Julia straightened out, finished her sandwich, narrowly avoiding a glob of chicken salad that plopped onto the space between her and Dave. He kept crunching on celery sticks. “How’s your day been?”
Julia hated the question. It had always felt to her like a question asked between people with nothing else to say. Her mom had once written to her that if she ever started her conversations with How was your day? to reexamine her choices in life. Like she always did with her mom’s nuggets of wisdom, Julia thought back, trying to remember the exact details of when or how it had been delivered. Probably when she was sixteen, when her dads had started begging her to make it through her teenage years without getting pregnant. It’d been a postcard from Costa Rica, the one depicting a green volcano, the handwriting on the back carelessly sprawling, so that only a couple of sentences fit. She’d always wished her mom could fit more on each postcard.
“How about your day?” Dave said, popping the lid back on the Tupperware of hummus. Julia hadn’t heard a word of his response.
“Enthralling, of course,” she said. “You ever wonder why asking ‘how’s your day been?’ seems so...desperate? I didn’t mean it that way when I just asked it now. But, I mean, what a boring question, right?”
Dave shrugged. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. I care about how your day’s been.”
“Yeah, but there are more interesting ways to ask.”
“Such as?”
Julia paused, suddenly defensive. “I don’t know. You could ask specific questions that’ll give you a better feel for the other person’s day. It’s like asking strangers how they are when you don’t actually care about the response.”
“What would you ask instead?”
A sigh escaped Julia’s lips and they both fell quiet. The basketball players started arguing about something, all in lingo Julia couldn’t understand. Julia wondered what she and Dave were even doing still at school. They could have gone off campus on their lunch breaks, snuck away to the harbor, avoiding the gaze of all the people who’d helped at the promposal and now didn’t understand why Dave was with the pink-haired girl instead of Gretchen. They could have been wrapped up in each other. Julia reached into her bag, found the side pocket where the Nevers list had been resting since they found it. She knew it by heart, knew that most of the items had been crossed off now. But she wanted something else to be on there, some new adventure to share with Dave.
“You could ask about erections,” Dave said, his voice cracking at the end.
Julia folded up the list, laughing. “Really? Erections are the best way to measure the quality of a day?”
“Maybe not the best way. But it could paint a picture.”
“That’s a pretty gross picture.” She looked over at Dave. When they were alone, she felt these uncontainable urges to touch him, not necessarily in sexual ways, just rub her face against his, lay a hand on his neck. At school, those urges fell away, and she sometimes found herself forcing the issue, throwing her arms around him as if to prove something to herself. “Plus, aside from the gross inherent sexism of that male-dominated question, are you really saying each erection carries with it the same exact ecstasy? Every day, every man, an erection carries with it the exact same shot of happiness, every time?”
“This is a bizarre conversation.”
“Don’t back away now, David Vas Deferens. You started the conversation.”