That Time I went on my first date

That summer I asked a girl out on a date for the first time. I was 17 and hadn’t gotten past laying down a sacrifice bunt, which is to say, once a girl had put her hand on my arm to explain something to me in a Health Science class. The state of affairs was embarrassing yes, but I’d spent the last few months talking to her on a large square bench after school. She called me Andy, as everyone called me Andy back then, though I hated the name and won’t let anyone call me it to this day.

We bought sandwiches from Subway. The conversation on the way over was stilted.

“What have you been doing this summer?”

“Oh, not much, a few odd jobs, here and there for people from church.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s fine,” I said.

The sun was hot that day, beating down on the asphalt as we drove across town on Mangrove, past Mountain Mike’s where I’d had countless soccer parties as a child and past Blockbuster and La Comida, the cheap Mexican restaurant where my family had occasionally gone out to dinner when we wanted to be at a sit down place that wasn’t McDonald’s.

She was working odd jobs as well, and I could tell, in the car that something between us was off, but I imagined that it was just that this was it felt like to be on a date. I assumed that you felt nervous, didn’t make eye contact, suffered through rather long swaths of silence, in large part because a date was making the implicit explicit. I’d wanted to be with a girl since around the end of seventh grade, which meant four years had passed without that desire ever being made explicit. And now we were driving through long arcs of sunlight that pounded the black pavement and reflected the heat back. On that day, you could smell the tar starting to melt, a strong scent. We drove past the Baskin Robbins and Safeway parking lot, a long line of non-descript bushes, lined the road side with some small bits of red gravel on the ground around them. Down and down we drove.

I had a horrible sense of direction and was trying to focus on the conversation, which wasn’t going well. I was very aware of the positioning of her knee, which was, though not close at all to mine, sort of close to my hand, which was resting occasionally on the automatic clutch, which was a nervous gesture I had, and I’d sort of tap the top of my fingers on the clutch before removing it, adjusting my body, leaning back into the seat, taking my left hand off the wheel and sliding the right hand underneath, driving with my bottom two fingers, though I wasn’t doing the latter on this particular drive. On this drive, I tapped the automatic clutch, nervously moved my hand back to the wheel and then down again to the clutch.