We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarassingly, A True Story

Sundquist, nominated for prom king, worries about dancing with his prosthesis because it makes him too stiff. He needs a date for the dance and asks Evelyn. Although Evelyn is still in her on-off relationship with Mason, she accepts. He fantasizes about being her boyfriend, but cannot tell her the truth about how he feels.

Sundquist prepares for prom by renting a tux and buying Evelyn a corsage with the money his mother has given him. On the way to Evelyn’s house he has a panic attack and arrives sweaty. In the car, Evelyn says that she is thinking of applying to Virginia Tech—Mason’s college—and that they may get back together. Sundquist thinks that his chances with Evelyn rest on what happens at prom.

When they finally get to the dance, Sundquist and Evelyn face a round of introductions. Sundquist worries about being able to balance on Evelyn’s arm and navigate the six narrow steps at the same time. He recalls an earlier occasion in his freshman year when a girl took his arm and he made an awkward descent. When Sundquist finally makes it on the stage as one of the prom court, he has an inkling that he, “the nominee of the commoners,” the unpopular majority, would win prom king (187). When the honor goes to a football player, Joseph Chuk, Evelyn tries to comfort Sundquist, telling him that it is “just a stupid popularity contest” (188). Sundquist, however, takes his defeat to heart, feeling that he would be able to laugh harder at the stupidity of the contest if he had won.

Sundquist is deeply self-conscious on the dance floor, as he assesses each type of dance in terms of its difficulty. The type that particularly torments him is “Close Fast Dancing […] where a couple assumes a slow-dance position but sways and spins at the speed of a fast dance” (191). Sundquist wishes he could be a skilled enough dancer to impress Evelyn, but his prosthesis makes it difficult because it’s designed for stability instead of bending into the rhythm. Evelyn goes off for a break because her arthritis has made her tired. When she returns, Sundquist is watching a skilled gymnast-like dancer called Jerome, who people have formed a circle around. When Jerome has finished, Sundquist offers to entertain the crowd in Jerome’s place.

When he has everyone’s attention, Sundquist performs the extraordinary feat of a standing split. He can do this because his prosthesis can extend beyond the range of a natural human hip. The crowd goes wild, and high on his success, Sundquist hopes to track down Evelyn for a session of Close Fast Dancing. She puts him off by disappearing to speak with her friend and creating space between their bodies on the dance floor. Still, he determines that tonight will be the night when things go further with Evelyn.

He places his hand on Evelyn’s hip and notices that she is looking at his hand. He gives up, discouraged. When he lets go, he sees that a guy called Alberto is grinding on Evelyn and that she is laughing as though it is all a joke. Although Sundquist feels hurt from not being Evelyn’s boyfriend, he can do little to stop Alberto. Sundquist does not try to make any more moves on Evelyn, and feels that she used him by “keeping me around because it felt good to have a boy pining for her” (202). At the end of the prom, he feels the note of falseness about his and Evelyn’s friendship—he admits that he would not have been interested in being friends had he not been attracted to her. They do not see each other much after prom, and she resumes her on-off relationship with Mason.

Sundquist judges that Evelyn’s unwillingness to get close to him at prom meant that she was likely not attracted to him. However, he would like to investigate her “perplexing emotional distance at prom despite deep platonic friendship” (207).

When Sundquist meets Evelyn, she is now married to Mason. The fact of the marriage drives home that she chose another man over Sundquist. While Evelyn would rather make small talk, Sundquist persists in asking her about what happened at prom and why she was so distant. She confesses that she had a massive crush on him and that every time she and Mason broke up, she was waiting for Sundquist to ask her out. This news shocks Sundquist. He feels as though he has discovered “an old lottery ticket in the bottom of a sock drawer, a scratch-off that was a big winner, but the ticket had an expiration date that had passed years ago” (215).

In college, Sundquist and his friend Brad sneak into a fraternity party through a window. They want to go to this party to meet girls. At the party, Sundquist spots a girl called Paulette, with whom he has briefly hung out in a group. He decides to take the plunge and initiate a session of Close Fast Dancing with her by placing a hand around her waist. Paulette shoves away his hands “as if they were too grotesque to allow near her body,” a feat that “was more personal and painful than the worst-case scenario I could have imagined” (225). It feeds an already present insecurity that his body is not good enough. While Paulette seems remorseful and invites Sundquist to dance with her group of friends, he refuses. His friend, Brad, accompanies him out of the fraternity party and Sundquist tells him what happened. While talking does not make Sundquist feel better, he is glad to not have to bottle up the truth.

Sundquist is rare amongst his college classmates in that he would prefer to find a committed relationship as opposed to an ACR, or an “Ambiguous College Relationship” which alternates drunk make-out sessions with periods of distance (227). Sundquist sets his sights on a girl called Lilly Moore, who he has met at a Christian event, and eventually asks her out. His friend Brad hints that J-Crew-wearing Lilly may be too preppy for thrift-store addict Sundquist, but Sundquist ignores this claim. He and Lilly go on coffee dates for a month and a half and his instincts tell him that things are going well. However, in retrospect, this proves not to be the case.

When Sundquist is describing his failed high school forays into dating, his friends Brad and Kyle are astonished that he has never told a girl how much he likes her. They insist that he tells Lilly how he feels about her, to get this important first step out of the way.

Sundquist arranges the occasion, inviting Lilly out on a romantic canoe trip instead of coffee. When he picks Lilly up, she is with friends. One of her friends, Sarah, asks if she can come canoeing too, a maneuver which Sundquist feels he must accept. Then, however, when another of Lilly’s friends needs a ride, Sundquist asks to come along in the car so that he will have some alone time with Lilly. When they have dropped off Lilly’s friend, Sundquist confesses his admiration for Lilly in a startling amount of adjectives. She confesses that she has a crush on the guy she was dating the previous semester, and not on Sundquist. A humiliated Sundquist must then face canoeing with both Sarah and Lilly.

Back with his friends, Sundquist tells them what happened. They confess that they are not surprised. They had already assumed that Lilly had put Sundquist in the Friend Zone. However, they wanted him to experience what it was like to open his heart and face rejection in the hope that it would not hurt so much next time. Sundquist admits that they are right because he has survived the rejection. Unfortunately, his humiliation with Lilly is set to continue.

Sundquist indulges in wishful thinking, hoping that Lilly will change her mind about him. During the summer he calls her once a day, every day, not knowing about how cellphones make it easy to trace caller ID. When she does not pick up, he assumes that she is busy, and not that she does not want to talk to him.

He gets a taste of his own medicine when a girl called Stella, who learns his schedule and appears everywhere he does, stalks him. Freaked out by Stella’s behavior, Sundquist tells her first objectively, and then more emphatically, to stop. However, he cannot help seeing uncomfortable parallels between his own behavior and Stella’s. He concludes that he only sees Stella’s behavior as stalkerish owing to his lack of romantic interest in her. He generalizes that “if we have a crush on someone, that person’s every behavior attracts us more. But if we don’t like that person, the very same behavior will annoy us” (254).

When Sundquist reaches his 20th birthday without having kissed someone, he elicits the help of his friend Katie. He talks at length about liking someone else—Lilly—but being attracted to Katie at the same time. Katie is the last girl he kisses in college.

In Sundquist’s college senior year, when he is out a bar with his friends, his drunk friend Ben spots Lilly Moore and, pointing at her, shouts “Dude, it’s your girl” (260).

A week later, when Sundquist, Brad, Lilly, and her friend are hanging out at her apartment, she asks Sundquist about what Ben said the other night. Sundquist lies to Lilly, so that he will not have to admit that he still likes her after all these years. Lilly does not call him out on his lying, and Sundquist always wonders whether she knew that he liked her throughout the four years of college.

Sundquist speculates that Lilly never had romantic feelings for him, but would like to know why she was curious about Ben’s outburst.

As Lilly is not from Sundquist’s hometown, he sends her a Facebook message seeking closure. In it, he asks her whether she knew Sundquist was lying about what Ben said, and that he had a crush on her. Lilly replies a few days later, stating that she cannot remember the conversation at all. This confirms to Sundquist that the affection was one-sided, as this “watershed moment” in his life “did not even make enough of an impression that the memory was worth saving” for her (272).