This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,38
jokingly offered her friend’s Netflix log-in to me. And isn’t that the classic first date? Dinner and a movie?
Not that this is officially a date or anything. It’s just two friendly colleagues getting together after work.… Right?
God, I hope Jocelyn thinks this is a date. But am I supposed to clarify, or ask if she expects it to be one? What if she doesn’t?
Suddenly I feel feverish. I can feel the sweat rising on my forehead as the seconds tick by without Jocelyn answering. She’s stood up to go print a flyer, so we’re almost at eye level, and she doesn’t have any of the expressions on her face that I initially feared (shock, pity, disgust). She just looks… thoughtful, and perhaps, a really optimistic part of me thinks, a little pleased.
“Wednesday nights are pretty slow, so it’s as good a day as any, I guess. I can ask my dad if I can have it off,” Jocelyn finally says. She cradles her laptop in her arms and runs her fingers along the seam a couple of times. “Did you… I mean, where should we meet?”
I suddenly realize how little I thought this through, and my throat starts closing up. It seems too forward to invite her over to our house, but it’s not appropriate to ask if I could come to hers, either. Am I supposed to suggest a neutral location? “Uh, would you want to come over to my house? Or I could just come here, or we could meet at the library or a café or something.”
Jocelyn’s eyes widen, and that’s definitely pleasure. “You’d invite me over to your house?”
“Of course,” I blurt out. “You’re my friend.” The minute the words leave my mouth and I realize that I’ve implied that it’s just going to be a friendly get-together, I close my eyes and let out a silent, internal scream. I almost don’t want to see the expression on Jocelyn’s face (Disappointment? Confusion? Relief?).
But when I open them again, she’s smiling at me. “That’d be really cool. I’ll tell my dad that I’m at Priya’s—she’ll cover for me. She loves that movie. You will, too.”
Then she turns and runs upstairs, leaving me with a whole new experience to stress over.
JOCELYN
When I finally get up the nerve to ask my dad for the night off, he’s in a super-good mood because on Sunday and Monday alone, ten new customers came to the restaurant bearing coupons from the Boilermaker Expo. They all ordered pot stickers, and he was fairly giddy with glee.
“Aiyo, Xiao Jia, you see? Ten customer ordering twenty, forty bucks each, that almost make up that fee you pay,” he says, as though it was all his idea.
“That’s great, Dad! Since things are going so well, can I have Wednesday night off? Priya and I are going to work on our movie.”
“Sure, sure,” my dad says, still smiling, waving me off. I wonder if he’s actually delirious. “I get Alan to help. He can study in restaurant.”
Tuesday night, Priya comes over to help me choose what to wear to Will’s house.
“I can’t believe you didn’t ask him if this was a date,” Priya moans after complaining for the third time that giving me advice would be so much easier if she knew the terms of my “engagement.” It’s kind of embarrassing—I’ve totally fallen into the “Not a Date” trope.
“And I told you, he looked like someone who was about to walk the plank, Pri. He was so nervous he would’ve passed out if I had given him the third degree.” He wouldn’t be that stressed out over something friendly, would he?
“Okay, so you don’t want to wear this, then?” Rummaging through my closet, she pulls out a yellow knit cardigan set that Amah gave me for Christmas last year. “It’ll be perfect for bingo night in another seventy years, though.”
“I should choose something nice. I think his family’s kind of well-off,” I say. “He lives in that development off Oxford Road with all those big McMansions.”
“Do you want to do a dress?”
“Nah, trying too hard.” I only have three dresses, anyway: two from Goodwill and a hand-me-down from my mother, which she gave me after my father told her she looked “too young” in it. “I feel like the Constance Wu character in Crazy Rich Asians, when she’s trying on formal wear for the Khoo wedding? Except that my entire wardrobe is probably worth less than the strap of one of those gowns.”