"The Hotline Scene"

As of this writing, I have been asked for my phone number a grand total of three times. Many girls find such occasions flattering—exhilarating, even—but to someone who spent four years at an all-girls high school, a strange male asking for something so personal can feel unfamiliar, even terrifying. Prank numbers like the Rejection Hotline—an automated message listing reasons why a caller may be undesirable to the intended callee—are saviors for girls like me who panic at the first sign that someone is planning to follow up on any flirtatious conversation. My experiences might have traumatized me less had I simply taken the time to memorize this number well enough to give it out as my own.

My first prospective suitor appeared out of the crowd at the Starlight Parade, an annual evening event held in Portland each year as part of the Rose Festival. The summer air drifted through the streets, pleasantly warm; I had been home from my first year of college for only a few weeks. I had never been to the parade before, as my practical parents despised fighting for parking downtown, so the throngs of people and subsequent chaos were new to me. The friends that had dragged me there, Emily and Margot, were pushing their way through the lawn chairs and picnic baskets on the sidewalk, conveniently clearing a path for me as they searched for Margot’s family.

We planned to watch the parade through then slip away to the local all-ages gay club a few blocks away. As such, I was almost certainly overdressed for such a casual event—my clinging black top glittered with sequins, I was wearing heels for the first time in ages, and I had ditched my glasses in favor of contacts and eyeliner. Margot, the effortless dresser, wore her shoes much better than I did, despite her ample height. Her make-up looked natural, while mine vaguely resembled a drag queen—somewhat appropriate, I suppose, considering our next destination. Emily, however, was a completely different story. A hippie at heart, she preferred quirk to convention and eccentricity to beauty. Her distinctive, squeaky laughter ricocheted off the buildings around us, annoying everyone else, but helping me pinpoint her .

The marching band music rumbled loud around us as we continued to weave through the people focused on the extravagant floats and dancing cowboys. Finally, we came to the curb and the crosswalk, with the last obstacle we had to cross the parade itself. Thus began the long wait for a gap in the performers—all we needed was one tiny spot that we could dash through.

The scene played out like this:

From behind me, someone taps on my shoulder. I turn to see a boy, definitely no older than thirteen or fourteen. He’s dressed like a typical teenage boy on a typical summer evening—khaki shorts, plain T-shirt, sandals, a baseball cap pulled hastily over his messy brown hair.

“Hey, can I have your number?” he asks, smooth as a button.

I have to give him credit—the kid’s got balls—but it’s hard to keep the smirk from flitting across my face. “How old are you?” I ask, putting a hand on my hip.

“Twenty-three,” he says automatically—a planned response, for sure.

Again, I’m impressed by his quick thinking and confidence, but again, it’s almost impossible to keep from laughing. “Uh huh. I don’t think so.”

For the first time, he looks embarrassed and I almost feel bad. What if he’s only asking on a dare from his friends? Will they laugh at him as soon as I’m out of sight?

Before I can react to this new train of thought, however, Emily grabs me by the arm and pulls.

“Come on, we have to go now!”

I turn back to look for the boy, but he has already disappeared from whence he came. Relieved that I can avoid letting him down, but also disappointed in a way, I follow Emily and Margot across the street.

I spent the rest of the evening recounting the experience and laughing about it with my friends. For months I retold the story to everyone I knew, despite the constant teasing about my “pedophilic tendencies,” because it was, after all, the first time anyone had ever asked for my number.

The second time, I was a little more prepared, though not by much. After a long day of pretending to program computers at my IBM internship, I had returned to my apartment complex ready for some food and a nap. Upon entering through the front gates, however, I was greeted with the sounds of terrible pop music and children laughing as they splashed about in water, and I realized that today was the day the complex had decided to throw its apparently-annual “fun in the sun” pool party.

Yes, it was exactly as lame as it sounded.

Lame, however, did not mutually exclude useful. The smell of hot dogs and fries mingled with the scent of chlorine as I passed by the pool, and a quick glance into the area confirmed my suspicions: there was free food to be had, one benefit at least to having my ears invaded by Ke$ha for the next few hours.

After dropping off my laptop and purse at my apartment, I returned to the festivities with my roommate Lucy. I grabbed some junk food and lemonade and looked around for a table. As luck would have it, the only empty one stood right in front of the exuberant disc jockey. I sat down with a sigh, hoping I wouldn’t sustain any serious ear damage from the booming speakers. While I waited for Lucy to finish getting her food, I watched the kids paddling around on inflatable crocodiles and hitting each other with foam noodles. A part of me wanted to join them; the oppressive Texas sun pushed in at me from all sides, and I was already sweating effortlessly.

The scene played out like this:

Without any warning or introduction, someone sits down across from me. I glance up from shooing away the flies congregating around my hot dog to see my worst nightmare: a young man wearing baggy shorts, a dirty wife-beater tank top, and the type of gaudy gold jewelry that can only be described as “bling.” I groan internally. I thought that horrible trend had gone out years ago. I swear to God, if his first word to me is—

“‘Sup,” he says, in perfect rapper imitation, and I begin looking for the nearest escape route.

Almost shouting to be heard, he introduces himself as Carlos, “one hundred percent Mexican,” from the complex across the street. His dark hair is cropped short and his eyes have a beady, rat-like shiftiness to them. I can tell he’s trying to act cool, but he keeps glancing around, eyes darting everywhere, and honestly, I’m a little unnerved. Oblivious to my discomfort, he picks a conversation topic out of the Lady Gaga song currently playing and starts to ramble about how she should have won American Idol. I just nod and try to keep from correcting his factual errors (namely, that Lady Gaga never competed on American Idol), the whole time wondering where the hell Lucy has gotten to. When she finally makes it to the table, Carlos seems put off but continues to spout complete bullshit for another ten minutes while she eats.

Lucy finishes her food quickly and pushes back the cheap plastic chair, raising an eyebrow at me to indicate I can explain my new friend to her back at our apartment. Seeing an opportunity to flee, I follow suit.

“So, uh, I’ve got to go work out,” I say, grabbing my paper plate and napkin with a little more force than necessary. I’ve managed to avoid catastrophe. I’m almost out. And then…

“Hey, you got a number?”

“Uhh, like a phone number?” I ask stupidly.

“Yeah, a number I can call you at.”

I have absolutely no idea what to do. Common sense says that I should make up some lie about my phone being broken, or else just flat-out refuse, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to reject someone—even someone I’m not interested in—so obviously. Confused and conflicted, I do the first and easiest thing I can think of: I spit out my phone number as quickly as possible and practically sprint back to my apartment.

I spent an extra-long time at the gym that afternoon trying to figure out how exactly I could have avoided giving him my real number and wondering if he would actually follow up on our brief, one-sided conversation. I doubted I had made the right choice by delaying my inevitable reaction; wouldn’t it have been kinder and politer to explain right then and there that I had a boyfriend and wasn’t available? I discovered quickly that, yes, I should have just withheld my number, for he did call me and, Christ, was it a nightmare. For weeks my phone rang at odd hours of the morning, and I constantly received misspelled, grammatically incorrect text messages, written in ALL CAPZ CHATZPEAK with Z’s everywhere there should have been an S. Well, another life lesson learned.

The third and final attempt made upon my phone number occurred here at RPI. The sky was whitewashed with clouds as I trudged through the brown, slushy remnants of snow, trying to reach the DCC without slipping, but my objective was disrupted by someone coming up behind me.

“I like your hair,” he said. “It’s pretty.”

Had I been a little more awake and a little less freezing, I might have had the properly witty response to such a mundane statement. However, this was one of the many occasions when I had overslept and thus forgotten both my scarf and hat on a day that promised heavy winds and below-zero temperatures. I was almost ten minutes late to a class I had no interest in attending, and the mile-long walk from my apartment to campus had not helped my mood at all. Best to give a simple answer and walk away, I thought, lest I subject this poor creature to my pre-coffee self.

The rest of the scene played out like this:

“…thanks.”

He looks pleased with himself as he comes into view. “What’s your name?” His face seems familiar. I think we might be Facebook friends or something else meaningless like that.

“Aileen,” I reply, hoping that if my short responses don’t reveal my irritation, my unyielding pace will. I hike my backpack higher up my shoulder and keep moving.

He follows me. “Oh, with an EI?”

“AI, actually.”

“Oh, like the band. You know A.I.?”

“Uhhh… sure. Yeah, right,” I say, unimpressed. I can see where this is going already.

He says his name is Alex, and by this point, I’m pretty sure I have seen him pop up on Facebook occasionally. We reach the heavy glass doors of the building and, surprisingly, he holds the door for me. Brownie points for chivalry, I guess.

“Are you going to calc?” he asks.

“Ha. I haven’t taken calc in, like, two years.”

He seems unphased by—or perhaps unaware of—the subtle insult in my tone, so I admit that I’m on my way to operating systems, before saying, “You know, you look familiar. I think we lived in the same hall freshman year.”

“Oh, were we freshman together?” he asks, but there’s something about the way he says it that tells me he really could care less. He doesn’t give a damn about how we may have been connected in the past—all he’s interested in is the present.

We’re almost down the length of the building’s long hallway by now. I can see the door to my classroom, open, tantalizing. I speed up a little bit, trying not to be obvious about it.

“Well, this is where I’m going,” I say when we get there.

And then, once again, that dreaded question… “So, you got a number?”

(Seriously, is that the newfangled way to ask someone out? Not even, “Can I have your number?” but “Do you have a number?” Of course I have a number. Maybe if you asked the appropriate question, I’d give it to you.)

“Look,” I say, stifling my annoyance in an attempt to be polite, “I’ve got a boyfriend, so if that’s what you’re looking for—”

“Oh no,” he says quickly, though his facial expression makes it clear I’ve thrown off his game. “I mean, I just want to take you out for a friendly coffee or something. My class is right next door, so how ‘bout I catch up to you in a month or so, and if you’re still dating him, we can just be friends.” A hint of the implied but-only-if-we-have-to lingers in the air.

“Yeah, sure,” I say, stifling a laugh as I enter my lecture hall. The boyfriend and I have been together for over a year; I don’t think that’s going to change any time in the next month.

As soon as I sat down at one of the creaky desks, I logged on to Facebook to satisfy my curiosity. A search and a few clicks later, I’d confirmed it—not only were we “friends,” but he had lived just down the hall. And the guy hadn’t even recognized me at all. But then again, from what I remembered of freshman year, he had been too busy harassing our RA and having raucous sex with his girlfriend to notice anyone besides himself. It took all my self-control not to post a status about the encounter, tagging him by name so it would show up on his profile, because, damn, would he have been in for an embarrassing surprise.

Each of these three encounters happened, as if by clockwork, once every calendar year, with the most recent taking place just a few weeks ago. By that logic, I should be safe from any more unwanted number solicitations until 2012. On the other hand, looking at the situation mathematically, the encounters are increasing at a rapid rate. With fourteen months between the first and the second, but only seven separating the second from the third, should I be expecting the next potentially awkward yet hilarious meeting by May?

Maybe I should memorize the Rejection Hotline number, just in case.