Tales From Heller

Introductory Coffee Chat, Casual Dress

Little followed Juliet from her past life to UCLA, or at least details that would reveal themselves as publicly as they did at Heller. Her roommates had decided between themselves at the beginning of the year to not ask her what sort of bizarre activities she was organizing on her voice calls or why it was that she had banned boba from their room—to them, Juliet was nice, if a bit of a neat freak, and her personal life was her own business. She certainly never showed any interest in theirs.

With this came the trade-off that nobody knew about Frank, much less that Juliet wasn't single—this was a fact inescapable for club members, some of whom privately wondered what unusual circumstances would have put them together to begin with, but Juliet made no attempts of sharing this fact with others under ordinary circumstances. Sometimes, by force of habit, she would lapse into telling stories about Frank's accomplishments, only to remember that her conversation partners were not so blessed as to know him—she would then hastily clarify "oh, he's my boyfriend—he goes to Wharton and he's a genius" before continuing to hype him up. Her delivery of these tales, while factually accurate, suffered from poor word choice and a lack of context: some wondered if this were the sort of deal where Frank had many such partners hand-picked from all his devotees and they'd all have orgies over summer vacation.

This nuance was lost on Ricardo, whose knowledge of Juliet was limited to their group project for their film studies class. He thought they had built a good rapport, bonding over Mike's unwillingness to get any of his share done and their mutual dislike of boba—if anything, there was perhaps a spark of compatibility. He hadn't yet dated in college: his only relationship was a semester-long casual affair with a fellow robotics kid back in high school, where at the end they realized they didn't have anything keeping them together but a mutual love of tightening screws. He thought he was a good catch, and given the wide range of misfits that populated UCLA he wasn't wrong, but had he known Juliet's backstory, he certainly would not have asked her for a study session at the business school café after class:

"So Juliet, I think we've really been getting along on this project, so I was thinking that we could get coffee at Anderson or something sometime—you know, just as a friendly thing," Ricardo began, really wishing that he'd practiced beforehand.

"Sounds fun! Does tomorrow at 1 work?"

That was fast.

"Sure, I'll see you then!" Ricardo said, reciprocating Juliet's good cheer—he wasn't sure if it would be too on-the-nose to say something about it being a date. She'd get the implication.

Ricardo spent all night running through worst-case scenarios in his head; his previous first-date activity had been soldering circuits, and in some ways maintaining a conversation over a cup of coffee felt harder. After a few too many stress dreams, he woke up, took care of his morning routine, went to morning lecture, and showed up exactly on time only to discover Juliet had beaten him there, already having obtained her coffee.

"Nice to see you again, Juliet. Looks like you're extra thirsty today," Ricardo said after briefly checking his watch to make sure he hadn't committed the enormous faux pas of showing up to a date late.

"A wise person once said, 'if you're five minutes early, you're on time.' That's part of our club teachings," Juliet explained. "Sometimes I forget not everyone has read How To Be A Good Person." So he had already made two faux pas: not showing up five minutes early, and not reading whatever How To Be A Good Person was. People all had their quirks, Ricardo thought, and it wasn't on him to judge.

"That's fascinating—let me get my coffee, and then I'm curious to know what that is. It sounds like reading is one of your passions," Ricardo responded, and he went to stand in line. He could feel Juliet's eyes boring into the back of his head. She was probably nervous. When he came back, Juliet broke out of her glassy-eyed stare and resumed her initial exuberance.