Awkward Things I Say To Girls

“Wow, Starbucks is empty. I don’t even know what I want in here,” my platonic friend said.

I’m paying no attention to her, thinking about someone else. “Do I still have that girl’s number?” I glance up from fiddling with my credit cards, insurance cards, and ID to make awkward eye contact with the barista. “We’re gonna need a minute.”

“Do mochas have milk in them?”

“I hope I didn’t lose that phone number. I’m going to put it in my phone right now before I screw it up again like I usually do.”

“Yeah, can I have a tall mocha, but with soy? And no whipped cream.”

“Here it is. I’m telling you, she was absolutely gorgeous. Okay Eight Oh Four . . .”

“Wait, do I want cake?”

I poke her in her side, which I judge to be a pretty platonic location for physical contact as long as I keep the poking non-ticklish, but which is much more friendly than, like, a shoulder or an elbow. “Don’t ruin your candy appetite. We already have candy for the movie.”

“You’re right.” She turned to the barista. “No, that’s all then.” She looked back at me. “Today’s Monday. When did you get her number?”

I close my phone. “Saturday. But I’m not going to call her…”

“No, you…”

“…for a couple of weeks. I’ll just wait until I have something to tell her about the team and then I’ll call her.”

“Sure.”

“Because seriously, I’m not trying to jeopardize a potentially good female player for our kickball team just because I want to hit on her. Poorly.”

“Yeah, you have to tell yourself that before you call her. It’s just business.”

“Exactly. You should have seen me on Saturday. I acted like I didn’t even really care if she was on our team. ‘Yeah, you could play on Wednesday or Tuesday, or there’s our team which is on Thursdays.’ And I would look away and stuff. But she wanted to do Thursdays and play with us.”

“…”

“Or like when she gave me her number, I was like, ‘No, give it to that other guy, our team captain, he’ll call you.’ Like I didn’t even want to be bothered by having her phone number. But he told her to just give it to me since I’m assistant captain.”

“When you call her you should be totally serious. Tell no jokes at all.”

“See, that’s where I always screw it up. I try to tell too many jokes. Like this one girl in college. It was just awful, I told like 600 jokes the first time I called her.”

“What, like ‘A guy walks into a bar…’”

“No, more like,” I say as I strike some kind of a ridiculous pose that for some reason my mind associates with being hilarious, “‘That reminds me of the time when…’”

“Sure.”

“…or ‘Yeah, as if that were true.’ Like sarcasm.”

“Right.”

“But that girl just wanted to go out with me on a date, like, I didn’t need to make her laugh at all.”

“Yeah, so, not like that.”

“That girl just wanted to make out with me. But yeah, like, with this girl, the kickball girl, I’ll be the opposite. I’ll pretend it’s not even a big deal.”

She gets her tall soy no-whipped-cream mocha and we start to walk out. “So when this girl you’re going to call is getting married to you, she’ll say, ‘I was so attracted to him because he was disinterested.’”

“Yeah, that’s how you have to do it. That’s what girls like, for sure.”

As we were walking out I was 100% oblivious to the tears of laughter that Platonic Friend claims she and everyone working behind the counter in Starbucks allegedly had in their eyes. But, look. I had important things to be thinking about.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 8:26 am and is filed under Current Awkwardness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.