Frankenstein's Girlfriend

4: Bookasaurus

“Rookie mistake,” Dana frowned, looking at the sizeable doggie bag in her hands. “I filled up on chips and salsa.”

“That’s how they get you,” Frank nodded.

They casually strolled through the milquetoast mini-mall, now a few feet away from Gordo’s Mexi-Kitchen, but Dana wanted to further examine Frank’s statement on the restaurant. Her purpose was not to explore her date’s worldview and see if it was compatible with her own. Rather, Dana was hurt by the suggestion that a national franchise restaurant was out to cheat her in some way. The interrogation began with:

“What do you mean?”

“Huh,” Frank furrowed his brow. It had been a full minute of silence before Dana asked the question, and Frank used the downtime to think about when the right time was to tell Dana about his not-so-secret double life. He came to this conclusion: Perhaps... never?

“You said Gordo’s Mexi-Kitchen was out to get me. Why?”

“Oh. They want you to fill up on chips, so you won’t eat the food you ordered.”

“But what’s the sense in that?”

“I dunno.”

She shook her head as they passed a boarded-up Sew What Craft Supplies, soon to become a Game Traderz, to the detriment of Chupa Valley moms.

“I took my fajita home – it’s not like I paid for it, then told them not to bring it out at all,” Dana huffed. “I mean, I guess if someone decided not to take home leftovers and barely touched their plate, the wait staff could… reprocess the parts I didn’t touch. That would be unconscionable and a violation of health codes, I’m sure. Are you certain about your accusation, Frank? Because I’m willing to write an email to their CEO and CC the Consumer Bulldog blog, but only if you have credible evidence—”

“We’re here,” Frank blurted.

Dana decided to postpone emailing the family lawyer until their date was finished. She looked up at the Bookasaurus Megastore’s sign, which was plastered in banners that read, “Extinction Sale,” “All Locations Going Out of Business Forever,” and “Stealing is Still Not Okay!” Her eyes got a little moist around the edges, as if she were losing an old friend.

Frank waddled off ahead of her, through the automatic glass doors. Realizing this, Dana quickened her pace, almost losing balance in her sensible heels. She came very close to twisting her ankle.

“Careful,” she muttered to herself. “No more dates that end in the emergency room.”

She easily caught up to Frank at the checkout registers. Dana adjusted herself just as Frank finished turning his long, pointy-head to meet her gaze.

“So, I’ll buy you a book and you buy me a book,” Dana stated. “We’ll meet back here in 15 minutes. Spend no more than $24.95. Good luck!”

Dana speed-walked off. She flew past a sea of teens stuffing manga into their backpacks. Meanwhile, it took Frank a full thirty seconds of just standing there before it finally dawned on him what was happening. He was starting their competitive date at a disadvantage.

Dana already knew what she was looking for. She created this game at dinner, confident she would pick out the superior book and win. Dana weaved in-and-out of the half-empty, faux-wood bookcases, locating the flight of stairs that lead to her target, but was immediately thwarted!

At the base of the stairs, Dana confronted a “traffic jam”––Dana’s nickname for slow people walking in front of her. An obese mother tried to corral her three rambunctious 5-year-olds up the stairs to the Spiritual Self-Help section. Dana stretched her neck, then sprinted forward. She dodged the kids like a football player running around orange cones in spring training, and half-squatted under the mom’s right side. The kids were ambivalent, and their exhausted mother lacked the energy to get upset.

Dana readjusted her bearings on the second floor. She zoomed past Romance, Young Adult and Post-Apocalyptic Young Adult Romance for her favorite section: Business. A quick scan and she located her target on the “Must Reads” table. Thanks to the clearance sale, her hardcover victory was marked all the way down from $24.95 to $22.50, but since it came at the expense of Bookasaurus’ life, the discount was bittersweet.

After idling her remaining minutes at an interactive display for the Zook e-Reader, which came equipped with a built-in Lasertorch™ to help readers burn their physical books, she sauntered back downstairs to the front counters. There she found Frank holding something, shifting it nervously between his left and right hands.

“Good evening, Frank,” she nodded courteously. “Let me show you what you’re getting.”

She proudly handed him a copy of Less Is More Than Ever by Eric Paulson. “It’s one of my favorite books,” Dana explained, beginning a speech she’d pre-rehearsed in her head several times at dinner while Frank was talking. “The author explains how, for example, the sale of one blockbuster novel could be equaled or surpassed by the sales of tons of novels that don’t sell well individually. In other words, when you combine items considered by some to be trivial or insignificant, they become very significant indeed. Isn’t that more romantic than some stupid book with a shirtless emo heartthrob on the cover?”

“It’s very sweet,” Frank responded. Though he didn’t really follow what Dana was saying, and had no desire to read this book, Frank recognized and appreciated the overwhelming sincerity in the way it was presented.

His turn. Frank handed her a DVD of Spook Valley High: The Complete Series. She didn’t need to hear him talk to know that she’d won. First of all, her gift was a book, which is what the rules dictated they exchange, and it was $6 more expensive. Just looking at the two gifts side-by-side, she knew any impartial referee would make the call that hers was more romantic.

“This was one of my favorite TV shows growing up,” Frank stated bluntly. “It still is. It’s about the teenage descendants of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman going to high school. I don’t have a good reason for getting this for you, except that I think it’s the perfect TV show and that you’re the perfect girl.”

“What?” she muttered back, in disbelief. High school guys called her lots of things: “Bitch,” “weird,” and “ice queen” being the top three. The last one particularly irked her, and for Halloween a year ago, she wanted to dress-up as an ice queen in an attempt to “own the epithet.” Unfortunately, her parents wouldn’t let her walk the streets at night alone wearing a queen’s crown, a blond wig, white thigh-high boots and a white bikini, even though she always got good grades.

“I’m definitely not perfect,” she replied honestly and reflexively.

“You would be... if you agreed to watch this with me.”

Frank’s gulped declaration of affection hit her heart deeper than the episode of Kings and Conquerors where Sir Orogon took an ill-equipped army into battle, allowing his secret lover Princess Ja’lura to be whisked away from the incoming horde of monstrous zorcs who wanted her dead. That’s saying something, since she wrote a comment on a blog once declaring “The Zorc and the Stone” her third favorite episode at the time. Orogon’s army of child thieves was weak when faced with the zorc invaders, and likewise, Dana and Frank were both weak when faced with sincerity.

There was only one car left in the Chupa Valley Center Square parking lot. It was the scratched-up brown sedan sporting an antenna topped with a plastic bat. The strip mall’s security guard, with a nonchalant frown, shaved head, and the word SECURITY emblazoned proudly across his black jacket, sauntered up to the battered coffin of a car.

He peeked into the driver’s side window. In the front seat, he saw an open DVD case, a netbook playing a cheaply animated cartoon about teen monsters and two plastic bags from Bookasaurus. In the backseat, he observed a pretty white girl on top of a lanky loser kid, making out. As he slipped his oversized hand underneath the back of her blouse, the security guard tapped on the glass, causing the girl to jolt up in surprise and hit her head against the car ceiling.