Flat Tire, Stalled Romance by Grace M. (19, F, St Louis, MO)
"During my freshman year of college I took a job as a aide/gofer for a professor. My duties including making copies, carrying things for her, grade tests, organize her files, etc. I really enjoyed my job but enjoyed it even more when the professor hired a junior (older man!) computer engineering student to help her teach the class and to tutor her students. I fell hard for "Alex". He was older, seemingly more mature than the average male college freshman, he was intelligent and had excellent taste in books. We could talk about anything and everything together. I thought I was making it painfully obvious that I liked him. I flirted, dressed up in cute clothing, and fabricated new computer problems just so he would come over to my dorm room.
Finally my hard work paid off. One day Alex pulled me aside and quietly said he had an extra ticket to a concert and would I like to go with hi. Of course I did! I accepted and spent the next few days planning the perfect concert going outfit. Now it was February while all of this going on; so the night of the date, it was about 20 degrees out. I, dressed in skimpy clothing, walked half way across campus, met up with Alex and we drove off into the sunset.
Well we barely got off campus before Alex pulled over. He had a flat tire. In the spirit of male chivalry, Alex insisted that I stay in the relative warmth of the car while he switched tires. After a few minutes of watching Alex getting nothing accomplished, I got out of the car to help him. I found him jumping on the wrench, trying to get the lug nuts off. "You're doing it wrong," I so helpfully volunteered. Alex shot me a death glare and kept on jumping. After a few moments of this, the wrench and the lug nut both broke. Now there was no way for Alex to finish changing the tire.
I called my roommate to come and pick me up. While we were waiting for her, Alex and I sat in his freezing cold car in silence. "Well this was kind of a bust for a first date," I offered. Alex was silent for a minute. "I didn't know this was a date...." he finally said. I was crushed! How was this not a date? We sat in awkward silence for the remainder of the half hour it took my roommate to pick me up.
On the way home, my roommate and I stopped at a local gas station to buy ice cream and rent a movie in order to make me feel better. In the gas station I literally bowled over some poor guy in my determination to get in and get out before I started crying. I stopped to help the guy up, only to discover I had gone out on an equally disastrous date with just a few months before. Needless to say, I fled the gas station, never to look back."
