Don’t Call Me

“Flatbread is the classiest kind of pizza because you can eat it with silverware without looking psychotic,” Sam had sent to Matty, messaging her after they matched on the new dating app Lobster. At the time, that had seemed to her like a creative and fun way to suggest a date. 

“My grandmother was psychotic,” Matty had replied in approval, before they agreed to met at Angelo’s Flatbread Restaurant on Saturday at five.

Six weeks ago, Matty returned home from what was supposed to be a lovely afternoon visit with her boyfriend to Capu Cofeee—the new coffee place they put in last summer which had quickly ascended to the very top of Matty’s favorite Insta spots—having been dumped by him. Things were so dire it was reported that she had responded to her best friend’s check-in text that read “how are u holding up girlie?” with the hugely foreboding “soo good.” The previous afternoon, her boss at Strawberry Beast Smoothies went as far as to call Matty “testy,” a particularly scathing remark from the usually docile middle manager. Tonight did not bode well.

“Can I just ask you—why are you dressed like that?” Matty said. “I’m just curious. I've never seen someone our age wear a polo shirt tucked into their pants.”

“Oh, it’s dadcore. You know, kind of like a defeated acceptance of consumerism. I try to dress like I was raised in a shopping mall.”

“I think I can see it,” she nodded. “Or maybe like a hardware store. Home Depot chic.”

“Exactly. Do you still want to get a full bottle of wine?”

“Sure.”

“Chianti?”

“No. Merlot.”

“Could you order it? I’m just going to run to the bathroom.” He pushed his chair back into the table and and spun away.

“Sure. And I like your shoes, by the way,” she said, crossing her legs and scanning the wine list that she held over her lap. 

Sam stopped and turned around. He looked down at his black flat top sneakers. “Thanks.”

“Are they supposed to make you look taller?”

With a nod that said touché, he spun back around and continued towards the bathroom.

“Because you might have to go back to the drawing board,” she threw in, raising her voice like someone’s unhinged grandparent trying to flag down their server for a gin and tonic refill.

It was not the most pleasant of evenings. The quandary about the shoes was only the second thing Matty had asked Sam about himself since they sat down, and that line of questioning had not seemed entirely in good faith. Sam pushed open the door into the men’s room wondering if he might be better off just giving up on the date and taking the opportunity to get drunk, when he felt a sharp, instantly recognizable agony seize his abdomen.

Since getting dumped, Matty had been forced to brush up on her dating skills. She spent hours studying blog posts from the wonderful fountain of online knowledge known as DateHimYourWay.com. Before, she would do things that caused her to appear weak, like asking about her date’s favorite bands, or laughing at a joke out of empathy rather than outright appreciation of its jocular craft. But she could see now that she had been a loser, and that mercifully, those days had come to an end. She was now a student of the Man Magnet Playbook, an erudite master of “32 devilish methods to attract a High Value Male and keep him in the palm of your hand.” She made sure to vet all their criminal records and high school GPAs. No one with sideburns would even be given a second glance. And it was necessary to test their mettle, to ensure they were not looking for a combination girlfriend-therapist.

“You look like you escaped from a POW camp,” she had said to one particularly skinny boy, who cried in his car on the way home. It was hard work, but it had to be done to sift through the mass of meat and stupidity that was her dating pool.

Five minutes passed. Then ten minutes. Where was this man? The bottle of Merlot had yet to land. Realistically, how long could one be expected to wait? Was she just supposed to sit here by herself like a schmuck? Dark days in her life indeed, so much darker than the problems her friends complained about. “It doesn't feel like I'm ready to graduate. I don't feel like a real adult yet,” they would say. Yes, and she did not feel like a real human being yet. She bounced her foot against the floor, her eyes darting around the restaurant. It seemed like she was considering leaving Sam alone with the inbound Merlot. She did, inconveniently, feel a call to the women's side of the lavatory. Matty decided that if he wasn’t back at the table when she returned, she would leave. But as she approached the ladies’ room, she heard a kind of wailing sound coming from the interior of the men’s bathroom, like the cry of a seal during a particularly lachrymose viewing of The Notebook.

“Uh, is that, you know? I mean, is that Sam? Are you okay?”

“Oh, jesus,” Sam clamored back, his voice breathy and shaken by pain. “Kinda. Not really. It's a kidney stone. I've gotten them before. They can take a long time to work their way through the bladder.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.” He howled after another surge of pain. “Could you get someone. To help me.”

“I’ll be right back.”

The only problem remaining after the pair of two very gracious staff members helped Sam to the front of the restaurant, his arms looped around them to support himself as he limped away, was securing medical attention without incurring a bill from the emergency room. It was a cost to avoid at all costs.

“If I take an ambulance it’ll be even more,” he said in between tortured gasps for air. It felt like a deep stabbing pain below his rips. It was like someone was twisting and jabbing a knife just above his hip bone.

“Kid,” said the stubbly, shaggy-haired cook who had come from the kitchen to help, "you need to go to the hospital. If there’s nobody to drive you, I'm going to have to call you an ambulance.”

“Hold on. My date can drive me to an Urgent Care. That’s just as good. And for an eighth of the cost, too.”

Immediately, as Sam looked at Matty with a special kind of desperation, one infused with apologetic shame and a gnawing physical pain, Matty's eyes pierced him back with a look of fiery resistance, going right through the spot where he was holding himself below his ribs.

“I actually have a lot of shit in my car right now,” Matty said. This wasn't her fault, any of this, and now he wanted a free ride? What was she really supposed to do? She looked down at him again. He looked better than he had before. He was a lot cuter in the natural moonlight, and the face of agony that he was wearing drew her attention to his big, helpless eyes. “But maybe there's space for you somewhere in the back.”

She turned the ignition of her seven-year-old Nissan Leaf, in good condition except for a small scatch on the passenger's door and a dark red stain on the floor below the driver's seat, left from nail polish and resistant to removal despite much desperate effort to that end. Sam had lain down in the back seat on the passenger’s side, finding space for himself after displacing a few plastic hangers and some loose clothes. He sprawled out laterally, his legs bent to the floor, upper body held as straight as possible, trying to avoid any movement that could potentially aggravate the already quite distressed nerves along his abdomen. As Matty pulled out onto the road she caught a glimpse of him in the rear view mirror.

“This is absolutely not because I like you, by the way,” she said, her eyes glued to the path ahead, illuminated by an endless curve of streetlights. “You're having a medical emergency. You don't have insurance. And I'm really nice.”

"Do you think I'm faking a medical emergency in some ill-conceived attempt to win a girl’s affection? Because I’m very happy to tell you that I’m not. Besides, I usually opt for a sprained ankle in those instances," he said.

She smiled behind his back. The road was empty, and she drove fast. Dark impressions of the treeline beside them rushed past Sam's vision. Steel guardrails crawled past them. Suddenly, there was a bump in the road. It was not a very pleasant feeling, especially for Sam, as the car was jerked upward with a sudden jolt and then immediately snapped back to the smoothness of the road with a low hum. 

"What was that?" Sam said, the pain of another hit to the gut starting to make him sound whiny.

"We ran over something," she said, looking at the dashboard. “Uh oh. The display says something’s wrong. The tire pressure on the front left is low. Jesus, and it’s dropping fast."

"Oh man. This is the end of my time on dating apps. I need to join a bookclub or something."

"It's draining fast dude. I'm going to have to change the tire. Sorry. It'll be quick."

Laying down on the grass, sprawled out in misery as Matty lifted up the car, slid the jacks under it, and swapped the tires with a few spirited cranks of the tire iron, it occurred to Sam that he had no idea how to do any of what Matty had just demonstrated.

“I think the stone is moving into my bladder. The very sharp, jagged stone. Judgment day.”

"Let’s go. My phone says it's eleven minutes to the Urgent Care."

They continued along their route, which now had only 8 minutes of travel to go. This was the exact moment when, taking her hand off the steering wheel to brush back her hair, Matty noticed that she was missing her left earring. Three hours ago, she had been inspecting her earings in the mirror as they dangled from her ears with a silver sheen. They were from the ex-boyfriend. She knew that she should probably get rid of them. But she liked them, and she convinced herself that she was only holding on to them because of their quality, rather than the fact that she was holding out hope that she would get back together with him. They had still been texting with each other almost everyday, up until this week, when things had gone quiet. Losing the earring was like the same feeling she had experienced when he told her he wanted to see other people. 

“We have to go back,” she said. 

“What?”

"I lost an earring. It was very valuable to me. It must have been when we changed the tire. I need to go back and look for it."

"No way! I'm giving birth to a calcium deposit back here dude! A very jagged, sharp calcium deposit. And I'm barely holding on. You don't want to see me cry, do you?"

"Cry if you need to."

She pulled off to a side street and sent the Nissan in the other direction, the direction away from medical care, the direction that to Sam represented another extended period of suffering. She found the spot exactly, easily identifiable by a large rock off to the side of the road. She found where she had made footsteps on the dirt shoulder during their pit stop. But she couldn’t find the earring. Not anywhere in the road, not under the car, not (and she double checked) anywhere on the floor of her Nissan. 

Sam had gotten out of the car to lie in the grass. It alleviated some pain to enter the fetal position. He sat up. "I think it's officially entered the bladder," he said brightly.

“Sounds like a successful first date,” Matty said. She was scanning every inch of the road.

“Actually, I think I’m going to step into the forest for a moment and try to brave it. If you could be so kind as to lend me your mango Powerade, that’s all I’ll need for this perilous mission.”

She reached into the car and flung the bottle over to him. "I'm going to keep looking for my earring in the grass. Let me know if it's a boy or a girl."

After growing exhausted from looking, Matty resigned herself to searching the internet for any medical advice that could aid Sam with his unfortunate situation. It was at that moment, sitting in the back of the car with her legs poking out past the open door, with the sound of agonized groaning in the distance, that Matty saw the Instagram post. The post where it was officially over, where things were never going to be the same again. Standing next to her ex-boyfriend, who looked like a dickhead in his new skin fade haircut, was another girl. A whirlwind of emotions ran through her. Suddenly the sadness of losing her earring dissipated and was replaced by gladness. She pulled the other earring out of her right ear and regarded it, scanning it for signs that could've warned her of this betrayal. After a good long look at it, her observations backed by Sam’s steady symphony of muffled screams, she tossed the earring across the street. 

"Can I get you anything?" Matty asked, half yelling.

"Is there any more water? I need to flush it out. It’s currently halfway through, and I don't appreciate the loitering, to be honest."

"There's bottles of water in the back."

"What? Why did you let me take your gross old Powerade then?"

"I didn't know what you wanted. Maybe you were in the mood for some mango backwash."

"Well, some water to chase it would be fantastic, preferably water that you haven’t mixed with your saliva."

"I will try my best." She came up behind him with a few bottles of water. "Can I come closer?"

"As long as you're mentally prepared to."

"Just don't turn around. I don't want to see what's left of your dick."

“It's still here. It's just having kind of a bad day.”

She came up behind him, as he lay on his side away from her, his slacks pulled down in front of him, and tossed the bottles his way. “Catch,” she said. They hit his stomach with a smack. 

"Oof!"

"Sorry!"

"Oh, don't worry. This is a good time to get hit in the stomach." He immediately opened one of the bottles and began to chug its contents. Ten minutes later, the magic of the digestive system had worked its wonders, and with a forceful finale, he ejected out of his system the twelve sided stone adorned with edges so cruel looking they seemed comical.

"Holy shit. Finally. I'm free."

"My bladder hurts from just watching that," Matty said.

"Yeah, that whole experience must of been really hard for you."

She chuckled. "Sorry," she said, taking a look up and down his prone body for the first time. He looked soft and handsome as he lay panting on the ground. "Are you alright?" 

"Yeah, I think so. I don't know if I'm going to have any damage or what."

"You definitely need to see a doctor. At least by tomorrow. And I probably wouldn't jerk off tonight."

"Don't worry, my date ended up being kind of a turn off anyway."

"Oh, that sounds like shame. She must not have appreciated the gentle way you moan."

"Well, you know the way girls are sometimes. Not always so eager to assist with a medical emergency involving the genitals on a first date."

"The guys I've been out with are the same too. People are so boring."

"Yeah," Sam said with a smile. "I'm just going to zip up and we can officially decide on how we're going to tell the story of the worst date we've ever had."

"Mm. Sounds good," she said. "And you need a ride home, I assume?"

"Oh. Well, uh, that would be," Sam got onto his feet, looking Matty in the eyes for the first time since he was helped into her car, "that would be very generous."

"Yeah, it would be," Matty said, smiling at him. "Come on."

"I mean, come to think of it, leave me stranded out in the middle of the woods while I was having a medical emergency." 

"That's not how I remember it."

"Uh huh. Did you find that earring at least?"

"Nope. Lost it. Both of them."

"Oh. Bummer, huh?"

Matty shrugged. "I'm over it."