Not My Type (8 page)

“No problem. Sorry it took me so long to figure out the problem.”

He shook his head. “I swallowed the wrong way when we scored.”

“I hate when that happens.”

He didn’t say anything, just rubbed his throat and drank some more. I didn’t know how long we were supposed to discuss his near-death experience, and since he wasn’t say anything, I thought maybe I should watch the game instead. After couple of minutes, Brent cleared his throat. “Um, would it be bad if we ended the night early? I think I might want to go home and lie down or something.” He looked chagrined, and I tried to school my face to show a socially acceptable level of disappointment, but even my liver exhaled with relief.

“That sounds like the smart thing to do,” I said.

He stood, and I followed him out to the same gate we had met at before the game. “Thanks for coming,” he said after a short but awkward silence.

“Thanks for inviting me.” And here was the moment I knew I could dread on every one of these stupid dates I went on: the good-bye. Do I shake? Offer a hug? Stiff-arm anyone who tries to kiss me?

Brent moved slowly toward a different gate. “Thanks,” he said again and then stopped and added, “I’m really glad you know the Heimlich, but that was the strangest good night hug I’ve ever gotten.” And then with a small smile and a wave, he picked up his pace and headed out.

I laughed, but the flash of humor was a little too late to save the date for me. On the plus side, he’d handed me the perfect ending line for my Tuesday column. It was definitely the strangest good night hug I’d ever given.

Dear Marian,

It’s just too delicious that you’re a librarian named Marian, first of all. Imagine me singing that song from The Music Man. How often does that happen to you, I wonder?

Anyway, that has nothing to do with the point of this note, which is to say thank you. Thanks for the dozen or so book suggestions you’ve made over the last several months for me. You’ve pointed me toward some really great novels. They got me through some tough times when I needed a little space from the rest of the world and a book was the only place I could find it.

You have excellent taste, and I’m grateful you shared it.

Sincerely,

Pepper, your most loyal patron

Chapter 6

On Sunday, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have to drag myself to church. I looked forward to it. I had five weeks down in my dad’s challenge. This could be my first opportunity to see if my notes were having an effect on anyone. Would I get a different vibe from Courtney? Would she think I was weird and be hiding in a different part of the chapel? Or would it be exactly the same as always?

I threw on a black shirt dress, some gray tights, and a pair of two-inch-heel Mary Janes. I’m not much for super-tall heels. I feel like I’m playing dress up when I wear them, like I’ll get busted for being a fake grownup, but I wanted to throw them on today to change things up.

When I slipped into sacrament meeting, Courtney was saving my usual spot. She smiled, and that was that. All righty, then. Business as usual was better than her avoiding me.

After the closing prayer, she turned to me and smiled again. “Thanks for your note.”

I shrugged. “No problem. Thanks for always saving me a seat.”

“Are you coming to Sunday School today?”

I opened my mouth to decline on the grounds that skipping it was now a habit, but Courtney must have seen my answer written on my face because she jumped in to preempt me. “You have to. And if you won’t come because I asked you, then I’ll have to guilt trip you into it.”

The twinkle in her eye undermined her threat.

“Take your best shot,” I said.

“I’ve been saving you a seat for months and rescuing you from the hinterlands,” she said, pointing toward the metal folding chairs in the overflow. “Now you owe me. You need to come sit with me during Sunday School so that Bow Tie Boy can’t.”

“Bow Tie Boy? Is wearing it some kind of ironic hipster statement?” I asked.

“No.”

I shuddered. “Yeah, you deserve better.” A shadow dimmed her face so fleetingly that I wondered if I’d imagined it because she was already smiling again. “I’ll go with you to Sunday School,” I said, “if only to save you from Bow Tie Guy.”

That night when I collapsed on my bed and considered the week behind me, I smiled. A new job, a date, and a new friend. Each one represented some kind of baby step toward . . . the future? I didn’t even know. But I guessed it was toward something good.

The only downside was the article due in two days. I might rather be reporting on Salt Lake current events or writing about local heroes, but I would write the best column I could on the world’s most boring date. It would take every bit of storytelling talent I had to turn that into six hundred and fifty interesting words, but hey, that’s what I was getting paid a penny a click for.

I got up early the next morning, like seminary-early if I lived in one of those mission-field states, and drafted my first attempt at the article. I read through it and decided that I was a two-time victim of my Friday night date because reading it was boring me as much as the actual date had. I would earn a whopping two dollars out of this experience with all the clicks this piece would generate. Oh, who was I kidding? Fifteen cents, tops. For a moment, I wished that instead of working at the kitchen table on my laptop, I had an old-school typewriter so I could rip the paper out of the machine for the satisfaction of crumpling it. Instead, I hit the delete key and manually erased my lame article one letter at a time, watching the cursor race backward, eating everything in its path. Good-bye, unnecessary description of the arena. Good-bye, reference to Brent as “tall.” So poetic, that.

I sighed and dropped my head on my keyboard, which hurt. Then I picked it up and stared at the screen that now read, “yu7y767t.” It was better than what I had written the first time. A half hour and another four deleted paragraphs later, Mace stumbled in and grabbed a gallon jug of orange juice from the fridge. He stared at me blankly while he chugged, but at some point, his stomach registered the presence of fuel, and his eyes focused.

“What are you doing?” he asked, rubbing his hand across his mouth to scrub away his juice ’stache.

“Trying to write my new column. It’s not going so well.”

“You have that writer’s block thing?”

“No. I can think of lots of stuff to say. It’s just not good.”

He put the orange juice jug, now empty, back on the shelf and pulled out a gallon of milk.

“If you swig out of that, I might throw something at you.”

He eyed the jug and then me. “Like what?”

“Like my laptop. It’s not really doing me any good right now anyway.”

He reached into the cabinet for a cup. “You gotta find the funny. Like on your blog. Isn’t that why they hired you?”

“This is different. It’s
reporting
.”

He snorted. “I know I’m a math guy and not a writer, but I don’t think telling about your dates is journalism. It’s supposed to be entertainment.” He grabbed his glass of milk and a banana and headed out of the room. “Find the funny,” he called over his shoulder.

I turned back to my laptop. Since I had failed at my first two attempts, it couldn’t hurt to treat it more like a blog post. Switching gears a little bit, I tapped out a new open. “You know all those articles that warn you about how everyone misrepresents themselves on their Internet dating profiles? If a girl says she’s slender, maybe add twenty pounds. Or if a guy says he’s six foot, you should subtract a couple inches—or maybe a whole ruler’s worth of them. Those articles don’t warn you about what to do when a guy who says he’s tall really means it—to the point that he’s always in a different weather pattern.
That’s
tall.”

Ahhhh . . . now it was going somewhere.

Two hours later, I had drafted, revised, and polished it to perfection. It was like something I would write on my blog, only . . . better. I hoped. I attached it to an e-mail for Ellie and hit send, crossing my fingers that she’d like it. I had an hour before work, and wanting to spend it at the library, I hurried to get dressed and out of the house. My favorite librarian had promised to snag any Meg Cabot books that came in over the weekend.

* * *

“What do you mean you want ‘more’?” I asked, not for the first time that day. I had asked two teenage boys that question when they’d tried to finagle extra pastrami on their sandwiches. This time, I was asking Ellie, who had called to say she liked what I’d sent her, but she wanted “more.”

“How much longer do you need it to be?” I’d hit the word count she’d originally given me. Maybe it was so good they wanted my column to be longer.

“No, the length is fine,” she said. Oh. “It’s a little tame. We need it to have more bite.”

I switched the phone to my other ear and chewed on a hangnail that had been driving me nuts for an hour. “Bite doesn’t sound nice,” I said.

“It doesn’t need to be mean,” she said. “Just funny, with a little more edge.”

“You want me to be snarky,” I said, not loving the idea.

“If that’s what you want to call it, yes.”

“That’s not what I do,” I said. “Maybe I can make it funnier without any edginess.”

“Snark is the currency of modern lifestyle humor,” she said. “We’re giving you prime placement on the home page tomorrow, which guarantees you at least five thousand hits. But if you don’t think you can handle it . . .”

“No,” I said, hurrying to reassure her. “I can handle it. I’ll work on it when I get home. You’ll have it by midnight.” I winced, thinking of the long evening I had ahead of me if I wanted to meet that deadline. And I really, really did. At least
five thousand
people reading my words. Mine. Possibly more, if the column took off. It beat the heck out of fifty people eating my sandwiches every day.

“Good,” she said, her voice pleased. “I’ll expect it then.”

I pushed end and sighed. My job rarely ever had my undivided attention, but it would be getting even less for the next three hours while I mentally revised my article. I might as well start with the title. Maybe “When Hot Dogs Kill.”

Or maybe not.

I grabbed a mop and headed for the dining area. Maybe a little focused manual labor would clear my mind. Three hours later, I hated my job so much I was ready to do whatever Ellie asked if it would put me one step closer to quitting Handy’s permanently. Mrs. Lehman, the bean sprout police, had returned for another tour of duty. Seriously, how anyone could be so passionate about a lack of bean sprouts was beyond me. Boo hiss, Mrs. Lehman.

At home, I found everyone in the kitchen finishing up dinner. My mom rushed up and flung her arms around me, pretending to weep on my neck. “You’re home, you’re home! Hallelujah!”

I disentangled her. “Ha ha.” She’d been doing the same thing every night since my Friday night date.

She swerved around me to the sink to scrape off a stack of dishes. “You know how to make me stop.”

“I’m not quitting my job, Mom.”

“Then I’ll continue to express my deep, deep joy every time I realize you haven’t been kidnapped by an Internet stalker.” She scrubbed furiously at the plate in her hand. My parents still weren’t thrilled about this Internet dating experiment, but my dad had backed off a little. My mom wasn’t going to quit worrying until she found a way to break the Internet so I couldn’t set up any more dates.

“Want to play Super Mario?” Mace asked as I crossed the kitchen.

“No thanks. I gotta go find the funny.”

“Cool,” he said.

“Dad, can I work in your office?”

“Sure,” he said. “Your mother and I are watching
Dancing with the Stars
anyway.”

I dragged myself up the stairs, but after a quick shower and a change into my BYU sweats, I was excited to tackle my article. I knew just where to go with it.

* * *

“‘When Dating is a Near-Death Experience’?” my dad read aloud when I came down the stairs the next morning.

“It’s up?” I rushed over to the laptop in front of him and looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, there it was, my column on the home page with the byline “Indie Girl.” It was the same screen name I used on the LDS Lookup site, at Ellie’s suggestion. She said it “captured my essence.” Whatever. It was better than “Here Under Duress,” “I Hate Cupid,” or “Just Say No to Romeo”—my suggestions. It was after nine, and everyone should have been gone, but Ginger sat at the table with my dad. I skimmed through the article. It looked like Ellie had run it with very little editing, which made me feel good. I hoped it meant I had a strong voice already.

“What do you think?” I asked, grinning. I’d been up well past midnight tweaking it, “punching it up,” as Ellie had requested, and I knew I had nailed it.

“It’s funny,” my dad said, his voice neutral.

“That’s what I was going for.” I headed toward the pantry to scrounge up some steel cut oats. I needed a bowl of something hot and hearty to refuel after my late night.

“Yeah, it was pretty good,” Ginger added. “I like the part where you put ‘Imagine Milhouse stretched an extra nine feet taller and capable of conversation revolving only around food or useless sports trivia,’” she read from the computer screen. “I already sent the link to some of my friends.”

“Wow. Thanks.” That’s as ringing an endorsement as you can get from Ginger.

My dad cleared his throat. “So is this the kind of writing you’ll be doing for the magazine?”

I paused in my oatmeal making. “For now. Why?”

“I’m a little concerned about the tone,” he said carefully.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, you weren’t very nice to this Giant Milhouse young man. It’s funny but at someone else’s expense.”

“How is that different from usual for her?” Ginger asked.

“Why are you even here?” I asked. “Go to school.”

“Major cramps,” she said, suddenly clutching her stomach and looking pained.

Dad shot her a knowing look, but he never argues about “women’s stuff.” She must have complained about cramps after my mom left for work, or she wouldn’t have gotten away with it. After staring at her long enough for her to decide she should go lie down, he turned his steady gaze on me. I ignored him and stirred my oats, but the weight of his stare made the back of my neck hot.

“Yes?” I sighed, turning around to face him.

“Are you comfortable with the work you did?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s not a big deal. No one knows my name or his. He doesn’t know I wrote about the date, so he’s not going to stumble across it and get his feelings hurt. Presto, there you have it: it’s a totally harmless article.” I scooped up a blob of oats and let it plop back into the pot, suddenly angry that steel cut oats take way longer than stupid Quaker Instant.

My dad was silent for a long moment, and when he spoke, all he said was, “Okay.” More Spicer shorthand, this time for “I’ll let you figure this out on your own.”

But I wasn’t falling for that. I had worked too long to get the tone just right, and I had produced something funny—maybe even hilarious in spots. If I thought for a second that there was a chance Brent would read it, I would never have sent it in. Even if he did find it and see himself in the article, the only two people who knew it was him were Brent and me, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone.

I ignored the little voice informing me that I was justifying myself. That voice is such a nag. I ran upstairs to get dressed while I waited out the oatmeal. I had a Handy’s T-shirt half over my head when my cell phone went off. I scrambled to pull the shirt down and answer the phone. It was Ellie.

“Hello, rising star!” she greeted me.

“Hi,” I said. “I saw the column. It looks like you were happy with it.”

“Loved it,” she said. “I made some minor tweaks, but I barely had to touch it. Good stuff, girl. I love the line about how the piece of hot dog hurtled out of Giant Milhouse’s mouth like it would rather leap to its death than hang out with him one second longer.”

“Thanks,” I said. My dad was being sensitive. Anyone could see that was hyperbole, not meanness.

“Do you have your next date lined up?” she asked.

“I will soon, I think. Two different guys have been e-mailing me, and I think I can set something up by Friday.”

“Awesome. So far, we’ve had the normal level of traffic, but I’ll keep you posted on how your column does as the week goes on.”