How They Met Read Online Free Page B

for a pen, then came back with his number on a napkin. Untrusting of napkins, I entered it into my phone.
    “Tomorrowish?” Justin asked.
    “Sure,” I said. “Tomorrowish.”
    Arabella looked satisfied, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from what she’d just done or what I’d just done.
    On the way out, she gave me a hint.
    “You’re going to call him, right?” she asked.
    And I said, yes, I was going to call him.
    When we got to the first block, she took my hand. And for the rest of the afternoon, she rarely let go.
             
    That night, Aunt Celia got a call from Elise. Aunt Celia’s side of the conversation went something like this:
    “Hello, Elise…. Oh, it was fine…. Yes?…No! Already?…I see…. Yes, he’s right here…. That’s really amazing, isn’t it?…No, I’m sure he won’t…. I’ll make sure he does…. No, thank
you,
Elise. Talk later!”
    Aunt Celia hung up, then shocked the heavens out of me by saying, “I hear you’re going on a date tomorrow.”
    I still hadn’t called Justin—I figured waiting until eight was a good idea, for some arbitrary reason—but I figured that since it
was
going to happen, I could tell her, yes, I had a date tomorrow.
    “You know,” Aunt Celia said, “Elise told me that Arabella was good, but I had no idea she was
that
good. Three days!”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Oh, you’re the fourth of Arabella’s minders to have been set up by her. It’s remarkable, really. Maybe
I
should start taking care of her!”
    “She didn’t set us up,” I said—but immediately I started to wonder. I mean, I was sure I’d had something to do with it. But maybe not everything….
    “You’re not to quit on Elise, do you understand?” Aunt Celia continued. “The last girl, Astrid, did that. And that other girl—the one who ended up in India with her girlfriend. Poor Elise—she loses sitters faster than I lose umbrellas.”
    “I won’t leave her,” I promised.
    “And you won’t run off to India?”
    “Just Starbucks.”
    Aunt Celia grimaced. “Starbucks is so
crowded,
” she judged.
    “But you do what you want.” She gestured toward the take-out menus and told me to order what I wanted for dinner. “I won’t be back too late,” she told me. “Nor too early, for that matter.”
    I waited until she was gone before I took out my phone…and the green H&M wallet. I imagined myself filling it with lucky pennies and love notes and photobooth strips of Justin and me in playful poses.
    “You’re such a goofball,” I said to myself.
    I discarded the notion of waiting until eight and dialed his number. I already had my first line ready.
    “You’ll never believe this,” I’d say. Then I’d tell him the whole story.
    Except for the wallet. I wouldn’t tell him about the wallet.
    I’d save that for an anniversary.

MISS LUCY HAD A STEAMBOAT
    The minute I saw Ashley, I thought,
Oh shit. Trouble.
    You have to understand: I grew up in a house where my mother told me on an almost daily basis that until I got married, my pussy was for peeing. In her world, all lesbians talked like Hillary Clinton and looked like Bill, and that included Rosie O’Donnell especially. My mother didn’t know any lesbians personally, and she didn’t want to know any, either. She was so oblivious that she stayed up nights worrying that I was going to get myself pregnant. There was no way to tell her the only way
that
was going to happen was if God himself knocked me up.
    Luckily, I’d learned that the best defense against such hole-headed thinking was to find everything funny. Like the fact that all the sports teams in our school—even the girls’ teams—were called the Minutemen. All you had to do was pronounce the first part of that word “my-newt” and it was funny, like suddenly our football team had
Tiny Dicks
written on their jerseys. Or the fact that in the past calendar year, my mother had hit so many mailboxes, deer, and side mirrors