When I was in high school, my friend Pete and I used to spend an awful lot of time at the local mall, the Emerald Arrow Galleria. Now that I look back on it, I’m really not sure why. It was such a waste of time. Nowadays, the only time I go to the mall is when I want to buy something.
Maybe back then, we just didn’t know any better. Since we lived in such as small town, the mall was our only source of entertainment besides the TV. City life for us was still a few years in the future, when we finally escaped the drudgery of rural life and headed for college.
But at the time, for us, the Emerald Arrow Galleria had a seemingly infinite number of record stores, book stores, arcades, and little specialty shops, such as The Wizard, which sold little glass wizards and orks, and Go Native, which sold native American paraphernalia. And of course, girls.
Our town was small, and so was our high school. There were only a limited number of girls we could stalk, since there were only sixty girls in our entire class. But the mall presented us with endless stalking possibilities. I guess most of the girls in the neighboring towns didn’t have much to do, either.
Our basic night out at the mall went like this. Our moms would drop us off, and we’d shop for a while. After Pete and I got sick of looking at books and CD’s, we went to the arcade. When we got tired of playing Super Guido Cousins, Kung Fu Baboon, and Battle Warriors, we went to get something to eat.
The food court had a stripped down version of Biggy’s Burger Barn, our favorite fast food slop house, as well as a panorama of ethnic fast food counters. China Crock had all sorts of grease infested pseudo-Asian dishes such as chicken fingers, super spicy chicken, and sweet and sour pork parts. When I was in college, I met a guy from China named Chan who told me that in China, people eat things like shark fin soup, jellyfish, and chicks on a stick. China Crock didn’t have any of that stuff.
The food from Taco Smell would have your intestinal tract doing acrobatics for the rest of the day. The Pizza Pavilion had three dollar slices of pizza and equally overpriced pasta dishes. The Rising Sun, which sold a sad excuse for Japanese food, had something they called tempura, which looked and tasted exactly like the chicken fingers from China Crock. Even though the food choices at the mall were a gastronomic nightmare, we could always satisfy our stomachs.
After we finished eating, the stalking would begin. We used to find girls we thought were cute, who at that time wore fashionably big hair and tight black jeans, and follow them around. We went into any stores they went into. If they went into any stores we were too embarrassed to enter, such as the Ladies Lair or the Underwear Boutique, we just waited on a bench outside the store until they came out. I don’t think that the mall management had stalkers in mind when they installed the benches, just tired shoppers or husbands who’d been dragged out by their wives.
Eventually one of us, usually Pete, who’s a little braver than myself, would work up enough courage to approach and try to talk to a girl. The results were predictably abysmal. Most of the time they either immediately said they had a boyfriend, or were just plain rude to us, obviously not interested.
Occasionally we got somewhere. Once a girl gave me her phone number, and I was quite excited. But when I called it the next day, it turned out she’d given me the number for the local chicken slaughterhouse. Once Pete even managed to get a girl to go out with him. Afterwards, he told me that he never wanted to see her again. She’d been totally weird, and had talked about nothing but how she thought it was fun to pull the legs off ants and the wings off flies.
One time we noticed that some girls were actually following us. It was like a dream come true. I’d thought one of the girls was particularly cute. She walked with confidence, and had long brown hair, all puffed out in front, and was wearing a t-shirt with the name of a glam band on it.
It was the first time we’d ever been followed by girls. Their stalking method was subtle, yet effective. We were on the first level of the mall, and they watched us from the second. They walked along with us, and stopped when we stopped, pretending to look at something. Eventually they came down to the same level as us. They walked into all the stores we went into, being careful not to get too close. We heard the occasional giggle from their pack.
We sat down on a bench outside ZX Pharmacy, to figure out what to do.
"We have to do something," I said to Pete. "This may never happen again!"
"I dunno," Pete replied. "I guess we should go and talk to them."
They were inside looking at make-up and feminine hygiene products. We got up, went into the store, and nervously walked up to them.
"Um, hi!" Pete said, hesitantly.
There were three of them. The glam girl, a short, plain looking blonde, and a rather sloppily dressed, dumpy looking girl with frizzy red hair. She looked like a cross between a circus clown and the lunch lady from the school cafeteria.
"Hi there. My name is Liz, and these are my friends Beth and Andrea," said the glam girl, pointing to her friends respectively.
"Well, I’m Pete, and this here is Ratch."
"Hey," I managed to squeak out.
"So, um, what are you guys doing?" Pete asked lamely.
"Just doing some shopping," Liz said, stating the obvious. "Listen, my friend thinks your friend is cute."
She pointed at Andrea, the uncouth creature to her right. I noticed that her left eye was a lot bigger than her right one, and her head looked a little too big for her body. I figured I should say something, but all I wanted to do was scream. Loudly.
Andrea must have been pretty nervous, because she didn’t utter a word. She just stood there with a blank expression on her face.
Even though it was the first time I’d ever had a girl interested in me, Andrea just was not what I had envisioned when I thought of a girlfriend. All I wanted to do was go back in time and warn myself not to go to the mall that night.
I didn’t want to cause a scene by running away and jumping out the first window I saw, so I said, "Hi."
"Hi," Andrea replied, shyly. Her voice sounded like that of a walrus.
"Um, what’s up?"
"Nothing."
"Er… So…" This was getting difficult. "Um, can I have your phone number?"
I thought that would quickly put an end to an unwanted conversation. Not that I actually planned on using the number, but I thought it would make her happy, she’d have what she wanted and leave me alone.
"Sure!" she exclaimed, happily. She pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me, after writing down the seven digits. Andrea’s writing was as messy and unattractive as she was.
"Thanks," I said, putting it into my pocket. I hoped that it would fall out and I’d lose it forever.
She didn’t go away, and just stood there, looking at me expectantly.
"Can I have your phone number, too?" she finally asked.
That was something I just didn’t want her to have, but I didn’t see any other way out. "Sure," I said.
I scrawled it down on a candy bar wrapper I picked out of a nearby trash can and gave it to her.
"Thanks," Andrea said, smiling.
"Yeah, well," I said, stammering, "Um, we have to go now, so, uh… I’ll talk to you later!"
"Ok, bye!" she said, as Pete and I walked away, me walking much faster.
"All right," Pete said, when he caught up with me. "You finally got some girl to talk to you and give you her phone number. Cool!"
He seemed totally oblivious to the fact that to me, the girl whose phone number I’d gotten was about as desirable as a discarded banana peel, or maybe a malignant brain tumor. "Cool?" I said. "I don’t think so."
"What? Why not?" Pete asked.
"You saw her!" I said.
"Yeah, so, what was wrong with her?"
"Well, she just doesn’t do it for me, you know? She looks like Bozo the Clown’s cousin, her voice sounds like an aquatic mammal with tusks, and she’s got the personality of wood flooring!"
"Oh, come on!" Pete exclaimed. "She’s not that bad. I thought she was nice. You hardly even spoke to her. She’s probably cool."
"I guess," I said, giving in. "I suppose I could give her a call. I might never have this chance again."
In the days that followed, I often thought about calling Andrea, but I just couldn’t get myself to do it. It wouldn’t matter if she was nicest and coolest person in the universe. I just was not attracted to her. I wished it could have been different, and even tried to force myself to like her, but it didn’t work at all. Superficial as it may be, looks are always what first attracts people together.
I’ve never been able to figure out why I’m attracted to some girls and not others in the first place. It seems so random. The girls I usually like aren’t the ones that the media says I should like, with long blonde hair and big boobs. I don’t care about that stuff at all. Maybe it has something to do with pheromones, or some kind of psychic thing. I’ve never been able to explain it, and probably never will, unless some Einstein discovers the mechanics of lust.
A few days later at school, Pete asked me if I’d called Andrea yet, and I told him I hadn’t. He said that I should do it soon, before she forgot about me, and I said that I would.
After a month, Pete asked me about it again, but by that time, I was interested in someone else, a girl named Marie from my math class. Andrea had slipped to the back of my mind.
At first, I’d been worried that Andrea would call me, and that I’d have to come up with an excuse to get off the phone, but she never did, and after a while, I totally forgot about her.
Over a year later, over the summer, I got an interesting phone call.
"Robert! You have a phone call!" my mom yelled. My parents are the only ones who ever call me that.
"Who is it?" I called back. "If it’s the Army again, tell them I moved to Morocco or something!"
It was by then my senior year, and I’d been getting a barrage of calls from the recruiting offices from all four branches of the armed forces. I’d told them I’d make about as good a soldier as a wet towel, but they persisted in calling.
"It’s not them," my mom said. "It’s a girl."
"Ok, thanks!" I said. Having a girl call me was a rare occurrence. I hoped that it would be Marie, my latest stalking victim, but she’d shown about as much interest in me as a wolf shows in a maggot ridden deer carcass.
"Hello?" I said.
"Hi."
"Um, who’s this?" I asked. It wasn’t Marie. It wasn’t anyone that I knew.
"Remember last year at the mall?"
"Oh yeah!" I said, buried memories coming back. I thought I’d recognized that deep, gravely tone.
Why had Andrea waited so long to call me? All the confused feelings I’d had before suddenly resurfaced. Things could have been good, but they could have been terrible. I had taken the easy way out by doing nothing.
Standing there holding the telephone receiver, I wanted to talk to her, yet I didn’t. "So, how’ve you been?" I asked.
"Not bad," Andrea replied. "Where do you live?"
Huh? Where’d question come from? Was she a stalker too?
"Um, I live in Zyton," I said. "How about you?"
"That’s so far," Andrea replied, sounding sad. "I live in Caseyville."
Caseyville was about an hour away, in the opposite direction of the Emerald Arrow Galleria from my town.
"Oh, that’s cool," I said.
"You just don’t care, do you?" Andrea said. She sounded upset.
"Huh? Of course I care," I blurted out.
"To hell with you!" she said, and then clanked down the receiver.
The next day I called Pete and told him about what had happened. By that time, he had found a girlfriend, named Aurora, and our trips to the mall had become far and few in between, and a lot less interesting, since Pete didn’t want to look for girls anymore.
"Wow," he said. "That girl must really have been infatuated with you. You really should have called her a long time ago."
"I know," I said. "But I really didn’t like her very much. What was I gonna say, ‘Hi, you suck’?"
"I dunno, Ratch," Pete said, "But you spend so much time hunting girls, and then someone who likes you comes along, and look what you do."
"I dunno, either, Pete," I said. "Maybe I never will."
Now, I think of Andrea as a sort of female version of myself. She probably spends as much time and energy looking for guys as I do looking for girls. Neither of us are anyone’s idea of an ideal other half. We’re both painfully shy and socially stunted, out there seeking perfection that doesn’t exist. Such is life, I suppose.
email the author of this story / back to top / back to Short Fiction