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“Yeah, I think I smoked once when I first got here, but it wasn’t for me. It made me feel sick,” I reply. “It’s totally cool if you do though. I don’t want you to limit yourself because of me.”
He turns his eyes back to the road, looking a bit deflated despite his efforts to hide it.
“Alright, cool.”
There’s a silence that falls over both of us, the type of silence that you can practically see. We’ve barely interacted, and I can already sense my social battery depleting by the minute.
Eric is the type who needs constant attention and reinforcement when he’s in a group setting. He brags about being the class clown when he was in middle school, which I always found endearing until now. The idea of him calling back to his middle school popularity makes me cringe from the inside out.
“Did you know that when I was sixteen, I tore my ACL during the homecoming football game and didn’t stop playing? I won that game for us. My knee still hurts sometimes, but it’s pretty much the best thing I’ve ever done,” he says, breaking the silence with something even more uncomfortable and irrelevant.
“Oh, really? I broke my wrist when I was–”
“Yeah, it fucking sucked. I had to get surgery and everything. They gave me a wheelchair for a few months while I healed. I kind of felt like a fallen hero,” he continues, cutting me off as he runs a red light.
I cling to the handle on the ceiling on impulse as he continues to speed down the street. When I glance over to him, he looks displeased and a little offended that I think his driving is bad.
“Is something wrong?” he asks, his expression grave and annoyed.
My stomach jumps into my chest. “No, no. I just drive really slow, so I’m not used to this. Your car is so much faster than mine. I’d be out of control in something like this,” I say, doing the best to make it sound nice.
“Oh, so you think I’m out of control?” he asks defensively.
“What? No! No, I wasn’t trying to say that. I was just saying that–”
“Whatever, forget about it,” he snaps, cutting me off again.
If I thought this situation couldn’t be any more suffocating, I was dead wrong.
There’s another awkward silence between us, and I grasp at my necklace anxiously as we pull up to another red light. There’s no music playing, and the idle of the car feels deafening in the absence of friendly conversation.
I swear I’d pay someone to get me out of this date.
“So, what have you been doing for fun lately?” I ask.
“I’ve been playing a fuckton of Battalion. I’ve got like six hundred hours logged on that shit,” he replies without looking at me.
At least now, he’s paying attention to the road.
Eric has always been bad about talking about himself, but this conversation has proven unknown heights of narcissism.
We’ve only been in the car for ten minutes!
“Oh really? I’m not familiar with that game,” I reply, wondering to myself if now is the time to fake a family emergency.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t expect you to know a game like that.”
So far, he’s made no effort whatsoever to show me that he wants me here. It was his idea to go on a date, and he knew exactly who I was before he asked me. I’ve shared tons of information about myself with him in the past, but he doesn’t seem to care about learning more.
When the light turns green, he speeds away again, crossing lanes and passing someone in the middle of the intersection.
As soon as he sees the sign for Seven-Eleven, he changes lanes again and turns aggressively into the parking lot. He misses the driveway, and half of his car drives over the curb.
“Goddamn it!” he shouts, pounding the steering wheel a few times as though I’m not there to witness it.
“Oh, it’s okay,” I say reflexively.
“No, it’s not fucking okay. I crashed the car before this one, and if my dad thinks I’m being reckless, he’ll stop paying my car note.”
