The Trouble Is

Chapter 23: Serial Dating

I spend the night with Katie and wake up under a ceiling of scarves and pictures. It is a whirl of color and life. I can already hear the printer spitting out a stack of little square pictures from last night.

Katie hands a travel mug full of coffee to me.

"But first, coffee," she says.

I take a drink, noticing the shot of vanilla she added to mine. Her mom orders those pump things of coffee syrup from Starbucks.

"It's sugar-free," Katie says.

"Even better," I reply.

While I enjoy the steady flow of caffeine, Katie stands on her bed and removes a handful of pictures from the little clips that hang from a long wire tacked to the ceiling. The pictures are all little squares, like you see on Instagram. Her printer is set for that crop and has special paper stacked and ready to go at all times. I see last night's boy toy in one of the pictures.

"Sooooo, Aaron?" I ask.

She laughs a little as she says "Sooooo goodbye, Aaron."

Her laugh is infectious, as always. That's one of the things I love about Katie. You can't help but laugh along with her, regardless of whether it's politically correct. She just has that kind of laugh.

"What was wrong with Aaron?" I ask. Sometimes I get a detailed list of sins requiring excommunication. It could be his breath, his inability to get her jokes, or the dog hair on his shirt. Or it could be absolutely nothing.

"The question to ask, dear A," she says, "is what was rightwith Aaron."

I just sip some more coffee and wait. I don't have to wait long.

"He was just not there, really," she says. "He couldn't keep up with us. I gave him several softball conversational topics. I really lobbed them out there for him. Home runners. But he didn't even take a swing."

I have no response to that. It's nothing new, and we both know it.

"Why do you think you do that?" I ask.

"Do what?" Katie asks me. She knows exactly what I'm asking. However, just because we are best friends doesn't mean she can't be irritating.

"Aaron was a perfectly nice guy," I explain. "He couldn't keep up because we have too much history. No one can keep up with us. It wasn't fair to him. It's not fair to all of them."

"What 'all of them'?" she asks. She's still standing on the bed, trading out photos. Out with the old and in with the new. I think that might be her motto. I'm probably the only person she's ever kept in her life for more than a few weeks, other than her family.

"And besides," she says, "you and East are the exception to the rule. You are the exception to all the rules. I would be exclusive too if I had someone like East."

"What rules?" I ask. "What rules could there possibly be that add up to you being a serial dater?"

"Oh, that's just precious," she says with a laugh. "Serial dater. It's not as if I'm on Tinder, picking up strangers. Wait a minute while I look that up in Urban Dictionary. I'm not sure that's even a thing."

Fair point, I think. It could always get worse. I wait for her to look it up.

"OK," she says. "I stand corrected. It's a thing. Let's see if we can get it on a coffee cup or something. I'm going to own that shit."

With that, she falls flat on her back on the bed beside me and we laugh until we can't laugh any more.