Being in love with a straight boy is a straight-up nightmare. Especially if it's been like that for years. But it's even worse when he's your best friend's brother, who has a girlfriend that's there to remind you how straight he is. That's when it b...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I know no one ever said it was easy, but dating was actually really damn hard. It took me hours to decide which place to go, and when we got there, the restaurant was filled to the brim because I was an idiot who didn't think to reserve a table beforehand. Nazy looked at me with that judgy look of hers, and I laughed nervously, and she crossed her arms, and I coughed, and she raised an eyebrow, and I just wanted to fucking die.
"What now, Casanova?"
"Uh, well..." I scratched my head. "Feel like getting pizza?"
The eyebrow went down.
"I think there's a good pizza place around here," I added, and to my surprise, she said, "Okay. Lead the way."
I led the way, Nazy right beside me, and I fervently wished for that to be my last fuck-up of the day, but karma is a bitch. Of course, the only reason why the first date with a girl whose attention I wanted was a disaster had to be because I'd always ignored girls that wanted my attention. Pure payback. There was no other explanation, really. Or maybe I was just an idiot.
I'd left my bank card at home.
"You know when you have one of those phone cases that holds bank cards but the floppy thing where the cards go in is magnetic and you left the floppy, magnetic part at home because it was in the way and you take your wallet thinking your card's in—"
"Jackson, shut up," Nazy said. "I'll pay."
"Sorry."
"I don't mind. I've got more than enough," she said, all mysterious and shit, before opening a wallet that held at least fifty cards—every single compartment was filled with so much shit that I might even have to use the word obese for it. I folded my hands behind my back out of instinct.
No touching, Jacky!
If only my mother would have come up with an even more awful nickname. I made sure to get everyone to call me Jackson, since it was my name. I remembered begging her to call me Jack-Jack, if anything, after seeing the Incredibles movie.
She never did.
We sat outside, under a pair of red parasols that did nothing to shield us from the sun because the angle was all wrong. Nazy was lucky. Her back was in the sun. I was forced to sit sideways to fall under the shadow of a tree, just to be able to see the girl I was on a date with. Thanks, Pedro, or whatever the hell the owner's name was. Something with a P. Like pizza. Mr. Pizza.
The pizza tasted good, though, as promised, but we didn't talk much, and I wasn't sure if that was just because the pizza prevented us from talking or because there was nothing to talk about. It hadn't been very clear from Nazy's text messages whether she was talkative or not, either. She went from sending streams of messages to not responding for hours.
