“I can’t believe you just did that!”
“Well what did you expect me to do? Say yes?” I say with a laugh and a toothy smile at my best friend Sam.
Sam stops walking, her opaque eyes wide open and her mouth hanging like a puppet’s. “Would that be so bad?”
I laugh again, this time at her. “Umm yeah. Did it ever occur to you that none of these guys asked me out last year. Just because I got leaner and taller over the summer and started putting on some foundation they are all falling at my feet like, like I don’t know like stuff that falls at peoples feet?” I wasn’t always good at the word-putting, sentence doing… stuff unless I thought about it a long time.
“Like groveling servants,” Sam says finishing my thought.
“Sure like groveling servants.”
“I repeat, would that be so bad? I mean come on Anna you’re a knock out. Not that you weren’t beautiful last year,” Sam quickly adds “but now you have matured into this beautiful flower.”
“It would be bad Sam because they wouldn’t like me.”
“What are you talking about, of course they would like you.”
“Sure they’d like this,” I say gesturing to my smaller waist and larger chest, “but they wouldn’t like me me.”
“So that means you can’t go on one date with Jake? I’m not saying get married or he’s your soul mate or anything. I’m just saying have some eye candy. Someone to take you out and get you a free dinner. I mean think of it like that, it’s a free dinner.”
I shake my head and say, “I still don’t know.”
“Come on, do it once and if you don’t have a good time you don’t have to do it again.”
“Fine.”


“You like your fish?” Jake asks a few minutes into having been served our food.
“Yeah its great, how bout you?”
“It’s good.”
This small conversation, a short hello when he picked me up, and some small talk about school in the car is all Jake has said to me all night. I could be wrong, but he seems nervous.
After a few more awkward seconds of silence, Jake puts his fork down and looks up at me.
“Is everything ok?” I ask honestly worried and a little creeped out.
“Yes and no, well not really yes I just need to tell you something so no. But at the same time it is yes and I mean-”
“Jake just tell me,” I say breaking off his babbling.
“I just want you to know that I liked you before. You know last year and the year before that and so on.”
“Sure you did. And if you did why didn’t you ask me out before huh? I knew I should have never went on this date. Sam why did I even listen to you,” I think to myself.
“I know you probably don’t believe me, but this is the truth. I wanted to ask you out last year but my friends persuaded me not to. Now that you look… like you do now they say its OK. Again I know your thinking that my friends are creeps and everything but I just want you to know if it was up to me I would have asked you sooner.”
“But it was up to you,” I say fiercely, maybe more so than I intended. Then this ferocity makes me just plain angry. “Why should I believe you do everything your friends tell you to do anyway? Why should I believe you at all. And if you are telling the truth then why did you have to listen to them. If you really liked me you would have asked me out before, no matter what they had said.” I stand up and start to leave the restaurant, when Jake starts talking again.
“Love. It can be a thing of beauty or a thing of humiliation. Friendships can be uplifting, or poisonous. Family can be your post, your roots, or it can be a wrenching hand, pulling you out of sorts. We have to choose who we love wisely, or it can take you down.”
“That, I, that’s my writing from like the seventh grade,” I sputter out.
“I know. I thought it was so true and honest that I snuck a copy from Mrs. Crane’s desk and I memorized it. I guess I just had that poisonous friendship and I was worried of humiliation.”
I am honestly at a lose for words. The whole restaurant is starting at the scene I created. I feel like an animal at the zoo. All these people, these onlookers, were waiting for me to do something. Anything in response to this beautiful gesture. So I graciously sat back down with Jake and continued to eat my fish.
Jake and I somehow carry on a conversation as if nothing at all had happened. But in the back of my mind I couldn’t help thinking about how Jake had made my writing better. Even with all of the time I had taken to think about my words before writing them, Jake put something into my writing when he spoke it. It wasn’t just words. They were words with meaning.