How to Meet Cute Boys by Deanna Kizis, Ed Brogna Page A

back to Siddhartha when she came to her senses a few weeks later. I’ve helped Kiki
     carry her microwave oven to the trash because she was joining the raw-foods movement, and I’ve helped her go pick out a new
     microwave when she ate so many carrots the whites of her eyes turned orange. Whenever Kiki gets one of these plans into her
     head, I play along and hope my best friend isn’t about to turn into a raw-foods-eating Buddhist vegetarian social worker.
    Anyway. Kiki, somehow, managed to make me feel like everything would be okay. But after she left, a kind of free-floating
     anxiety took over. I inspected my face in the mirror, and wondered if the sun gave me wrinkles. I lit a cigarette, and started
     to worry about what it was doing to the elasticity of my skin. I put on a clay masque, hoping to undo some of the damage,
     and while it dried I thought about those “How Old You
Really
Are” quizzes in
Cosmo
. I pretty much checked off every risk factor in the box and discovered that I was, like,
fifty
. While brushing my teeth, I worried that statistically Max was in a higher-risk group when it came to diseases. We hadn’t
     had sex yet, but we’d done other stuff—how risky was other stuff, exactly? And I wasn’t just worried about dying, either.
I made it through my early twenties without getting a single cold sore,
I thought, staring at my reflection in the mirror.
Oh sweet Jesus, what if I get one now?
    I turned in early, and had a crazy dream in which I tried to find Max in a murky swamp. I was holding my breath and diving
     down into smelly green water. Finally I spotted him. He was drowning. I reached for his hair, pulled him up to the surface.
     But when I went to kiss him, all I had was his severed head. I woke up, kicking wildly and screaming, “Noooo head! Noooo head!”
    Ten A.M . Phone ringing. Me sleeping. Phone ringing. Me pulling pillow over head. Phone ringing. Oh, hell.
    I picked up the phone. “Who’s calling before eleven?”
    “Yo! Where were you last night?”
    Did I forget to mention Ashton?
    “Out.”
    “Where’d you go to?”
    Ashton who ends his sentences in prepositions?
    “Uhhh …” I pictured the post-Kiki panic attack and leaned over to pick at the middle-of-the-night pedicure I’d given myself
     after that dream woke me up. I hadn’t let it dry all the way though, so I now had a waffle pattern from my sheets on each
     toe. “Out,” I lied. “Rock show.”
    “Who’d you see?”
    “You wouldn’t know. There were no synthesizers, oversize cargo pants, or tabs of X. There were actually people there who knew
     how to play a guitar.” I lit a cigarette and rubbed my eyes.
    “Gross. So I called you at, like, twelve-thirty, but there was no answer. I called you Saturday night, too.”
    Okay. So I’m a bad person. All right? A bad, bad person. But Ashton was Kiki’s idea. We’d met him at a gallery opening. He
     asked me if I liked the art; I said no. He asked for my number; I gave it to him. He seemed okay. But once he started leaving
     messages it didn’t feel right. I called Kiki at the office and told her I intended to blow him off.
    “No, no, no, no,
no,
” she said. “You’re dating now, okay. You gotta give people more of a chance.”
    “But you were the one who said most guys in L.A. are assholes,” I said.
    “Which is why you have to make sure you’re not tossing out the
one
amazing guy who
isn’t
an asshole. Investigate. Let things breathe. Seriously—you shouldn’t get rid of any potential partner until after you’ve
     had the sex.”
    THE FILLY LEXICON
    safety-guy
/’sāf-tē-[[ggrave]]ī/ n
.
    1: a male you’re sexually involved with who never asks for a commitment, and
this never bothers you
2: the lover you introduce at parties as your “uh, friend” 3: the perfect last-minute date for all non-family-related events, work functions, and lonely nights.
    Syn:
PERMA-F--K ; BOOTY CALL
    –
B.F
.
    So I started dating him, but he was neither