THE WORST DATE OF MY LIFE

He smiles. He’s always smiling at me. It’s like he doesn’t know I’m a piece of shit. Or that he thinks pieces of shit are endearing instead of stinky and unsanitary. But seeing him smile makes me smile too. I’m smiling in my eyebrows and my nipples. Once he smiled at me after he ate a home-cooked meal made by yours truly (it was my specialty: toasted cheese sandwiches with apple juice) and he said, “Wowzers, Anna. That was a great grilled cheese.” And even though it was toasted and not grilled and you would think a smart, young, go-getting male would be able to tell such a simple difference, the compliment made me smile in my toenails and my scattered pubic hairs on my thighs that almost don’t count as pubic hairs, but more like confident leg hairs.

And he’s smiling now, of all times now, with sadness and sweetness in his eyes. He smiles all this at me while I’m secretly biting the inside of my lower lip and dabbing ink from my white jeans with a napkin because a bitch pen burst in my pocket on purpose and ruined my third favorite pair of white jeans and they are ruined and he’s smiling and I’m dabbing and I’m dabbing and I’m still dabbing even though I know it won’t come out.

The table looks distant, distorted until I become aware that I’ve stood up from my seat. To cover for it I say, “Excuse me, Clark. I must go to the public restroom now and attempt ink removal with the aid of tap water. I’ll only be a moment.” And I smile a big, ugly smile with my lips flared to show my enormous yellow teeth and then I’m walking away and I’m about to cry and I’m about to cry and I’m crying and I’m crying and I push the ladies room door open but it won’t open because it says “Pull” and I didn’t see that at first so now I pull and it lets me in and it feels like coming home late for Thanksgiving dinner and my mom saran-wrapped me a plate of turkey and stuffing which is now room temperature.

I go to the sink and look in the mirror at my face crippled with tears and I whisper to myself, “Get it together, Anna.” I take a big deep breath that tastes like stale bathroom soap and I whisper angry, “Get it together, you fucking horse-faced cunt bitch dyke whore!” And I spit blood at my reflection and it lands on the image of my forehead and looks like I got shot and now blood drips down the face and I wish I were shot and I should shoot myself to death like I deserve. I stick out my bottom lip and see the bite. I rinse it out under the tap and spit pink water back into the sink and in a moment of triumph I flip my reflection off with rigid intensity before turning to leave.

When I sit back down at the table, our food has arrived and I’m stretching smiles across my face and taking deep snoring breaths through my nose. “Oh well,” I say at an ungodly volume as if my ears were just cut off. “There are more white jeans in the sea!”

Clark chuckles one polite chuckle at my lighthearted remark then through a dreamy smile, he says, “You look gorgeous, by the way.” And, oh my god, my stomach starts smiling, but I can’t tell if its from him or from seeing the black bean burrito on the table in front of me. Then I smile with my mouth wide open so much so that it hurts my face and my cheeks are pushing against my eye lids and I squint because of it. I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say. Maybe if I didn’t drop out of college I would know what to say, but I did, so I don’t. To change the subject without speech, I pick up my burrito and take a giant bite and swallow it with minimal chewing so that I can feel the hard lump go down my throat, pushing the emotional lump farther down my throat, and through the magic of food consumption I don’t feel like crying as much anymore.

He starts forking his salad into his mouth and when he swallows he looks up to me, asking, “How is the burrito?”

I purse my lips together because the question, for no good reason, makes me as nervous as a retarded fish flapping around on a cutting board. I feel my eyes bulge and the air is collecting in my cheeks until it flies out of my mouth and I breathe in and I breathe out like an ugly, stupid border terrier and I scream, “It’s so good but all the beans and cheese is gonna make me shit mud later tonight — so no butt sex for you, mister!” And then I’m petrified wood. I’m dead. I’m a pile of broken Easter eggs. I open my mouth wide so I can say I’m sorry but I can’t bring myself to speak again so I just hold my mouth open, my head gently bobbing like a dumb-fuck leaf on a dumb-fuck tree being blown by the cock-eating faggot wind.

He still smiles but he looks uncomfortable and confused. He looks to his left at another table and raises his shoulders and eyebrows at them, as if to say, “What a character, huh!” He looks down at his salad and avoids forking an olive when he gathers his next bite. Then he looks up to me with another fucking smile and he says, “Don’t you want to know how my salad is?”

I nod, yes, with my mouth still open wide, still a giant zero full of god awful teeth.

“It’s not bad,” he says and puts a few leaves of spinach between his perfect lips. Then he winks at me and I lose it. My clit smiles for the first time ever and I unzip my white jeans and violently stuff my hand down my bright pink panties but I’m so dry and I don’t know why. I take my hand back out and snort and hack up some snot and saliva and spit it on my fingers before I shove them down there again, rubbing my clit so slippery wet that I’m grunting and I’m grunting and I’m grunting so much it hurts my face and neck. I come so hard that I feel a blood-vessel burst in my eye.

Clark leans in, politely swallows his bite, and says, “You look so cute when you masturbate.” I start to feel like I’m melting chocolate, or even better melting cheddar, but the waiter comes to our table and he says, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave. Other customers are complaining.”

“Ooh, I’m sorry,” Clark says in a hushed, innocent voice. He pulls out his wallet and I grab a fork off the table and start stabbing myself repeatedly in the thigh because I’m so stupid because I fucked everything up because everybody hates me and because God hates me and because I’m behaving like a fool and you would think that literally any human being in the world would have better table manners than me. What the hell was I thinking? What the hell was I thinking? I am going to burn in hell and get raped by Satan and he’s going to puke all over me because even Satan hasn’t fucked anything as goddamn repulsive as me. I yelp out loud when the fork breaks through both denim and skin.

He sets a fifty dollar bill on the table and he holds out his hand for me to take it and I feel like I’m Cindarella for about two seconds before I stand up to walk because my leg hurts because my leg is dribbling blood and it hurts like birth with every step but I’m holding his hand and his hand is soft and his hand is beautiful and his hand is everything I’ve ever wanted in my entire life.

The last time I held hands with a boy was in the second grade and I squeezed it so hard he started crying and the girls and boys playing four square on the breeze way started laughing at him for being a wimpy little bitch, which he probably was, and so he yelled at me, “I hate you. You’re fat and mean and I hope you die.” And then I hoped I would die and then everyone else laughed at me and I hoped they would die and I know now that they will die because they are all jealous now because I found Mr. Right and I’m holding his hand and he isn’t a gay loser like everyone, including myself, thought at first.

“Do you want to go to the hospital or to my place?” he says, and when I see that look in his eyes, that happy mechanical look in his eyes, I start to frown in my veins and I can feel it like metal in my blood and I take my hand back because I know I know I know who he is now. He’s a robot built by my rich fucking father and he’s been programmed to be Mr. Right and I’m Mrs. Wrong for everybody and even I know it. I start to cry and laugh and pee fart silently and I grab him by the throat and dig my nails in deep, shouting, “Show me the wires, you robo-homo!” And I feel wetness on my fingertips and I tear at his latex flesh until there is a huge gaping hole in his neck, but hot wet blood is spraying out and not electricity and Jesus Fucknuts, I blew it because I’m a moron because he’s not a robot and anybody who’s anybody can see that. Now Clark is dying dead on the street and it’s my fault and the cops are going to catch me literally red handed and I’m going to prison and I’m going to prison, but I’m not going to prison because I’m going to kill myself and I’m going to kill myself and I’m going to kill myself right after I give his perfect dead lips a soft, sweet kiss.

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