One or Two Things I Learned About Love Read Online Free PDF

that?) I’m seeing him on Thursday. It’s his day off. (I don’t want to start out by making problems so I didn’t say anything, but it isn’t my day off, of course. I figure I can probably swap with Mike for one of her days.) He says he has a great idea for what we can do. He doesn’t want to go somewhere noisy or crowded. He wants to go somewhere where we can talk and get to know each other. I said, “What? Group therapy?” He said it’s a surprise. Oh goody.
    I don’t want to get carried away or anything (Nomi says it’s not pride that goes before a fall, it’s HOPE), but I am getting kind of excited about the BD (Big Date). I want to believe that (at long last) the Hildy D’Angelo Dating Curse has been lifted. And that I’m finally going to go out with someone like other girls do. You know, instead of another immense disaster/public humiliation/waste of time/all of the above.

    1 Mick Littlejohn in ninth grade. We went to a movie. Mr Littlejohn drove us there and back. Mr Littlejohn and Mick talked about football the whole time we were in the car. The last thing Mick said when we got to the movies was something about being tied with minutes left to play. When we came out two hours later, Mick got into the car and started talking about how in the very last minute some guy made a 50-yard pass and his team won 33–30. I’m not really into football (I’d rather watch a snail race at night in a fog), but that’s the kind of thing you remember. At least you do if it’s the only time you heard your date’s voice all afternoon.
    2 David Schlessel in tenth grade. (This is the half date that doesn’t count.) Nomi, Sara, Cristina, Maggie and I went to the Halloween dance together. Safety in numbers. (And so you don’t have to stand there all by yourself like the last doll on the toy-store shelf on Christmas Eve.) We went as a 60s’ girl band (no instruments and we all dressed the same). David Schlessel asked me to dance. We had a couple of dances and then I said I had to sit down because it’s really hard to dance when you’re dressed like a 60s’ back-up singer. My feet were redefining the meaning of pain. We hadn’t talked while we were dancing but when I was about to limp away he all of a sudden asked me if I wanted to go out with him. I don’t know if I did or I didn’t, but I said yes. Turned out, he didn’t want to go out with me. He thought he was asking out Sara. He didn’t realize I wasn’t Sara until I showed up at the movie. He wanted to know where Sara was. I said I guessed she was probably at home. He asked if she was standing him up. I said, “Standing you up
where
?” He said, you know, breaking our date. I said I didn’t know he had a date with Sara, I was under the impression that he had a date with me. He said he really had to have his glasses checked. There was no point in wasting money on a movie, so we both went home after that. (That’s why it’s only half a date and it doesn’t count.)
    3 Daryl Jonas last spring. Daryl sat next to me in math. He’s about as good at math as a skunk. He’s also immensely accident-prone. It’s practically a talent. Every week it was something else. A fractured wrist (pulling himself out of the pool). A sprained ankle (stepping off the sidewalk). A black eye (he really did slam right into a door). Daryl can’t walk into a room without knocking into something or someone. (He said his mother fines him every time he breaks something now, and Mrs Spurgeon in the cafeteria made him bring his lunch from home because he dropped his tray so many times that she refused to serve him any more.) But Daryl’s nice and funny, so I ignored all the times he knocked stuff off my desk or got himself caught in my bag, and when he asked me if I wanted to go bowling, I said yes. He broke my toe. I was lucky he didn’t ask me to go white-water rafting.
    Which makes this the first time I’m going out with someone I really and truly want to go out with. And who