The Date

We'd gone up to this mountain road lookout thing for the date. It was cold outside, and I'd dressed for the weather. She hadn't. Since it was a date, I gave her my jacket. You could see a lot of the city up there, most of it really, all the way over to where the bay curved near downtown. We talked for a while about our hometown, the restaurants and bars we liked. Both of us grew up there, and met there, but never really talked. And now that we were in this new city, and we were lonely, we went on this date together, hoping it'd work out so we wouldn't be so lonely. At least that's how I felt.

“What about chocolate?” she asked. “Light or dark?”

“I like dark,” I said smiling.

“I like light,” she said. “Milk.”

I kept thinking about all the friends I left behind moving up here. It was making me sad, and I was on a date, so I tried not to think about it, but that didn't work. I had a lot of friends back there.

“What about movies?” she asked. “Do you like dramas or comedies?”

“I kind of like horror the most.”

“Oh,” she said. “I like comedies.”

The date wasn't going so good. I started thinking about how weird it was, that all those people I hadn't seen in so long, two years now, were just right over there, to the left, way over all that land, living, doing whatever they did, eating dinner and checking the mail and watching TV, and I was sitting up here, missing them, and they were just right over there, alive.

“What about soda? Coke or Pepsi?”

“Pepsi,” I said.

“Coke,” she said. She sounded almost sad. Maybe she was missing her friends too. The date was going really bad. I started to think it was probably a bad idea, the two of us.

“Dogs or cats?” she asked.

“Cats,” I said.

“Me too!” she said. Most people picked dogs, but we both liked cats. She smiled. It seemed like the date was getting better.

“Winter or summer?”

“What about spring?”

“No,” she said. “Winter or summer?”

“Not fall either?”

“No,” she said.

I felt nauseous. Just when things were starting to go good, I thought.

“Summer,” I said.

“Winter,” she said. I'd been wrong again.

I drove her home down the mountain road. We smoked cigarettes and afterward I didn't like the taste in my mouth. It felt dusty and dry. She had a soda with her, a Coke, and I wanted to ask for a drink. But it was our first date, and I didn't know if that was okay. I tried to think of something to say, but I could only think about the way my mouth tasted. I decided I should stop smoking from now on. As we pulled up to her house, I couldn't stand it any more.

“Can I have a drink of your soda?” I asked.

She looked at me and she looked almost angry.

“I thought you liked Pepsi,” she said, and she shut the car door, taking the drink with her. I drove to a gas station and bought a Pepsi, which was very good. It wasn't as cold down in the city as it was up on the mountain. The date had gone as bad as it could go. We would not be seeing each other again.