“This was last night?”
“No,” says Cal, “two nights ago.”
“She was cute?” asks Sean.
“She was pretty cute,” Cal says, reaching across a group of gym-rat, hard body, greek row blondes with their domestic brewed, board short boyfriends to grab a waterbottle out of the cooler beside the counter, “like a kind of mousy cute.”
“In a bad way?” Sean asks from behind him in line.
“No,” Cal pulls his wallet from his back pants pocket, “still cute.”
The group of post-pledged, Kappa PHI-whatevers laugh loudly to themselves in the background from their flipflops, jean skirts, fitted tees, china white teeth and burnt-mud bronzed faces.
“Is that everything?” asks the cashier, a burnout fem/hipster turning her face from the register. Cal nods. “Eight seventy nine…” Cal draws his debit card from the wallet, “on your card,” marks the girl, her hair noticeably unwashed, “go ahead and slide it.”
Cal swipes his card and thumbs four digits into the remote. “She had this tooth to gum thing going on,” He says over his shoulder to Sean whose eyes are fixed on the overhead wall of sandwich options.
“Do you want your receipt?”
Cal shakes his head no and steps to the side of the counter, “Like the ratio was off. She had a mouth full of gums and these really small teeth. Like I don’t know, the teeth of a toddler or something.”
“I’ll have a turkey-bacon-prov” spits Sean, still staring above the cashier’s head at the listed menu items and their adjacent prices, “everything on it except olives.”
“She had these real little teeth that just kind of poked out of these enormous gums.”
“Do you want a drink?”
“No.” Sean hands her a twenty straight from his side pocket and turns to Cal, “Were you into her?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I wanted to be. She was cool, other then her gum and tooth thing. I mean she’d smile and there were these titanic sized gums with these tiny white teeth sticking up on deck. It’s literally,” Cal watches as the cashier counts bills back into Sean’s hand, “the only thing I could think about the whole time.”
They scoot into one of the few remaining open booths, dropping their backpack beside the chairs. The place is always hoping, especially at this hour, an hour best described as late, late dinner. The small sandwich spot is full of studiers grinding out papers on open laptops, tables sprawled with binders and textbooks, chit-chatting peers and that stagnate air of sitting roasted coffee.
“I know what you’re talking about.” Says Sean, “I’ve seen her smile.”
“I was eating dinner with her…”
“Where?” Sean interrupts.
“Mike’s,” Cal waves his hand off to the side, illustrating far physical distance, “that pizza place way over on Lakeside.”
“Good pizza.”
“Yeah,” mumbles Cal, “worth the drive.”
Sean veers his head upwards, quarter nodding in recognition then jeering behind the booth to the counter, evidently preoccupied with the upcoming arrival of their food.
“So we’re eating dinner,” says Cal, “and the whole time we’re there she’s talking about this paper; this -I don’t know- portfolio she’s making for her business ethics class. It’s all really intense stuff. So she’s telling me about this and I should be into right? Just up my ally, but all I’m thinking is how she looks like this goddess until she smiles or opens her mouth and its just these nubs of teeth and Godzilla sized gums.”
“That’s your number,” remarks Sean, nodding to the counter and shuffling from out of the table to his feet, “I’ll get them.”
He sits back down a few moments later with both trays and a handful of napkins.
“Her dental care,” says Sean, setting down the trays, “must be easy.”
“That’s what I kept thinking. She’s telling me how she got this internship in the Silicone Valley last summer with some startup web-based gambling site or something and all I’m thinking is that this girl must not even have to floss.”
“Brushing her teeth is probably her just painting white dots on her gums.”
“Exactly.” Cal says with a mouth full of sandwich so it comes out ‘zachally’, “I was just like well, genetics botched that.”
“Hopefully,” Sean chews, “natural selection will sort it out.”
“I know. I want my children’s children to live in a better world. I kept wondering if I was going to have to chew her food for her.”
“Mother bird.”
“You’d think,” Cal pauses to lap from his waterbottle, “science would have stepped in at this point.”
“Tooth enlargement?”
“Yeah, I mean it was like looking at Stonehenge from a helicopter.”
“Are you going to call her?”
“I don’t know,” Cal’s eyes drift around the moving bodies in the crowded room, “I almost want to wait for her adult teeth to come in. I don’t want nudged teeth marks all over the furniture in my apartment. I finally have some nice stuff.”
“You should put some whiskey on a cold wash cloth, I hear that helps.”
“A good ratio is like 2 to 1 tooth gum.”
“It only gets worse.”
“I mean the less gum the better. You know?”
“Cassy, she had these receding gums and then I saw her mom’s.”
“Bad?”
“Terrible. Barley holding onto her teeth. It was like houses on the edge of an eroding Cliffside.”
“Alright,” mumbles Cal, “but Cassy wasn’t cute,” He wipes his hands with a napkin, “so it really wasn’t a huge loss. With this girl it’s a pretty huge loss. It’s like pitching a perfect game and then in the last inning” Cal pauses to gulp from his waterbottle, “the other team gets a grand slam and wins The World Series. Her body, hair, face, freckles had all the hype of the original Star Wars and then there was this gigantic Phantom Menace sized let down in her smile.”
“Cassy was cute,” argues Sean passively, “she had that tall, Asian model thing going.”
“She had that tall, Yao Ming thing going.”
“No,” Sean takes a bite from his sandwich, the artisan bread’s almost gone on the top so his hands are covered in mustard and it’s innards, lettuce, tomato, zucchini, jalapeños, bell peppers and onions are spilling on his plate and tray, “she was sexy.” He says trying to control his sandwich, fumbling falling provolone, “She had a nice frame.”
“Her body was so awkward and elongated, she looked like when dwarfs sit on each other’s shoulders under a trench coat.”
“Really?” said Sean.
“I always expected to see them all scatter. Speaking of Asian,” Cal says mid-bite, “I just watched Up again the other night,” chews and swallows, “what’s going on with that kid? Talk about racially ambiguous. They must have been going for more relatable but it just takes away from the movie.”
“I thought he was Mexican?”
“Me too but his eyes say otherwise. They should have given out a prize for who ever guessed his ethnic background correctly.”
“He’s a chubby little bastard.”
“Even if it were just a list of ethnic percentages. There should have been a reward. It’s all I was thinking about the entire movie.”
“He probably could shed a few pounds.”
“I know,” Cal says, “I don’t know how those balloons lifted him up so high.”
“Seriously.” Says Sean who’s now just picking toppings with his fingers and putting them back on what’s left of his sandwich.
“His mom’s pretty skinny.”
“Do you see her?”
“At the concert. Or talent show or whatever. At the end, when he gets his Boy Scout badge. She’s there.”
“If I were her I’d get him into some physical activity.”
“The first time I saw the movie I thought the plot was going to take a turn into diabetes.”
“There’s an alternate ending,” says Sean, “where he looses a foot.”
“There’s an alternate ending where he looses Biggest Loser.”
“Where the twist is that he’s a pregnant Asian women.”
“Could he be Eskimo?” asks Cal.
“Where he finds out his real parents are Lisa Ling and the Michelin Man.”
“Is Eskimo a race?”
“I think so,” answers Sean, “if they wanted him to be racially ambiguous they should have gone all out and given him a grown black man’s voice.”
“Just Wesley Snipes.”
“Or Eddie Murphy.”
“The more they try to relate him to everybody,” Cal says, “the less relatable he is to anybody.”
“They should have given him a ponytail,” says Sean, “and a decorated navy uniform.”
“It’s never quite clear how old he is, he’s just arguing on a cell phone and mouth kissing older women.”
“It would have been a better movie if it were just about him and that old guy trying to skeeze on girls.”
“Or share a condo.”
“Or sell weed.”
“Or get that talking dog to go to rehab.”
“I am pretty sure that talking dog had a pretty serious pill addiction.”
“My grandma,” says Cal, “is like the guru of medical-cabinet-cocktails and I swear, her and that dog are the same person. She’s always like, ‘I hid under your porch because I love you.’ And I’m like. ‘Merry Christmas to you too grandma.’ It’s almost appalling.”
“I met your grandma once, she tried to sell me her TV.”
“No she does that, her house is like a big-ass rummage sale. She’ll be down in the basement calling up the stairs at the whole family like,” Cal screeches his voice up an octave, “Which one of you has five dollars and wants to go home with folding chairs and a crate of tennis balls?”
Cal keeps casually raising his eyes across a couple of tables to this brunette who’s nodding in conversation to a friend. His glances are beginning to grow less conspicuous as he draws his vision on the tops of heads around the room, pausing to focus on her, and then abruptly shifting his look up to the ceiling fans as if considering a rather interesting idea. He knows that she knows he’s making an effort to notice her but every time he looks back at Sean he forgets what she looks like, her lips or her elegant posture, the straight arc of her back and crossed legs and he has to touch back over to her and fill his curiosity. She’s smiling politely to the face sitting across of her. Cal thinks for a second that she seems burdened by boredom, occupied with the chore of her friend’s droning voice and idly daydreaming, fully aware of the male (and occasional female) eyes that bob her direction.
“I’ve been working on this project,” Sean says pulling a folder from his backpack, “it’s not for a class, it’s just because, well it’s pretty hilarious.” He slides sheets of paper out of the folder on the table, scooting his tray and garbage over with his elbow, “I was looking through some of the Google searches in the library, like past searches and some of them were pretty funny. So it got me thinking and I got a hold of some of my buddies in the tech department and well basically, this is nowhere near legal and is definitely frowned upon by administrations but, we tracked key strokes on campus computers in Internet search engines.”
Sean raises one of the sheets pseudo-dramatically smiling at Cal.
“Now remember this is just our school, just in the last year. The number one search, I kid you not is ‘How to get pregnant’ and that’s,” he runs his index finger horizontally along the sheet of paper, “that’s almost nine thousand searches.”
“Nine?!” says Cal, “Thousand?”
“Yes,” nods Sean trying to hold back laughter, “nine thousand girls on this campus have typed ‘How to get pregnant’ into their search engines.”
“What is there some kind of fertility crisis on campus? Some Children of Men, Clive Owen shit going on? That’s unsettling.”
“Agreed.” Sean says, “The next, ‘How to make money’ and that’s just bellow eighty five thousand.”
“Sure.”
“The next one,” says Sean, “How do I make you sleep with me’ hits right around seven thousand. The disconcerting word here being ‘make’. People, guys I assume are searching ‘How to make you sleep with me’ not ‘How do I get you to sleep with me’ or even ‘persuade’. No, ‘How do I make’. Seems a little aggressive to me. May as well be force or ‘How to roofie’.
“That does sound a little date-rapey”
“Okay, so the next one we have is, ‘Why do I have no friends?”
“Probably because you’re making people sleep with you, trying to get pregnant and poor.”
“This is where,” Sean searches down the printed words on the page, “it starts to get really bizarre.”
“Hit me.”
“I’m just going to read them in order.” Says Sean,
‘I have a large uterus’
‘I want to die’
‘Why do I fart so much?’
“This one,” laughs Sean, “is disgusting, ‘Why do I have so much discharge?”
“Gross,” says Cal, “what does that even mean?”
“I really don’t know, but more then one student, here at this school searched it. I mean these are our classmates, our friends. We go to parties with these people and eat and study with them and they’re sitting at computers in the lab searching, ‘Why do I have so much discharge’. It’s absurd.”
“Two thousand people at this school,” says Sean, “searched for who they should vote for. Just under a couple hundred told Bing that they only have one testicle. They Googled ” Sean reads down the list,
‘I smell poop’
‘Why do I have nightmares’?
‘Why do I pee so much?’
“That hot girl next to you in biology,” Sean looks up at Cal, “is probably asking Yahoo, ‘Why is my poop green?’
“We live in strange times.”
“It’s all a matter of community. Belonging. People want to feel connected, if not by their strengths, by their bizarre flaws. By our shortcomings. We all just want to be in the club, even if it’s the club of weirdoes. It’s all just a way of not feeling so alone.”
“You really thought about this didn’t you?”
“I think people just want to feel accepted, even if that means typing their secrets and insecurities into search engines.”
“Makes sense.”
“There are surprising amount of guys using loopholes to get to porn on the school’s network. Probably in class. It’s all med student searches, basically searching for naked women in medical terms.”
“OB/G-why not?”
“Then there are the one-timers. The ridiculously hilarious one-time searches. I probably missed a lot but I mean there was literally thousands and thousands to go through. I just picked the funniest that jumped out at me.” Sean flips through the pages, “Okay, again in no particular order,
‘I can’t stop crying because Pluto isn’t a planet.’
‘Is my roommate trying to kill me?’
‘My roommate farts in the closet’
“There is actually a lot of roommate ones.” Says Sean,
‘My roommate eats in her sleep’
‘Can two roommates sleep in the same bed without it being weird?’
“Oh this one,” chuckles Sean to himself, “Is my fav,
‘How do I get my roommate to stop breathing?’
“We probably know some of these people,” Sean’s eyes scan down the pages,
‘Why are white people scared of loud noises?’
‘How to get boys to stop honking my boobs?’
‘Who’s Joe Bidden?’
‘Where’s my boyfriend?’
‘Can dogs smell sadness?’
‘I dream about birds who want to touch me’
‘How can I tell if he’s asleep?’
‘My boyfriend started wearing my jeans’
“Here’s the thing,” says Cal, darting his eyes from the brunette back to Sean who’s still reading down his list, “I think I’m going to call her.”
‘I need to go back in time and warn myself about something.’
‘Waking up lonely’
“I’m taking a lot of the classes next quarter she was talking about. She said she still had the text books…”
‘How to do the pretzel?’
“…and I could save a lot of money…”
‘How to tell him it’s not his’
“…if I can get past this tooth thing.”
‘The do’s and don’ts of sexual harassment’
‘Where can I get a balloon full of Vicodin?’
“Which will save me…”
‘Getting blood stains out of leather.’
“… like six hundred bucks.”
Sean keeps reading through the list, Cal’s eyes bounce around, peeking at the brunette and the room moves with the opening and closing of Mac Books, flipping of textbook pages, shriek of highlighters and stench of over brewed, bland coffee.
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