the menu. “What about sausage and onion?”
I didn’t have time to voice my opinion before he gestured a waiter over to take our order.
“So,” I said in the following silence. “You go to culinary school.”
He nodded. “I want to have my own show one day.”
“Like a cooking show?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t you need to be an established chef before you get your own show?”
Alex shrugged. “Things don’t work like that anymore. They want you for your personality, not your skills.”
“I see.” I balled up a napkin tightly in my fist.
“What about you?”
“I plan to study at MIT, then work for NASA as an engineer.”
“Isn’t NASA kind of dead?” Alex asked. “Triple i is where it’s at these days. I mean, how many useless probes is NASA going to send into space? Private space travel, now that’s interesting.”
I gritted my teeth. “Well, I don’t quite agree with that. Obviously.”
“To each his own.”
Another painful silence. Alex pulled out his phone and checked a message. I wondered if we could agree to spend the rest of the date like that, each buried in our respective devices.
“So,” I said. “Your mom is a myTality distributor.”
“Yeah. She does okay for herself.”
“It’s pretty absurd, isn’t it? The whole myTality thing.”
“What do you mean?” Alex asked, a blank look on his face.
I tried to make my expression neutral. “Never mind.”
“I drink one of those shakes every morning. I get a lot of energy from them.”
“How nice.”
Conversation proceeded in uncomfortable starts, stops, and missteps until our pizza came. And then an entirely new challenge was in front of me.
I despised eating pizza with my hands. Grease would drip down my chin and toppings would slide off and sauce would seep out, until I was covered in pizza goop. Luckily, there was a solution—I ate pizza with a fork and knife. It earned me strange looks, though.
“Are you going to eat the whole slice like that?” Alex asked, watching me struggle to saw through a piece of pizza with a look of fascinated horror on his face.
“I am.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like messy food.”
“I get it,” Alex said, though from his expression he clearly didn’t. “I can be a little OCD too.”
I opened my mouth to tell Alex the following three things:
1. I did not have obsessive compulsive disorder.
2. Even if I did, he wouldn’t be able to tell based on the way I ate food.
3. He was, in all likelihood, not “a little OCD too.”
But before I could speak, I heard a devastating sound: Owen’s voice. Saying my name.
I looked up and saw him approaching my table. In my surprise, I managed to finally cut through the crust, while at the same time inadvertently using my knife as a lever. A chunk of pizza launched from my plate and into the air before landing right in front of Owen.
I wanted to be put on a rocket and shot into the farthest, darkest corner of the galaxy where no one would be witness to my humiliation.
Rather than comment on the pizza I’d catapulted at him, Owen said, “What happened to your face?”
“I had a mishap,” I mumbled.
Then Owen looked over and registered who I was with. His expression turned guarded. “I’m interrupting.”
“No,” I replied. “We were just… This is Alex.”
“Nice to meet you,” Alex said.
“You too,” Owen replied. He nodded toward a group of other theater kids streaming through the door. “I have to go. See you later.”
Before he could move away, Sofia Russo bounced up to us. “Gideon! I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”
“He has several, actually,” Owen said bitterly.
Yes, I definitely would’ve welcomed the opportunity to free float in space. I finally saw the appeal of being an astronaut. Maybe it wasn’t the daredevil nature of it that drew in people. Maybe it was just nice to know you couldn’t embarrass yourself when Earth was 500 kilometers away.
Alex and Sofia glanced between Owen and me. With every passing second I felt more uncomfortable. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood.
“Look,” I babbled to Alex, “this date was a mistake. I shouldn’t have agreed to it. And clearly we’re not… We don’t have much in common. I’m sorry, but I need to go. Okay? Sorry. Really.”
I reached for my wallet to throw some money on the table. But in my haste to leave the house, apparently I’d left it behind. My night couldn’t possibly get worse.
I didn’t know what to do—would apologizing for not having money make the situation more or less awkward? Could anything make it more awkward?
“Sorry,” I mumbled