see now that there was something else tugging at me as I walked away from Zachary that day—a different intention, an opposite feeling. I won’t call it desire.

    W hen I was a kid, I wasn’t sure what kind of woman I would become, but I had