The Saturday after Christmas was quite possibly my weirdest day ever.
I had found an old friend from high school, we’ll call her Sara to protect the guilty-ish, online the day before. I’d talked to Sara from time to time online, but I hadn’t seen her for at least a year.
“Hey,” I typed, “we should hang.”
“Yeah, “ she answered, “What are you doing tomorrow?”
The conversation, as you can see, was nothing special. She gave me her number, reminded me of how to find her house, and that was that.
I got there at three in the afternoon. I didn’t get home until six in the morning.
The day started out innocuous enough. We talked about exes and college, gossiped about old high school friends, and harassed our friend whom I’ll call Dan over IM. He wouldn’t come over because he had to go to work in five hours.
No, we didn’t understand it either.
Sara and I had dinner and discussed the geo-political state of our country (“It’s like the world is hemorrhaging and the US is just mopping up the blood instead of stitching the wound”), and at ten pm we decided to head over to Dan’s bar and further harass him.
The bar was called “Buffalo Billiards”. Already it didn’t seem good.
Dan was working the door. He teased us about not having ids (which, truth be told, Sara didn’t, though she was of age), flirted creepily with Sara, and otherwise exacted his revenge for our earlier conversation. Dan flirts creepily with almost every girl of his acquaintance. Some find it charming; Sara found it annoying. I’m quite possibly the only girl Dan doesn’t flirt with, because I spent the first year we knew each other playing with his mind. He used to be afraid of me.
“You guys did good, showing up.” Dan grabbed Sara’s hips, and stared at her. “This is like, our high school’s bar.” He listed off a lot of semi-familiar names, and gave their locations in the establishment, then let us in to go say “hi”.
We didn’t recognize the bartender until he’d served us our drinks. When we pointed ourselves out to him, he recognized Sara immediately. He tried two different names before I gave him mine. His sister, whom we suddenly realized we were sitting next to, didn’t even try names, just chatted amiably for a bit. She could have tried Allison for both of us without offending. There were a lot of Allisons in our class. All but two of our senior class officers were Allisons.
As we ran into more of the high school crowd, we realized something: nearly every guy from our class had spent the intervening four and a half years getting thick and scruffy. This amused us to no end.
There were those that recognized us immediately, like the guy who I’d gone to school with for ten years, whose name I couldn’t remember. There were those that I , at least, had seen on occasion when home from college. And there were those that, by unspoken agreement, we pretended we remembered as they pretended they remembered us.
And there were the Mikes. There were two Mikes there that evening. They didn’t remember me. They remembered, and hit on, Sara.
“My older brother was right,” one Mike said, drunkenness one possible reason for his insane candor. “The late bloomers are the best.”
I’m so seldom hit on that I usually don’t notice when it’s happening, but even I, were I the center of the Mike’s attention, would have picked up on that mack truck.
“C’mon, Sara,” he swigged his beer and leered. “Let’s get a motel room.”
The other Mike managed to be more subtle. When the lights flashed for last call, he stumbled to his car.
“Is he okay to drive?” Sara started after him.
“He’s good,” Dan leaned back. “He drives home every night.”
Yes, Dan, but that doesn’t mean that tonight won’t be the night he dies.
At two we made our last good-byes and headed out to Sara’s car. Mike was sitting in his in the parking lot. Sara, the good Samaritan, went over to check on him.
“Is he okay?” I opened the passenger side door.
“He wants to follow us to my house.”
Okay, maybe this Mike wasn’t that subtle.
We drove, he followed, we freaked.
“Oh god,” Sara slowed. “What if he crashes into me?”
Oh god, I thought, why is he following us home? And more importantly, why is Sara letting him?
Sara is worried her boyfriend might propose, bu she had a crush on Mike in high school, and was suddenly sixteen again. This is when the night really got weird.
I was not about to leave while Mike was there. Sara’s fidelity counted on it. So I ended up sitting on Sara’s couch watching Half Baked while she and Mike disappeared into the kitchen.
But I had been the third wheel a lot, so that while uncomfortable, was not too weird.
The weirdness came in when Sara let her dog out, and Mike spent an hour training it to sit and lie down on command.
He wasn’t just trying to impress Sara. He honestly wanted to train that dog.
At four o’clock in the morning.
Mike and I were waiting each other out, and I won. Finally he left, but not before giving Sara his number. Sara’s boyfriend never came up.
“You were totally leading him on,” I said while she closed the door after him.
“I know!” She wailed.
Mike came back in. He was looking for his cellphone, which was in his pocket. Sara spent another ten minutes walking him out.
When he was finally gone, we sat down and analyzed the evening, down to the make our session in her kitchen. Sara’s dog refused to sit on her command.
Dan showed up for a bit after work, and we finally passed out on Sara’s couches, watching My Cousin Vinny, because the only other thing on was porn. I woke Sara up before I left, and we promised to get together again before I left town.
The drive home was ruled by one thought: I have to write this down.
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