Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

“I passed my test,” I announced to my dad as I met him outside in the DMV parking lot.

“Hot damn! Well done,” he said.

“So take that!” I said, pointing at him.

“Take what?” he said, his eyebrows wrinkled in confusion.

“You didn’t think I could do it. And I did it. Because guess what? I can do a lot of things that you don’t think I can do,” I said triumphantly.

“Uh, okay. I got no idea what in the fuck you’re talking about, but whatever floats your boat, son.”

I felt empowered, like one of those women in a Lifetime Channel movie who stands up to her husband. Now I just had to ask Jenny to the dance.

The next day, I strode into my public speaking class and sat in front of Jenny with a sense of purpose. There would be no more pussyfooting about; I was going to straight up ask her to the dance. I swiveled in my seat to face her.

“Hey, uh, Jenny, do you… like where you live?”

“Um, yeah,” she said.

“Cool,” I said, turning back around to face forward.

I took a deep breath and swiveled once more.

“So, uh, I don’t know if you know the dance, or if not that’s cool too?”

“Do I know the dance?”

“I was thinking… I didn’t know if you had a date to the dance, or if someone asked you or not, but if they didn’t or if they did and you said no, or whatever, I was wondering if you wanted… or if I could take you to the dance tomorrow.”

That was the best she was going to get from me. I sat back and awaited her answer.

“Yeah, okay,” she said.

“Awesome,” I said.

I turned back around to find our teacher looking at me. I was so exhilarated I gave her a thumbs-up and spent the rest of the period replaying my victory in my head over and over, enjoying every minute of it.

“Dad, I have a date for homecoming, so I’m going to need the car,” I said proudly when he got home that evening.

“Good for you! Congratulations, son. But tough shit. My car’s not a fuck palace. I’ll give you some money to take a taxi.”

The next night, on the way home from the dance, in the back of a taxi cab driven by a guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a meth addiction, with Snow’s “Informer” playing on the radio, I leaned in and kissed Jenny on the lips. It was my first kiss.

If there was anything that thousands of hours of movies had taught me, it was that prom was where awesome stuff happened. It was where virginities would be lost, scores with bullies would be settled, a hugely popular band could show up unannounced and perform, and a nerdy guy could get the prom queen. As the end of my senior year of high school approached, while some classmates focused on summer plans or leaving the state to go to college, I was hell-bent on having the most awesome prom imaginable.

The first and most important item on the checklist was finding the right date. I didn’t usually shoot for the stars when scouting women; normally I’d only ask a girl out if I found out she liked me. I’d hone in on the characteristic I liked—or, at least, didn’t find objectionable—about her and use it to talk myself into how great our chemistry was. It was like deciding that the Olive Garden is the greatest restaurant in the world because it always has plenty of parking. But prom was the Super Bowl of high school, and I was determined to land a date who would help make it the night I’d been dreaming about for years.

My target was Nicole D’Amina, who sat a few seats away from me in my first-period A.P. English class. She was smart, mature, and composed, but not above my friends’ brand of sophomoric humor. She had won me over on a Monday morning earlier in the year when she let out a blast of laughter after our English teacher said, “Sorry for the smell. Construction workers came in over the weekend and lined the walls with caulk.” With dark brown hair down to her shoulders, sparkly green eyes, and olive skin, she was also incredibly hot.

“She has a ridiculous ass, man. It’s crazy. It is a crazy ass,” my friend Dan said to me as we walked out of class one morning during our senior spring.

“It is. She’s super cool, too. I was thinking of asking her to prom.”

“I’m not trying to be a dick, but she’s not going to prom with you. She fucks college dudes.”

“You know that for sure?” I asked.

“Not really. I just made that up. But she seems like she fucks college dudes. Like, I could picture a college dude fucking her, but I can’t picture you fucking her.”

I couldn’t picture me having sex with her either. Then again, I couldn’t really picture me having sex with anyone. I had never even touched a bare boob. Since my first kiss, I’d gone on a few dates, had a couple make-out sessions, and done enough dry humping to cause a rash on my thigh. But I was ready to move forward.

“I’m just gonna ask her. If she says no, she says no. No big deal,” I persisted.

“Yeah, but if she says no, then all the girls will find out, ’cause that’s the kind of stuff they talk about. Then, when you try and ask another one of them, they’ll know they’re sloppy seconds and say no.”

I resented Dan’s pronouncement that he had “dropped a fuckin’ logic bomb” on me, but he had a point. I didn’t want to risk missing what could be the greatest night of my life by overshooting and asking someone out of my league. Within minutes, I’d scrapped my original plan to ask Nicole, and decided to ask someone I knew would say yes.

That not-so-special someone was a classmate named Samantha, who was small and thin, with dark sunken eyes that made her look like a creature out of a Tim Burton movie. She and I were usually the first people to arrive at our English class, and she often came over to my desk and asked me how I was doing and whether I needed any help with my homework. She rarely talked to anyone else, so I was pretty sure she had a crush on me.

The next day, I waited until our first-period class was over and caught up with her as she was walking out of the room.

“Hey, Samantha,” I said, following her through the doorway.

“Hey. What’s up?” she replied brightly as we strolled out into the quad.

“I was wondering if you wanted to go to the prom with me,” I said confidently.

“Uh, I…”

As her voice trailed off, she started picking up speed.

I tried to keep pace. “Did you hear what I said?” I asked between breaths.

But then her walk turned into a jog, and then into a full sprint, zigzagging through the crowd like she was returning a punt in the NFL. Within ten seconds she was fifty feet ahead of me. I sprinted after her for a while, but she kept running, and ten seconds later she faked left, then made a hard right, and was gone.

A few hours later, in sixth-period P.E., I sat in the bleachers of the football field with Dan and our friend Robbie, lacing up our running shoes for a jog, and explained what had happened.

“What in the fuck?” Robbie said.

“Yeah, she just took off running,” I said.

“Why did you chase after her like a rapist?” Dan asked.

“I just chased her. I didn’t do it like a rapist,” I snapped.

Privately, I was surprised and hurt that Samantha wasn’t the shoo-in I’d taken her for. And with only nine days till prom, I was still dateless and starting to worry. Still stinging from the rejection the next day, I tried commiserating with a classmate who, I’d heard, was the only other guy in our class who didn’t have a date, a tough, stocky Filipino guy named Angel. Before fifth period, I turned to him and said, “Girls are so picky with this prom crap, huh?”

“Maybe with your skinny ass. I got a date last week, homey. She’s from my neighborhood. My brother says she likes to fuck without rubbers,” he said proudly.