Danielle, 29

Chapter 11

Danielle, 29

It’s almost eight on a Sunday night and I’m out with a girl named Danielle and everything is going fine. Under normal circumstances I might say it’s going well. She’s twenty-nine and very cute, and so far, the conversation has been better than average…

But my mind is elsewhere and I’m struggling to keep myself in the moment because I really have to go to the bathroom, and I’m not talking about just having to pee. This morning’s regrettable near 1 AM trip to Fiesta Tacos is churning fiercely in my stomach and we aren’t quite at def con five yet, but circumstances are becoming increasingly dire and I’m starting to question the likelihood that I can make it through the night without having to go. 

I know what you must be thinking �" Just go, man. Everyone does it. If only things were so simple. I hate going to the bathroom in public and always have. To make matters worse, this isn’t a situation where I can just go and I’m back in five minutes or less and I can jump right back into the date casually. This is a “nine tacos from the dollar menu with excessive amounts of hot sauce” dilemma: a messy, technical knockout �" an ordeal of ten minutes, minimum. 

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“God damn Thomas,” Jadyn giggles, “You’re nasty.” 

            The room rings in agreement, and I can’t really argue with them about that. 

           “It felt like it was five hundred degrees, and I had to go so bad I was sweating. My head must have been so shiny and wet, and I knew she could see it.” 

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“You alright?” Danielle asks. My abdomen is straining to keep its contents contained. She keeps talking but I can’t even look at her. My eyes are fixed desperately, longingly on the men’s room door. 

“Yeah, I mean, sometimes you just have to go,” Danielle says, snapping me back into the conversation. 

“Huh?” I snort.

“To the gym,” she says with a chuckle. “To work out.” 

“Oh,” I sigh, shifting in my seat, trying to will myself through the night. “I’m not really the gym type.” 

“You should go,” Danielle says. “You can tell so much about someone by how often they go. I find it’s best to get into a routine and be regular about it. I mean, I go every day. Sometimes twice.” 

I’m clenching my teeth as I smile. Is she messing with me? Does she know how badly I have to go, and she’s intentionally torturing me? Who the hell uses the verb “to go” so many times in the span of a few sentences? 

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“Dude, you’re paranoid,” Jadyn says. 

“Yeah Thomas, you’re f*****g weird,” Marky chimes in. 

“Markus, language,” I say, shooting a quick glance his way. It’s inevitable that when I tell my students any story, there’s a handful of interruptions. I can’t blame them for this one �" even as I sat there that night, I told myself I was just being paranoid - but then things got even weirder. I look over to Jadyn.

"You think so?" I ask. "Listen to what she said next... then you tell me if I'm paranoid."

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“Going’s half the battle. People make it out to be so hard, but sometimes you just have to go,” she says, leaving me speechless. As I sit here, bowels clenched, I come to realize I’m living an extended metaphor. Regardless of whether she’s talking about the gym, or me being a grown a*s man clenching his cheeks together and fighting in vain against a simple act of nature �" her words are prophetic. She’s right. Sometimes you just have to go. 

“Excuse me,” I say, standing up confidently and eyeing my destination; the men’s room. I march to the bathroom with my head held high. 

           It’s ten minutes later… and I’m fairly certain I’m going to die in this bathroom. 

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Deafening silence hovers over the classroom, before a single giggle ignites a chain-reaction of laughter that moves through the crowd like the wave at Fenway Park. But it stops at Rosa Cortez, who is sitting there with her arms folded, looking pissed off about god knows what, which is generally how she looks, so it could be nothing. Then again, it’s Rosa Cortez �" and you just never know what’s she capable of or what will set her off. I shush the laughs before continuing.  

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It started as a regular, albeit urgent mission. I had it all planned out. I was going to head in here, make quick work of it, get out and go on with the night. It would be insignificant; a non-event, something that I’d forget about as soon as I made my way back out there and rejoined the date as though nothing had happened. But now and for as long as I live, which is looking increasingly like five to ten minutes, no matter how hard I try to erase the events of the last twelve minutes in this bathroom �" I fear they’ll be forever etched in me, a part of my very existence from this day forth. 

    I was sitting on the toilet, and for all the grumbling and dancing my stomach was doing, and all the agony it forced upon me �" as soon as I sat down, the need to go subsided. I should have just gotten up and walked out, but the great prophet Danielle’s words were ingrained in me and it was like a voice from the heavens whispered down on me, “Going’s half the battle. People make it out to be so hard, but sometimes you just have to go,” and even though I no longer felt as though I had to go, I was going to go because it represented a major obstacle in my life, one that it took someone like Danielle to help me overcome. 

So, I went, compelled by forces within me I didn’t know existed. And then I flushed. 

But Danielle was a false prophet; doomed to the eighth circle of hell for eternity, for leading me astray down a sea of s**t both hypothetically and damn near literally. 

I watched it start to spiral down, then froze as it began to rise. I couldn’t bear to watch the sight of it coming back up, so I high tailed it out of the stall, attempted to dodge the flooding water, but as I lunged, I felt my footing go, heard my shoes squeak against the floor, felt myself sliding. 

And now I’m in def-con five. I am flat on my back, half of my body is soaked and I’m staring at The River Styx running across the floor and it shows no sign of slowing down…

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I pause for dramatic effect. Ten faces are staring at me as if enraptured, their eyes begging to know what happened next. It’s also only seven minutes into the first day of school, and I’ve just said the word s**t in front of my class for the first time this year. However, thanks to Rosa Cortez (whose face has changed, and she suddenly seems to be engaged and listening) going seven minutes without breaking anything, I believe that may be the longest I’ve made it into a school year without swearing. I let the silence linger, stirring their imaginations as they wonder the outcome of my dilemma, before I continue. 

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So, there I am, facing certain death on the disgusting bathroom floor, the toilet is still running and all that’s rushing through my mind is that I can’t go out this way. I have to do something �" I must live to tell this tale. 

I roll over, scramble to get to my feet, drenching myself even further, but I make it up… only to find myself cornered next to the sink. I wash my hands quickly, because you should always wash your hands when you use the bathroom, then I start to plot my escape route. 

I stare at the raging river and I think about jumping, but it's so wide I know I won’t make it. I have no choice. I’ll have to ford it. I lift my pant legs and I tiptoe right through and make it to the other side, but as I reach for the door my hand freezes. I look back at what I’ve done; the product of my false idolatry of Danielle - and as much as I’d rather be anywhere in the world right now, I can’t open the door. I stand here, calculating that there’s a fifty-fifty chance I die in here because I’m too embarrassed to ever leave... but I swallow my pride. I can’t let my final resting place be here… not in a public restroom. 

I unlatch the door, hoping to god that no one is standing outside it and breathe a sigh of relief when I see the coast is clear. As my sopping shoes squish and squeak beneath me, all the while feeling my cold, toilet water drenched clothes pressed against the left half of body - I know I’ve survived hell, but I can’t help but think there’s still at least a twenty-five percent chance I’ve contracted a disease that will kill me within the year. 

I stare across the restaurant at Danielle, frozen and at an impasse, a situation in which progress is not possible. Physically, I feel better �" but my psychological state, not so much. I’m shaken, rattled even by the ordeal, suspicious that this was her evil intentions, her conniving plot all along. My clothes are wet and maybe it’s just in my mind, but the smell of toilet water seems to be clinging to me. There’s no way I can sit down like this... but I can’t just walk out on her. Or… can I? 

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I pause, letting them process some of the new vocabulary words I’ve discreetly embedded into the story, as well as my clear message about the importance of proper bathroom hygiene. I’m about to tell them the ending… when the bell rings. 

“The end,” I grin. “Have a great first day back.” No one moves. 

“What the hell did you do?” Alessandro asks. 

“You should all know me well enough by this point to know that I �"“ 

“This dude probably ran out like a b***h,” Jadyn says, laughing up a storm and being joined by a few others. 

“He wouldn’t have left,” Maya says, coming to the defense of my honor. 

“You didn’t leave, did you?” Zeke asks.  

I shrug, “You’ll never know. Maybe a few less interruptions the next time and we’ll get to finish a story for a once. Oh well. Get to class.” 

My kids leave the room begrudgingly, looking far less like kids than they used to - their imaginations hopefully running wild at the possible endings to my story. Rosa’s the last to leave the room. She gets to the door, turns back to me and my immediate reaction is to raise my hands in self-defense from projectiles being fired at me. 

“You’re a pretty fucked up guy, Thomas,” she says with a snorting laugh. I’m tempted to give her the language warning, but I let it go, because it’s Rosa Cortez, and no one or nothing was hurt. I laugh to myself after she’s gone. Small victories.

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I made it through day one, and it was a good first day back. My ninth graders seem anxious to learn, and my tenth graders seem to have matured… a little. There were no fights, no blood, no incident reports needing to be completed - Hurricane Rosa was present, but she didn’t make land, and as I walk out of the building, I couldn’t be happier to be Mister Thomas, English teacher, once again. Summer me will return one day; June 24th, 2020, to be exact �" but for now, he’s in hibernation. Still, I’m counting down the days until Friday when I can go out on another date and take another crack at my search for the elusive one. And the beauty of coming back on a Tuesday; only three days to go. 

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Lying in bed, I can’t help but be grateful that the bell saved me this morning. I don’t know how I was going to turn the story in a teaching moment. I’d told them enough of my embarrassment; but I do wonder what my advisees would have thought of me had I told them the ending of the story - that I pulled a waiter aside, told him about the mess in the bathroom, gave him my credit card, and stood hiding like a kid in timeout in a corner out of sight while he charged me for the meal. Then I got out of there without looking back, embarrassed and smelling like the New York sewer system. 

I sent Danielle a message apologizing later that night. I received the lonely word “a*****e” in return and haven’t heard from her since. Maybe she’s right. It was not my finest moment - not one that I boasted proudly about to my mother. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Danielle’s gone, done with, and she wasn’t the one for me anyway. I like to imagine that if there was even a chance, even a sliver of a hope that she may have been, that I would have swallowed my pride, sat back down smelling like s**t, and I would have told her what happened, and we would have laughed about the whole thing. But she wasn’t, because what kind of twisted person goes to the gym twice a day?