Sarah Archer - How to Build a Boyfriend from Scratch

Martin went on. “Oh, cool. Yeah, I’m a realtor, I do residential spaces in East San Jose. I kind of fell into it through family, but I feel lucky because I actually love it. I love working with people.”

“Mm-hmm.” Kelly smiled while taking a sip of water, hoping that her face didn’t betray that she could relate to that comment about as much as if he had told her he liked taking long walks on the planet Xanadu.

In the ensuing silence, Martin glanced around, then, spotting their waiter, Tony, quickly stopped him. “Could I get another Amstel when you have a second? Thanks, man.”

Kelly thought back anxiously to how quickly she had responded when Tony took their food orders earlier. Of course she had Googled the restaurant menu beforehand and figured out what she could order so there would be no surprises. Prawn noodles? Too messy. Papaya salad? Too fussy. Ahi tuna? Just right. Though the beef shank did sound good. But it might be an uncomfortable bedfellow with the bathing suit. Naturally, it was exactly what Martin had ordered.

She glanced up to see him looking around the restaurant with a polite aimlessness, drumming quietly on the lip of the table with his fingers, broad and flat like tongue depressors. And she pulled out of her own anxieties enough to realize that she clearly was not being a very good date. If she wanted to achieve her ambitions for a successful night, it was time to ratchet up her conversational acumen. Besides, a twinge of guilt lit within her. Martin really was trying.

“I’m not sure how closely you follow all the news out of Silicon Valley,” she said, leaning forward, “but there’s this amazing new development called ‘visual foresight’ we’ve been working with. We can program robots to teach themselves how to predict the outcome of different behavioral sequences. They’re basically learning to see the future.”

“Awesome,” Martin replied, with an easy smile. “That is definitely cooler than the Hall of Presidents.”

“I like to think so. That’s what I love about this field—you take anything you can imagine, and you can find a way to make it a reality.” She smiled back at him, lighting up. She was crushing this first date thing after all.

“So robots can predict the future. It’s like Minority Report . I love that movie.”

“Well, not exactly. The machines use dynamic neural advection, calculating what will happen in the next frame of a video. The really exciting part is that they’re teaching themselves, learning autonomously.”

“So wait, maybe it’s more like Rain Man . Like, if you took a robot to Vegas, could it predict what the dealer’s going to do? Are you taking orders yet?” He laughed.

Kelly stopped, her hopes sinking. She could think of literally zero good responses to this. He was staring at her, waiting for her to continue the conversation, to say something, anything—

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she blurted, standing abruptly and knocking the table so that the ice in their glasses rattled. She recognized too late that the worst response of all had been to imply that she had to drop a super emergent deuce.

“Oh, sure,” Martin said politely. He stood and moved to her side of the table to help pull out her chair. As he did so, he extended a hand around her lower back, as if to usher her out—and that hand went straight to her butt. He didn’t squeeze it, didn’t precisely cup it, but he definitively, 100 percent touched it. Kelly’s eyes flew to his face, which was entirely nonreactive. She couldn’t tell if he even recognized what was happening. A swift analysis determined that either he was copping a feel before dinner had been served, or that her butt didn’t feel anything like a butt, and both prospects were so worrying that she was clueless as to how to react.

“Um, thank you,” she mumbled, and slipped butt-first from his grasp. But somehow when she started walking, instead of going toward the restroom in the back, she started toward the door. Some primal fight-or-flight instinct was taking over, and evidently Kelly’s ancestresses had been the ones who bowed meekly before the mastodon and bid it a pleasant day. She was fleeing.

Clearly, she reasoned with accelerating speed, the whole evening was down the toilet anyway (nearly literally). If she turned around and headed back to the table now, Martin would be obligated to ask why she had thought the restroom was somehow invisibly concealed by the front door, like some sort of Platform 9¾ situation. She would be obligated to provide an explanation, which would mean she would be obligated to come up with an explanation, which would mean she would need to think a heck of a lot faster than she was thinking right now. Then the rest of the evening would pass in tense small talk about wine and weather while Martin was obviously fixating on her mysterious lap around the restaurant, and she was obviously fixating on whether or not her mom had paid Martin to give her some human contact, the lack of which in her “already twenty-nine-year-old” daughter’s life Diane was always lamenting, and really, did Kelly want to subject herself and Martin to that? Of course she didn’t. Besides, if she left now, Martin’s pal Tony certainly wouldn’t charge him for her tuna, and he wouldn’t stay for dessert or order another drink without a date, ergo, Kelly was granting him a significant savings by walking away from the night now. Maybe fifty dollars? If he invested that right, it could be five thousand dollars by the time he reached retirement. Clearly, Kelly was taking the only logical course. This was a successful and reasonable termination of the night.

As she pushed open the door, its chime jingling, she looked back just enough to glimpse Tony and Martin gathered by the table, both gaping at her in bewilderment.

Kelly clattered down the sidewalk as fast as she could in her sensible heels, cursing the frigid winter air and the fact that the only parking spot had been on the other end of the strip mall. The faster she moved, the sooner she could get to her car and vent her emotions by blasting NPR. She needed to drown out her thoughts: Thoughts about the million and one more graceful ways in which she could have handled that situation. About how she couldn’t find a plus one on her own and couldn’t even hold on to the one that was handed to her. About how dating, the soul-sapping square dance of trying to find the right guy, sucked. About the fact that she really did still want to find the right guy, in spite of all the bruises that come with cracking your heart from its exoskeleton. About the growing suspicion that she couldn’t find the right guy because she wasn’t the right person.

As she finally reached her black Accord, her still-empty stomach creaked in protest.

As soon as Kelly got home, she stepped out of her dress and unpeeled her swimsuit. It was like skinning a grape. She felt better. Until her phone buzzed. She knew even before fishing it from her purse what the screen would say, and sure enough, it was her mom. Of course Diane would be waiting anxiously for a report of the night’s events, probably envisioning a fairy-tale evening that had ended with Kelly stretching onto her tiptoes for a magical kiss, kicking back one foot like the heroine in a rom-com. Instead, here Kelly stood in her half-lit apartment with a very confused date somewhere alone in another part of the city and a Target Juniors bathing suit around her feet. She couldn’t talk to her mother. Not now.

She walked into the kitchen, pulling up Priya’s contact on her phone instead. Priya she could talk to. Priya she needed to talk to.

Priya shared Kelly’s intellectual curiosity and analytical mind, but not her over -analytical mind. She was relentlessly open, sometimes to the point of TMI, but her endless ability to laugh at herself and others had often sapped the power from Kelly’s neuroses. It was lucky, really, that they were forced to work together for long hours back when they had been paired on the Zed project as AHI’s newest hires. Otherwise Kelly would probably never have attempted to get to know Priya, or been able to let Priya get to know her. But something about finally getting a robot to execute a perfect spin in place, at three a.m., after imbibing enough Red Bulls to make your toes twitch, really cements a friendship. Now, tinkering beside Priya in the lab was one of Kelly’s favorite parts of her job.