NOAH
Chapter Two
“Everyone here is rude, Matt.” I fixed my glasses and ran a hand through my unruly hair. Each time the beat dropped, my stomach rose. I was going to be sick just from the smell of sweat and spilled beer. I didn’t need the bass rocking my body this hard on top of everything else.
“They’re not rude,” Matt said, holding two plastic cups, red on the outside, white on the inside, and filled with the golden liquid I had no taste for. “That’s what people are like.”
“People are rude,” I insisted.
“And you’re never going to meet anyone if you don’t give them a chance.” He gave me a pointed look.
“Maybe I don’t want to meet anyone,” I said sulkily. “Maybe I’m enough for myself.”
“You, my darling, are a handful for anyone, but a date wouldn’t kill you.” He took a sip of his beer and looked like he had just knocked on the Pearly Gates.
I sniffed the air and cringed. “What’s that smell? Are someone’s socks on fire?”
Matt inhaled deeply and looked positively pleased. “That, my friend, means there’s a working bong in this house. Laters.” He thrust the beer into my hand and winked, then disappeared into the crowd.
I was shit at parties. No, actually, I was shit with people. Parties without people were totally fine. And this particular party was packed with pretty much every type of person my personality clashed with.
If only I could be more like Matt, who was a rare human I wasn’t terrified of.
He could just walk up to anyone and blend in.
There was no doubt in my mind that the bong users had no idea who Matt was, but when he approached them, he would be welcome.
And good for him. I just wished he would make good on his word to be my wingman.
I was half-certain he had given up on me ever actually scoring a date. The last million attempts he’d made had ended in me stammering, offering an obscure piece of comic book trivia, snorting at my own physics joke, and the other guy yawning in my face.
I looked around the spacious ground floor area of the neo-colonial frat house, parsing through people I’d seen before.
All alone, I had no choice but to pick a human and approach him.
He was a frat bro by the look of him, partying in his sweatpants and hoodie, currently all by himself because the two other guys began making out and moved a few feet to the side.
He wasn’t that much bigger than me, which made him less scary, but he was still as far out of my comfort zone as I could push myself.
I missed my striped pajamas and soft slippers.
“Hey,” I said, curling my toes in my shoes like I was grounding myself.
The frat bro scanned me and I watched interest leave his face. “‘Sup?” His head was turning away as he spoke.
“Not much,” I sighed and blended back into the wall. He never noticed.
I wasn’t exactly the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but I wasn’t your sexy fuckboy, either.
My only strength was my sharp brain and that brought my average up.
But being smart about stuff and knowing how to do stuff were two things that I had never reconciled in my life.
And for some reason, I had been stupid enough to believe that focusing on my mental capacity would make me happy.
Silly me. Why on Earth would I have believed that?
Oh yeah. Mom and Dad, I thought sarcastically. Not that I should blame them for making me into a socially inept, awkward, and introverted geek. Which wasn’t to say I didn’t blame them anyway.
I kept looking around the house. Here, a girl was tripping over her own feet.
There, a guy was glaring at another, more distant guy who was smiling and joking with a blond girl.
What the hell was all that about? And further still, Matt was red-eyed and holding the most blissful little smile of contentment that I ever did see.
He spotted me, then made his way toward me.
“Get laid yet?” he asked as he reached me.
I rolled my eyes and covered up my blush by drinking tiny sips of beer for a long while. If anything, it cooled me down. Not that Matt knew how well his arrow had struck the bullseye. Even my best of friends wasn’t included in that bombshell. “Do I look like I got laid?”
Matt narrowed his eyes at me and considered me for a time. “Laid? No. You look like you got screwed. What happened?”
“Everyone. At. This. Party. Is. Rude.” I finished my beer and felt like I needed to burp.
Oh no. Oh, God. Not here among people. What do I do?
I held my breath and looked around, waiting for it to settle.
If I accidentally belched in a crowd, I might as well climb the highest level of this house and put Newton’s laws of gravity to the test.
Matt, however, finished his beer and roared a rift shamelessly, then wrinkled his nose when several people laughed. “Not my finest hour, I’ll admit it,” he said.
I wanted the ground to open under my feet and swallow me whole.
“I used to be able to belch through half the alphabet,” he bragged.
“Try that the next time you’re pulled over,” I teased.
He’d been pulled over with me in the car and the officer was the most stunning young woman I’d ever seen.
Obviously, she left Matt tongue-tied at once, which firmly assured her that he was drunk.
He’d recited the alphabet backward and walked in a straight line, then ended up blowing the balloon until it was proved, beyond a shred of doubt, that he was not drunk, but merely an idiot.
“It happened once, dammit.” Matt slapped my shoulder and shook it a little. “I still dream of her.” His tone was soft and dreamy and way over the top. And when he began giggling, I remembered he’d been testing that bong.
“How about we head back?” I asked.
“Are you mad? The party’s barely started,” he said. “And my mission is to score you a date for the next one.”
“You’re basically giving me up for adoption is what I hear.
” I deadpanned and Matt stretched his lips into a huge grin and looked into my eyes.
He ran a hand through my hair, straightened my little bowtie, told me to exhale, sniffed, then patted my shoulders.
“Minty breath, clean fingernails, nice hair. There’s no mother who wouldn’t want you as her son-in-law. ”
“I’m not exactly trying to score someone’s mom,” I said.
“That’s as close to a yo-mama joke you’ll ever get, my friend,” Matt said, feigning heartbreaking disappointment, then sliding his arm over my shoulders and looking around. “How about that guy?”
I looked at where he was pointing. “Are you fucking crazy?” I asked.
“Language, Mister,” Matt said. “And what’s wrong with him?”
The guy Matt was still pointing at very visibly, was a six-foot-four boulder of muscles, a drop-dead gorgeous face, upturned nose, blue eyes, and bright blond hair.
He was an all-American beauty. He was a walking stock photo that advertised anything from Greek Life to college football or sexy cologne.
“He’s slightly out of my league. Stop pointing your finger at him.
” I swatted Matt’s hand down and exhaled in frustration.
The blond guy was making his way to the one that had been hanging out with the blond girl.
The girl had gone somewhere and the two guys struck up a conversation.
“This is stupid. I really just want to go.”
Matt raised his hands in surrender. “Alright. I’m not gonna force you.”
I felt bad instantly. Matt had been trying to help me solve my single biggest problem ever and he didn’t even know what the problem was.
He had no clue about my lack of experience.
And not just in dating and networking, but in everything.
He just assumed there was an app that took care of the awkward bit and got me action, but he couldn’t be more wrong.
Yeah, I’d downloaded apps at one point, and they had freaked me out so much and so quickly that I’d never opened them again.
He had no idea I was a virgin. And every day that passed, I was a virgin for a day longer, which made it harder to tackle that monolithic first time.
“If you want, we can go,” Matt said. And he meant it, but I couldn’t do that to him.
“I’m good,” I said bravely. “You can have fun and I’ll stick around.” Matt moved away to mingle with the crowd.
There was pizza in boxes all over the place, so I grabbed a slice, decidedly not worrying about who else had touched it.
It made me think of my personal hero, Nikola Tesla, who was such a germaphobe that he supposedly stopped shaking people’s hands.
His solitary life was on the list of things I had in common with the great man.
And, according to some whispers and unproven gossip, remaining a virgin was on the same list. And none of that made him any less brilliant, I told myself as I went down a mental rabbit hole of considering Tesla’s achievements and life.
He had immigrated to the US to work for Thomas Edison on the promise of a huge payment if he could improve Edison’s direct current.
And when he did, Edison claimed the payment promise had been a joke all along.
It was only the first of many slights and still, at least today, Tesla’s genius was getting the appropriate appreciation.
Did you ever stop to consider that thinking about Nikola Tesla at a frat party might be why you’re still a virgin?
The snarky voice inside my head was right, but I indulged anyway.
I chewed my pizza and washed it down with sparkling, sour, and bitter beer.
It was a horrible combination and my time would have been better spent doing literally anything else.
I could have been reviewing my notes from senior year’s introduction to astrophysics.
I had a session with a student who was two years ahead of me, but I’d already covered the grounds privately. In high school.