Much Ado About Victor

Cynthia was a friend of a friend of mine and we met at a party. We talked for three hours and didn't run out of conversation topics, so I figured that it would be worth it to ask her out on a date.

I was wrong.

I picked her up at her apartment and she was wearing a floral catastrophe of a dress, as if she had rolled around in a field of daisies and every flower had stuck to her outfit.

You know what though? It was cool. She was a nice girl, and I could overlook fashion idiosyncrasy.

What was harder to overlook was, on our way to the restaurant, her act of rolling down her widow and screaming, "Hey! Victor!" at a guy on the street.

She waved at him and he waved back. I asked her, "Want me to stop?"

"Yeah!"

I pulled over and she jumped out of the car, ran to Victor, and hugged him. I turned the car off and walked over to them.

She turned to me. "Oh my God! It's Victor!"

Victor and I shook hands. She went on, "Victor and I have been friends since junior high." She turned back to Victor, thus ending my temporary inclusion into their world.

After about ten or so minutes of catching up, she glanced at me, as if remembering a toilsome task, and said, "Well, I have to run, but don't be a stranger! I mean it!" She punched him in the arm, he said his goodbye, and we departed.

Back in the car, she said, "Victor and I did acting club in high school. We had a kissing scene."

I rolled my eyes. "That's hot."

"One time, before the play went up, we hung out and practiced it."

"Uh huh."

"For like, hours."

"That's fun."

"It was pretty hysterical."

"Hey, here's the restaurant."

We made it inside, and I'm not exaggerating or embellishing when I tell you that every other thing we talked about that night, whether it was horror movies, politics, or favorite music, Cynthia managed to slip in a mention of Victor.

"Oh my God! Victor loves horror movies!"

"Victor and I went to a rally together with some friends."

"Victor was my concert buddy throughout high school."

Finally, I asked, "Why didn't you and Victor ever date? Or did you?"

She put down her fork, frowned at me, and said, "That's inappropriate."

"What's inappropriate?"

"You don't ask that on a first date."

I said, "Oh. Okay. Just so we're clear, though, you can talk about another guy non-stop on a first date, but when I ask you a simple question, that's inappropriate?"

She leaned in. "Christ! Will you stop it? Change of subject!"

We changed the subject, all right. If silence is a conversation topic, then we talked each other's ears off for the rest of the night.