scooted my ass deeper into the crook of his crotch. “Go to sleep,” I said, shutting him down. Tomorrow we’d start up again, and maybe then I’d figure out a way to win. And if this was a blinking warning signal, then Gina was the pop-up message that spelled everything out, “Sorry, you lose. There are no more legal moves.”
“If dude is telling you fifty thousand ways that he ain’t ready, listen to him,” she concluded at the end of a marathon my-life-sucks-and-every-dude-I-date-turns-out-to-be-a-raging-asshole phone call. She was probably right, but ’member before what he said? He said I was perfect. Remember that? Can’t we just focus on that for a minute, please?
Gina had memories of my own to share. Like when West Point Willy told me he wanted to “take a step back,” and I let him date other women, knowing he’d come back to me one day because, hellooo, I was the best thing that’d ever happened to him since not dying in Iraq. I wasn’t, and he didn’t. And when Abdul said he wasn’t over his ex-fiancée and I gave him time, because seriously, that chick was hideous, and he, despite being Muslim, bought me a DVD player for Christmas. Like if he could barrel through religious roadblocks as hard-core as Islam versus whatever I was, then forgetting some hideola girl who wore jean skirts should not be that hard. They got back together in three months, and I got Netflix. And when James said he thought he would lose his job shuffling legal briefs because I worked in the newsroom twenty-one floors down, I thought he was totally justified. The plan was to just wait until he went back to school in the fall. September came and went. He started dating some midget who ran marathons and, according to Facebook, liked cooking “big ole meals.”
Gina had points.
“We broke up last night,” was how I said hello the next morning. I gave up on being perfect and decided to be a soldier instead. I blocked Dex on IM. I threw the toothbrush I kept at his apartment in his trash can, hoping the pathetic image would drive him insane, or at least to my basement apartment on Ninth Street.
“Whaaaaa?” Gina said, feigning an appropriate modicum of surprise. Best friend indeed.
“Yeah, dude. He said he wasn’t ready for a relationship and bla bla bla. We’re done this time. I can’t do this back-and-forth shit anymore. It’s for the birds.”
“Right, dude, you gotta keep that shit moving.” She was on auto-pilot now. “K.I.M.”
We both knew this was all bullshit—a rehearsed spontaneous dance number that was getting harder to perform night after night. I was the jerk in the Magical Mister Mistoffelees costume wondering how my master’s in fine arts came to this. Dex was the master of backtracking. My phone rang by evening. Maybe he’d come around—the white-capped mountains of my gleaming perfection. Maybe it was snow blindness he was scared of, not a healthy, loving, and monogamous relationship with one Helena “You’re Awesome, You’re Perfect, Now Change” Andrews. How would I ever know if I didn’t pick up the phone? “Hello?” We’re back “together” in the time it takes to spell-check abracadabra.
I was an annoying narrative arc on a teen soap opera. Okay, we get it. These two crazy kids will never get together! It’s impossible. Too much has happened! Dan and Serena, I’m bored of you now. The best way to flip the script would be to get the upper hand this time. I never IM’d Dex first. Let the phone ring at least three times before answering. And I refused to play Scrabulous with him for weeks, ignoring every new game he started and then pretending like I hadn’t. I was through with games, see.
“Stop ignoring my Scrabulous requests!”
“What are you talking about, crazy pants?”
“My pants aren’t crazy. Get on Scrabulous.”
Obviously this man wanted to marry me and inseminate me immediately thereafter. Why else would a stupid computer game be so important? He loved me in a place where there’s no cyber space or time. So Scrabulous became our new thing. We made dates to play—Okay, be at your computer in an hour—and our daily conversations were peppered with talk of word scores and numbered tiles. And then, of course, he screwed it all up again.
“I just don’t want you to hold out for me,” he said out of the total blue one day while we were spending quality time online. I’d mentioned a blind date I