The girl on the other end of the room was dressed as a nerdy girl, which - I know, some of you may think I'm contradicting myself, because I previously said it was "the hottest costume I'd ever seen", but I'll confess an almost feral prediliction for nerdy girls.
It's actually one of those things I can trace back the exact source of. When I was still a boy, and completely inexperienced with girls, my parents had taken me to the State Fair. Which I know is probably a pleasant experience for most kids, but my parents did their best to make it un-fun. My parents would recruit separate groups and then split up to see the attractions. My dad headed straight to the midway to tackle none but the most vomit-inducing rides. I get motion sickness, so that wasn't for me. My mom on the other hand engaged in her favorite sport: Drinking.
I was 14, and I decided to join my mom's group (as the possibility of my mom forcing me to drink was both less likely and more rewarding than my dad forcing me to get on the Puke-O-Rama, and sat with my mom, her friend Tracy, and my aunt Claire outside the beer garden. Timing my opportunity, when my mom finished her third Bass, I asked mom for $10 to spend on video games. She handed it over without a word.
In one of the hot, humid, sweaty arcade tents that littered the fair, I found a girl playing a game I'd never heard of called Mario Bros. As I approached the cabinet, she was about to walk away, then inquired of me if I was planning on playing. When I said I was, she resituated herself. She as Mario, me as Luigi, we battled turtles, bugs and floating ice things to higher and higher levels.
Her quarters were lined along the control panel, and I saw them dwindle. When they were depleted, again she made a movement away from the cabinet. Then she paused, and asked me for a quarter. When I gave it to her, she kissed me.
I know, that's a weird thing to recall, but it's stuck with me in a way you wouldn't think possible, and there's always been a longing inside me for a girl who knows stuff about particle physics, even though I don't. In fact, she doesn't even have to know about particle physics - she could just make shit up, as long as she was good at video games.
So there was this girl who fit that niche: her long, straight black hair pulled taut into two pigtails, an ill-fitting t-shirt with a Dig Dug logo clinging to her ample breasts, unabashedly nerdy tortoiseshell glasses, and cargo pants too long for her, dirt-caked to the cuffs.
With half-eyed determination, I strode over to the girl to introduce myself, and then everything seemed horribly awry.
"Holy shit!" I almost shouted. |