She’s looking across the table at me, but only because she’s trying not to look at him.

We met a couple weeks ago at some friend’s friend’s party and got to talking about our mutual hatred of our Russian Lit. conference. (I recognized her right away but I let her guess how she knew me for a while.) But I was a bit drunk and had to read her name off the attendance sheet today because I was too embarrassed to ask what it was again.

And then there’s him, Marco. My cheerfully oblivious best friend wouldn’t have noticed her anyways; he’s busy tapping away on some cartoony game on his phone under the table.  

I’ve been pretending to read along with our T.A. for the past five minutes, but I’m really busy coming up with the life story of the girl who’s been accidentally staring at me for a little too long now. So far she’s a vegetarian camp counsellor who hated her parents for making her learn the violin (even though she made it to first chair in high school), but I still can’t decide if she’s into lame art films or if she’s more of a shameless Katherine Heigl fan.

When I look up at her she quickly rolls her eyes at Whatever-His-Name-Is droning on about Tolstoy and smiles.

She’s wearing a tiny cross necklace. I bet she doesn’t believe in God.

After aspiring professor So-and-So stops talking mid-sentence when people start packing up, I walk around the table and ask her (Katie, unless I counted the number of seats she was sitting away from me wrong) if she wants to come with Marco and I to this open mic thing tonight at a record store. She glances at Marco, who’s still fiddling with his phone, and says yes.

As we leave the room Marco asks me what I was talking to her about.

“Nothing,” I tell him.

I meet her later on outside the campus gates, she’s wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a scarlet beret. Definitely not a Heigl fan.

“Where’s Marco?” she asks.

“He’s sick. Food poisoning I think,” I say, doing my best to sound sympathetic.

She’s disappointed but when we start walking and she tells me she’s never been to an open mic before I at least know she’s not dying to go home. She calls me by the wrong name (close, but still wrong) and then apologizes and says it was a “blonde moment.”

“You’re not blonde,” I say.

“I’m strawberry blonde,” she protests. “What colour would you call it?”

“Reddish,” I admit.

She groans and tells me I suck. We walk about a half block in silence and then she musters up the courage to say what’s really on her mind.

“So is this a date?” she asks.

“Do those still exist?” I say.

“What? Of course they do,” she snaps back.

“Do you think it’s a date?” I ask.

“No,” she says, a little too quickly.

I try to change the subject by pointing out the record store across the street. We walk inside and it’s a little less busy than I thought. There’s a small stage set up in the back corner with a few tables and about 15 other twenty-somethings hanging around; a couple are tuning guitars, others are talking or reading over poems on their crimpled pieces of paper.

There’s a bulletin board of photocopied gig posters, most for shows long passed. We walk towards the stage, (after putting out my arm with a theatrical “Shall we?”) passing rack after rack of overpriced vinyl records. I always thought the Wax Museum was just a stupid pun, but then it hit me how perfect it is: the best songs ever written sit around in racks or taped to hip kids’ walls, but no one listens to them—they’re just plastic decoration.

We sit down at a table and she pulls out a bottle of absurdly bright red lipstick, probably from Revlon’s Jessica Rabbit collection. The contrast between her lips and pale skin gives her an open casket kind of look that I’m trying really hard to ignore.

“Want some?” she jokes.

“Not from the bottle,” I say.

She laughs but turns her head away. Telling the truth wasn’t working, either.

A guy in a flannel shirt and knit cap takes the stage first, and plays a Jeff Buckley song so obscure that Jeff Buckley would’ve had a hard time remembering the words. His half-assed singing didn’t matter much; the song choice was the real performance. After as much applause as you can get out of a handful of kids trying hard to look like they don’t give a shit, he steps down and goes back to his table.

A guy in a plain but clearly expensive black hoodie and shiny jeans with carefully mussed hair hops on stage carrying a megaphone. He pushes the microphone aside, and starts speaking, softly at first, through his staticky electric conch:

I’m a friend request from a stranger.

And I will never—I said, I WILL NEVER—apologize for it!

Just as fast as he was there he was gone, out the door and off to God knows where. Nobody clapped. Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything. We all just kind of sat there, looking for someone to roll our eyes at.