After dinner, they went for drinks and wound up in the Latin American Club, right under the mannequin with the merkin. “Oh, look,” Serafina said. “It’s your friend.” He followed her line of sight and spotted Patricia, with an African-American guy in a black velvet coat covered with elaborate piping. After a moment, Laurence recognized the dude she’d been talking to at Rod Birch’s house. Patricia waved at them, and they waved back. Laurence didn’t know whether he and Serafina ought to be intruding on Patricia’s date or whether he wanted her intruding on theirs, and he worried Patricia was going to lecture him about the planet again. But Patricia beckoned them over, and Serafina went.
Patricia’s date was named Kevin, and he was a Monty Python–quoting Anglophile who walked dogs and worked in a café—but his real job was creating a webcomic, which Laurence had read a few times.
“The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,” said Kevin. “There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.”
“The comics I read were funny in their own right,” said Laurence. “So you totally screwed up.”
“You are destroying me,” said Kevin.
Patricia was telling Serafina that she’d just quit a terrible catering gig, but now she’d gotten a new job at one of the fancy Mission bakeries, where they were using locally sourced organic grains not just to be fancy, but out of necessity since the Great Midwestern Dustbath. “I love to bake, so this is perfect.”
Serafina liked baking, too, but she was lousy at it. “I made this cake once and it caved in, and I thought my kid brother had stepped on it in the oven. I beat him up for like an hour before I realized I just forgot to put in enough of that stuff.”
“You mean flour,” Patricia said.
“Yeah, flour.” Serafina smiled.
There was a long silence. Kevin cleared his throat like he was going to say something clever, but then he thought better of it.
Laurence still itched all over, thinking about how he’d tried to lecture Serafina about her job at dinner and now she was forced to hang out with his middle-school friend. He needed a patch for this date. Not to mention, he felt some random need to prove to Patricia that he wasn’t a total jerkface.
While they waited for drinks, Laurence tried telling Patricia all about Serafina’s emotional robots—then realized halfway through that talking about Serafina in the third person didn’t make her seem cool, but just made it seem like Laurence thought she couldn’t speak for herself.
“Patricia seemed cool,” Serafina said afterward, as she and Laurence sat in Humphry Slocombe and shared some Secret Breakfast, that weird ice cream with the cornflakes and whiskey in it.
“You didn’t really get to see what’s cool about her.” Laurence scooped some ice cream.
“Obviously I did, since I already said I thought she was cool.”
“It’s weird to see someone you haven’t seen in ten years, and it brings back all sorts of stuff. I was such a loser, you wouldn’t believe.” (When talking about middle school, Laurence had long since learned it was best not even to mention that he believed he’d created artificial intelligence in his bedroom closet, even as a funny story. It just made him sound like an asshat.)
They finished their ice cream. Which, ice cream with whiskey in it might not have been the best idea after three beers at the Latin American. Laurence was seeing a lot of floaters and his head was only getting fuzzier, plus he felt a deep unrest in the pit of his stomach.
“So what’s going on?” Serafina said. “I feel like there was some subtext to this evening that I missed.”
Laurence thought of saying that he didn’t know whether subtext was an emotional state or a mental state or even what the exact difference between the two things might be. But he bit his tongue and said, “I feel as though I’m on probation. I mean, in this relationship.”
“Huh. News to me.” Serafina shrugged. Her eyes widened and her lower lip curled inward as she looked at her boyfriend. Her red highlights glistened under the fluorescent hipster-ice-cream-store lights. She looked so beautiful and so filled with curiosity, Laurence felt a brand-new pang of love for her. He was ready to open himself up to her, something that did not come naturally to him. Her callused and manicured fingers toyed with the unladen ice-cream spoon.
“Have I said or done anything to give you the idea that you’re on probation?” she asked.
Laurence searched his memory for a moment, then shook his head. “I guess I just decided I was. I don’t know why.”
“This is weirding me out. I mean, I feel like our communication has sucked for, I don’t know, a month or so. But maybe it was worse than I knew.” Serafina massaged her own temples, pinching the skin on either side of her eyebrows.
“So … I’m not on probation then?”
“Well…” Serafina stopped mortar-and-pestling her forehead and looked him in the eye. “I guess you are now.”
“Oh.” Well played, Armstead.