My Belle

     I couldn’t believe Michelle wanted to go out with me.

     She was so amazingly perfect, for me, it was easy to overlook that one thing that would have frightened off pretty much any other potential partner.

     Before we get to all that though, it’s important to note that my luck with women has never been classified as what one might call good.

     I avoided them at all costs in elementary and middle school, and back in high school, the thought of even talking to one, despite how badly I wanted to, quite frankly terrified me. When I was forced to engage in conversation with a girl in class, those few times we had assigned group projects and what not, I would always break out in a terrible sweat and it took everything in my being to find the basic words to say hi, how are you, I’m good, this project sucks, huh? And even when I managed to say that, it was as if my body developed an acute flu. I’d get all clammy, I felt hot and flustered, and if the interaction went on long enough, sometimes I’d even get literally nauseous.

     After high school, I went straight into the workforce, since college wasn’t really necessary to prove that I was good at coding. I convinced my folks to let me stay at home and act as an incubator for me while I built my first app, Noteful.

     (Noteful, by the way, is a members-run community marketplace for school notes and study guides.)

     By providing room and board, mom and dad got 10% of my company.

     Naturally, this lifestyle afforded me the opportunity to never face my growing fear of talking to a girl. I could work alone, at home, and not have to go out in public for anything. Communicating with people via the computer, behind a screen, was much easier for me. Though, eventually, the party came to an end when my parents came up to my room one day, all serious like, and told me they’re worried about me. That they think I’m throwing my life away in this room and they want me to get out of the house and make real friends, out in the real world, not friends in my computer, as if the people I engage with on my computer weren’t real people at all. They told me I’m a bright young man with a lot to offer someone. They said unless I wanted to be alone for the rest of my life, I had to get out there and talk to people.

     The thought alone of talking to a girl, at this point, honestly made my insides rumble.

     I gotta say though, my parents are good people. They always do mean best.

     Since there was no stick they could really use, other than kick me out, which they would never do (I think), they actually came up with a pretty good carrot to get me out of the house. My dad told me he got two tickets and he was gonna take me to comic con. He said he would dress up with me in any cosplay I wanted, or he could stand off to the side and let me do my own thing. It was up to me.

     I opted for him to stand off to the side, though I honestly doubted that he would.

     For the event, I chose to go as someone that required a mask of some sort, as it would make it easier for me to blend in and not really be seen. After about 5 seconds of thought, I decided to go as Spiderman. I figured there would be plenty of other people dressed as Spiderman, so I wouldn’t be making too loud of a statement and I could cruise through the convention mostly unnoticed.

     Unfortunately, though, this plan backfired and comic con was an absolute nightmare.

     My dad didn’t stand off to the side at all.

     He was glued to my hip from the start. We hadn’t even completed our first lap of the convention before I figuratively almost died. My dad was walking around with a big shit-eating grin on his face, just way too happy, and he’d point out everything and anything he saw and ask me 100 questions about it. I managed to get a few steps ahead of him just as I saw an unbelievably fit and sexy person wearing a Spiderwoman suit that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. It was a good thing I was wearing spandex under my suit, otherwise my instant boner would have been screamingly obvious.

     Then it happened before I could stop it. While I stopped in my tracks to try and think of anything that would make my erection go away, my dad walked a few feet by me, saw what I saw, and stopped dead in his tracks. He turned back to me, raised his eyebrows, shifted his eyes to look over his shoulder, then turned back to the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. “Hey Spider Lady,” my dad yelled to her. “Have you met my son, Spiderman!?” He then turned to me as I tried to levitate out of my body and escape the moment altogether. “Hey Spiderman, come say hi!”

     I figuratively froze stiff, completely immobilized by embarrassment.

     Then, to my absolute astonishment, this sexy Spiderwoman started walking over to me with this nimbly sultry strut. A couple feet in front of me, she bent down in spider-like fashion and lifted her hand, as if asking to shake mine. “Spiderman, how do you do?” she said.

     I tried to respond coolly and calmly, but instead literally threw up in my mask.

     Vomit spewed out of my mask’s eyeholes and out of the fabric covering my mouth, it oozed out of the neck and onto my chest.

     I stood there for probably half a second, though it felt like eternity, one I will never forget, before I turned and sprinted out of the convention hall to the bathroom.

     I didn’t leave the house for 8 months after comic con.

     Then one day, after again expressing worry about me not getting outside, ever, my parents said I had to start doing things if I wanted to keep staying in the house. I had to help with groceries and all that stuff. So, under rule of home law, I went out grocery shopping.

     That’s when I met Michelle.

     I was standing in the pasta aisle, looking at the 500 variations of pasta sauce, figuring out which tomato basil garlic one I wanted to go with, when she just walked up to me.

     “I mean, jeeze,” she said, in a casual and joking and friendly way, “I don’t think there’s enough pasta sauce here. They need, like, at least 5 more options.”

     To my astonishment, words just flowed out of my mouth, without me having to even think about them first. “I know, right?” I said smoothly, shocked at the confidence with which I had just spoken those words, agog at the slight giggle this beautiful girl let out after they had left my mouth.

     “Me? I personally like that one.” She pointed down to a generic store-brand organic one.

     “Oh yeah? What makes that one so special?” I said.

     Honestly, I must have blacked out at this point. Next thing I knew, we were meeting up for a date and I had never felt so positively good and excited ever before my entire life. I was figuratively beaming with excitement and happiness.

     Over the course of an amazing dinner, conversation just flowed naturally, effortlessly. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. She laughed at my stupid jokes, I couldn’t help but laugh at hers; she asked me legit questions about Noteful, seemed enthralled by my answers; I asked about her life, she told me she was a coder herself, that she was building a neural-link videogame life simulator, which meant the player could put on a headset that would send their consciousness into an alternate reality where they’d be able to live out an entire lifetime while only a few minutes actually go by in real life, which was cool as all hell; and with each passing minute, it seemed like my confidence just kept leveling up and leveling up.

     After dinner, we drove to the beach and walked up and down the shore as the sun set. The conversation continued to flow uninterrupted as we just kept walking back and forth until it was dark out.

     I wondered what the hell was happening. What did I do to get so lucky and enjoy such a perfect moment? In my head, for the first time I think ever, I thanked god.

     Out in the distance, piercing the sky, I noticed a spotlight coming from downtown. “Huh,” I said, “I wonder what that is.”

     “Beats me,” Michelle said. For some reason, at the time, I could tell she was lying, that she did know what it was, but I didn’t call her out on it. I just continued on with the perfect evening.

     When it got fully dark and the beach emptied out, Michelle and I just sat there on the sand and watched the waves lap up on the shore.

     She sat right next to me, wrapped her arms around left arm, held my hand with both of hers, and nestled her head against my shoulder. I was amazed that this perfect evening just kept getting more and more perfect.  

     Then, it got even more perfect.

     I didn’t make the first move.

     She did.

     Before I knew it, I was kissing a girl for the first time in my life.

     Her lips were soft and warm, gentle and guiding.

     When she pulled back and looked me straight in my eyes, all I could say was, “Wow.”

     At the time, I had no idea how I was managing to keep it together and still give off all the right energies; which just goes to speak of the perfectness of Michelle, well, at least for me.

     We kissed softly once more, then she buried her temple between my shoulder and chest. I rested my cheek against the top of her head and wanted to sit there in that moment forever and ever.

     We turned our heads back towards the ocean and gazed rapturously at the expanse before us. She started snuggling in closer and closer, interlocking her feet and legs with mine, and I gained the confidence to start looking at her, this girl of my dreams, more closely. I took my attention from the ocean and gave it to her body, knowing the ocean would always be there, but Michelle might not. I wanted to really soak in the moment and her essence and never forget a single thing. When my eyes came down to her hands holding mine, I noticed three distinct freckles, the only freckles on her entire body, shaped in a perfect equilateral triangle on the inside of her left wrist. “Hey, pretty cool,” I said, tapping each of the three freckles.

     “WAIT DON’T DO TH—” was all she managed to say before I tapped the third freckle.

     I tapped that third freckle and as we sat there on the beach, Michelle stopped talking mid-word, her body erected itself so she was sitting straight up, palms open facing the sky, froze stiff like that for a good 2 seconds, and then her head snapped backward with a violent crunch, to the point the back of her head was pressed firmly against her spine and the top of her skull was pointed directly at the ground. Once her head snapped in place like that, a powerful and literal beam of energetic light shot straight through the part of her neck now facing upward toward outer space. It projected out until it reached the stars in the night sky and seemed to travel on forever beyond that.

     Sure, I panicked for a minute or two. I may have gazed blankly at the ray of pure energy for the better part of a few moments, wondering what in the world was going on. I may have thought I was dreaming and none of this was real or that I might be suffering a psychotic break from reality or something. I admit I thought of just running away from the situation, from what had been, up till now, the most perfect night of my life so far. But, you know what, soon enough, I had to come to terms with the fact that this was very much my reality. Better yet, I figured there had to be some earth-shatteringly historic explanation for all this. Maybe it even had something to do with the similar light I saw earlier, that Michelle played the fool to.

     Eventually, I had the wherewithal to just tap the three freckles again. One, two, three, same as the first time, but nothing happened. So, naturally, I tried them in reverse, three, two, one, and just like that, the beam of energy sucked back in on itself and Michelle’s head snapped right back in to place.

     “Sorry about that,” Michelle said, as if she sneezed and a little bit sprayed on me.

     “Uh,” I said. “What the hell just happened?”

     “Oh, that? I don’t know… I don’t know if you really want to know just yet. It might ruin everything.”

     “I mean, I feel like I gotta know…”

     My heart hung in limbo as the one perfect encounter I have ever had with a female was on the verge of being ruined by some paranormal phenomenon.

     Michelle let out a soft sigh. “Well, you asked for it,” she said. “Honestly, you weren’t supposed to see that yet. But since you did…”

     I literally waited with bated breath for what she was about to say.

     “Okay, remember how I said I’m a coder and I’m building a neural-link videogame life simulator that allows the player to enter an alternate reality? Well, you and the world you know are that alternate reality. I’m here, as well as other places across your globe at this exact moment, just fixing some bugs and making sure everything is set for launch. I want the first gamer entering this world to think she’s in the real world.”

     Uh, what?

     I didn’t actually say that aloud, but Michelle could tell I needed some more explaining. “Look,” she said. “Your world, everything you know, it pretty much is the real world. It’s the exact same as life back in my reality. It’s just, you know, it’s not that reality. It’s this one. You’ve lived your life, right? That was all real to you, you’ve learned about history and are familiar with the goings on of today across the world and all that… so ipso facto… your reality is still real! So there’s no need to worry about that.”

     Well that’s good, I thought, unsure if I was actually being facetious. I had so many questions I couldn’t think of one to ask. I guess more or less accepting the news that my reality is just a simulation some girl had built, my ego, which apparently was still super real, had to know what she meant. Out of all the questions I could have asked, my ego made me say: “You said fixing some bugs? So, what? I’m a bug or something?”

     “Oh, no! Nothing like that. It’s nothing.”

     “Tell me.”

     “Seriously, it’s nothing!”

     “Seriously, tell me!”

     “Fine. You know how you’ve been worse than bad at speaking to females your whole life? Like, ridiculously bad? Like so bad it actually makes you physically ill?”
     “Yeah I get it. Bad. Ridiculously bad.”

     “Well it’s not your fault!” she said all bubbly like, as if that made me feel any better. “No human should be so repulsed by speaking or interacting with anyone. In your case, it occurs when speaking to someone of the opposite biological sex. For others, it happens when they’re forced to interact with someone that’s different from them in any number of ways. People who falsely self-identify as a political party, they malfunction when engaging with someone in a different political party; or when some people respond with fear and then hate when interacting with people who look differently. It’s all a malfunction in my code that I’ve been working on forever. But it’s nothing that can’t be fixed!” When she said forever, I could tell she meant it figuratively as it pertained to her reality, but at the same time, I reckoned it could be applied literally for mine.

     When I just sat there silently, clearly confused, she helped me out: “So, like, yours and everyone else’s DNA in this reality is technically part of this feedback loop I put into the code, and there’s a slight anomaly with your iteration. For lack of a better term, it kind of makes you malfunction when you interact with a member of the opposite sex. I’m here to make it right.”

     I didn’t know what to say, so I continued to sit there, still looking out at the expanse of ocean that was just revealed to me is nothing but code. I could feel her looking at me the whole time. Eventually she looped her arms with mine again and held my hand again and put her head into my shoulder.

     “We were having such a great time,” she said. “Can we just act like this whole thing never happened?”

     Strangely, that’s exactly what we did.

     I mean, it was just so nice spending time with her. I know it was only our first date, I know she technically wasn’t real, that nothing was, but I really felt like this must be what love feels like. (I know now, that that’s due to this being my first encounter with a mutual attraction, but who cares, that’s how I felt at the time.)

     Michelle and I dated for about two months, and over that time, we spent almost every day together, mostly out in public, enjoying life. With her holding my hand, or my arm, or just simply walking next to me, that confidence growing within me witnessed stupendous growth. We both just kind of silently agreed to never talk about that night on the beach. I think I was so foolishly in love, I didn’t want to spoil that. I wanted to be together forever.

     My parents likewise were just as happy to see me with someone. They would figuratively beam when Michelle would come over for dinner.

     But eight weeks in, Michelle said she had to go, that I would never see her again, and that she valued our time together.

     It felt like my heart literally broke apart in my chest.

     I’m not ashamed to say I cried and cried day after day for probably a week.

     But now, hey, I’m doing good. I still help my parents out with the groceries and errands and what not, I'm still working on Noteful, and honestly, it’s pretty nice. That confidence I gained is still there.

     I even find myself sometimes talking to girls.