Chapter 7 — Zero to One Hundred

James
James
Sep 7, 2018 · 6 min read

Last night was a blast after dinner. We end up going to some club in Hollywood and dance for a bit. I catch the girl telling someone she is waiting for her boyfriend while I was in the bathroom. I thought that was cute even though I still had no plans to make her my girlfriend. I figure today we can go walk around the Sunset Boulevard a bit in the morning and then head over to the Warner Brothers Studio. Everything was going according to plan until a bit after we get our tickets for the tour. Oh my god how shit changed quickly. Things literally went from zero to one hundred with this girl. The barista messed up our order so we end up with extra coffee so I was in a pretty good mood. She sits down on the sofa and I sit down in her lap. We are being all PDA and lovey dovey taking pictures. She asks to see my phone to take a look at the pictures we had just taken. Now I’m sure as a man reading this, I’m even thinking…that was a bad idea bro…but I am not the type of person to hide anything and I didn’t feel like I had anything to hide. I forgot to factor in the psychotic tendencies of this chick, but hindsight is always 20/20. You see, about a week earlier my uncle sent me a picture of a girl on Whatsapp. He followed the picture with “She will be in San Diego in September”. I did what I though was right and said nothing. I was with a girl so why get greedy and look forward to the next one. Plus if the chick was coming in September, then I have plenty of time to deal with that later. Unbeknownst to me, the app downloaded the picture my uncle sent automatically. Now, imbedded in my picture album is a photo of some really Brazilian looking chick. How do you think this girl is going to react when she is scrolling through all my pictures and sees her? Not good. Not good at all. “Who is this?” she asks me, turning the phone around to my face. “Oh that is just some girl my uncle sent me a picture of”. Now I may not be a liar, but at this moment I can definitely sympathize with the lying mentality. If I had just told her it was my cousin or something else, maybe I would have gotten away with it. Instead, I inserted the key into the gates of hell and I unleashed the devil. “Oh HELL NO!” she yells while jumping up from behind me, shoving me to the side. She belligerently and angrily storms across the tour lobby screaming in Portuguese. She is now yelling at me that she cannot believe this and she should have known this would have happened. I can do nothing but call her name and ask her to calm down. I can’t even touch her because she just begins to scream for me to get out of her way. I keep trying to tell her I can explain but she just is not having it. She is now crying and saying that she is shaking. I’m glad there were no other Brazilians around (surprisingly) or else they would have thought I poisoned her coffee. After what felt like forever walking back and forth chasing her, the lobby is empty of people and the tour guides are escorting the outliers into the screen room. She refuses to leave because she doesn’t want to go anywhere with me, so I tell her that she either has to leave with me or go on the tour. She surprisingly decides to go on the tour. We enter the screen room with all awkward eyes looking away. They know we know they noticed. We sit in the screen room as the tour guide explains the history behind the studio. She loudly whispers in my ear to see the message my uncle sent me. I stupidly did not delete the message, so I show it to her. “Doesn’t he know I am here with you now?” she asks me, still angry. “Yeah, I told him you are here with me when he and my grandma called last week,” I reply. “Then why is he sending you these pictures of whores?” she asks again raising her voice loud enough for the people around us to feel uncomfortable. “My uncle is a pig! That is why I didn’t reply!” I say to defend myself. “Look I’ll message him right now,

‘No t h a n k y o u un c l e b u t I a l r e a d y h a v e a g i r l I l i k e,r e m e m b er?’

, see?” You would think that would be the end of it. The guilt is on my uncle and she is now warming up to me. Well apparently my uncle had nothing better to do on this particular day, at this particular hour, in this particular minute. After about two minutes of silent movie watching in the screen room, my phone buzzes. The girl gives me the death stare as I turn my phone over and the bright white backlit screen comes into focus inside the pitch-black screen room. “Have some fun little nephew! Marriage comes later!” the message from my uncle reads. I see a spark flicker in her eyes of hatred as she abruptly blurts out “AY NO!” My face turns red as people around us shush. I quickly start typing in front of her again, “

‘N o it is f i n e u n c l e.I a m h a p p y g e t t i n g t o k n o w a W O N D E R F U L’ w o m a n r i g h t n o w. T h a n k s a g a i n u n c l e.’

, see I this is why I didn’t respond. He is a pig!” I am quick to throw my uncle under the bus, but to my defense, he should have gotten the hint. I even sent the man pictures of the girl and me. Unfortunately he didn’t get that hint either. I try throughout the movie to dig myself out of this hole that my uncle is just digging me deeper into. During the movie she takes my phone and messages my mom about how much of a pig my uncle is and what he is saying. That at least took some of the load off my shoulders. As the lights come on and the tour guides are dividing up groups of people, my phone buzzes again. This time she blurts out an “AY NO!” before I even pull the phone out of my pocket. This whole time I am still consoling her and telling her that I want her and not the other girl or any other girl. I sigh and turn over the phone expecting the worst but hoping it was just my mom or a friend. To my dismay, my uncle’s message caused my phone to buzz saying, “You need to live while you are young nephew! The other girl will never know.” At this point I am dead in the water. I quickly try to put all the blame on my uncle and ensure her that she is now seeing the reason I didn’t reply to him in the first place. We are the last ones out of the screen room and onto the tour cart. I’m not sure if the other couples purposefully separated us, but she ended up sitting behind me for the most part of the tour. She didn’t speak to me much for the first couple minutes, but then softened up. She wouldn’t get near me still, but she did take pictures and make silly faces.

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