How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss

One

Jason

Saturday night at Zoot Bar was the night all the dicks came out.

Rich dicks. Overdressed dicks. Dicks with gelled hair. Dicks with backward baseball caps. Dicks with expensive football jerseys and loud voices. Dicks with carefully distressed jeans. Dicks hanging out with other dicks, looking to score. Dicks who have girlfriends, looking to cheat on them. Dicks on their own, somehow thinking they’re going to clean up. Eden Hills, Michigan, had basically one nightclub, and on Saturday night, it attracted every dick in town.

Ask me how I know.

“This is a bad week,” the guy next to me said, looking over the dance floor, which was just getting started. He called himself Shark—though I happened to know his name was really Tom Stuckey, and he graduated from Eden High five years before I did—and he was fucking huge. Massive shoulders, massive arms, a thick neck leading up to his beefy head, crowned with a thin crop of buzzed hair. I was taller than Shark—I’d been a football player, then a Marine—but the guy still had forty pounds on me. He was born to be a bouncer, Shark was.

“You think it’s bad?” I asked him. This was only my third Saturday bouncing at Zoot. It was a second job I’d taken on, since I needed the money. I figured with my day job at the bank, adding the bouncer gig wouldn’t be a problem.

It was exhausting, working all day and then bouncing on evenings and weekends. But the faster I earned money, the faster I could leave my mother’s basement, where I’d ended up when I broke up with my fiancée and moved out of her apartment.

Yeah, this year wasn’t going well for me. Not well at all.

“It’s the vibe, man,” Shark explained. Shark had been a bouncer ever since he turned twenty-one, which made him my mentor. My bouncer mentor. “You feel it? It’s only ten, and everyone’s piss drunk already. The school year just started. We’re gonna be busy tonight.”

I nodded sagely, as if I were a pro. Eden Hills was small and suburban, but we had a community college, and every September the college kids did a lot of stupid shit. I had no idea why, since I’d never been to college. I’d gone into the Marines at twenty and spent four years deployed. I’d been back for three months now, and my life was in a spin. I’d returned to the bank job I hated, because I wasn’t trained to do anything else. I’d proposed to my longtime girlfriend, which just made our relationship self-destruct, and we broke up a few weeks later. I was broke, I was homeless, I had no career, no college education, and I spent my nights at a cheesy nightclub, wiping people off the floor.

Oh, and my best friend, Dean, had hooked up with my little sister, Holly. Like, seriously hooked up. It had freaked me out at first, and now it just made me uncomfortable. Because of all people, my screwed-up best friend and my sweet little sister had turned out to be actually happy together. She’d even moved in with him. I tried not to think about it.

Shark and I made our way through the dark press of bodies toward the bar. We were big guys, and we both wore black zip-up warmup jackets with the word SECURITY across the back, but no one made way for us. I’d learned my first shift here that you just needed to elbow your way through people in this place.

The bartender, Edie, was working fast, whipping up drinks and filling orders with lightning speed. Still, she turned and gave us a quick smile, which I thought maybe she directed especially at me. Edie was a big part of the bouncing duties at Zoot; she was, not to put too fine a point on it, smoking hot, which meant every dick who came through the door tried to have a shot at her. She was a tough girl who could handle her own, but the bouncers were her backup. Anyone who made Edie uncomfortable got thrown out the door.

We gave her a nod—the music was pumping too loud to say anything—and Shark turned to me. “I’ll take the back,” he said in my ear. “Puke Patrol. Relieve me in one hour.”

I leaned an elbow on the bar and gave him a salute. He disappeared, his huge arms elbowing his way through the crowd.

The back of the bar, where the bathrooms were, was universally the worst part