Dating : Quick Question

Hey guys! I need a little dating advice. Here’s the deal: on Saturday, I went out with my friend Tiffany and we went to this awesome Mexican restaurant. And there was this really cute waitress who I thought might have been flirting with me — but stupidly, I didn’t ask for her number or anything. But I feel like she WAS kind of flirting? And Tiffany thought so, too. So right now, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to figure out what to do. Do I go back? Do I ask her out? What do I say? Is it creepy? It’s creepy, right? I shouldn’t say anything. Actually, I shouldn’t go back in the first place, right? That’s weird. Hard cringe. But she introduced herself and told me the times that she works and said I should come back for brunch! Because she works brunch! But then, that’s what waitresses do, right? They want people to come back into their restaurant so that it’ll stay open, so that they can keep working, so that they can keeping making money, so that they can keep paying their rent or paying off their car, or keep saving up to buy something really special that means a lot to them — maybe even something like an exotic trip they’ve always wanted to take — to somewhere like Paris, or Patagonia or maybe the ancient Peruvian city of Machu Picchu because maybe this waitress once saw pictures of it when she was a kid and it held a special odd meaning for her and was the one thing that took her out of the oppressive daily routine of her parents fighting about which one of them was to blame for her older sister running away. It didn’t matter what was said or how long the fights between her parents would go on — they would curse and scream and yell and throw things and weep and it never stopped, this fighting, and the waitress as a young girl would hear the shouting every night from upstairs in her bedroom and would hold her hands over her ears and whisper one thing to herself over and over that made it better — or maybe somehow made it worse; a secret truth that only the girl knew: her sister didn’t didn’t run away.

Her sister never existed.

Or, at least, never existed as a real human person — her “older sister” was just a ghost or spirit or a collection of raw psychic energies that just happened to accumulate for whatever reason over the span of hundreds of years in the swamps of the deep bayou that were later drained and filled in and paved over to eventually become the site of the Lakeforest subdivision that the waitress grew up in and somehow those energies became trapped in the back wall down inside the crawlspace under her basement stairs, the wall that would wail so loudly each night with its inhuman, low buzzing voice like a million fat flies feasting on the boated corpse of a rotten baby lamb that only the girl could hear, a sound that would keep her up night after night until one night she crept downstairs and removed the panel on the stairwell and crawled inside the space and put her forehead to the wall, listening to the low inhuman voice as it tried to form words with its mealy alien tongue: “MEEEEEEAT” it buzzed in her brain so she started small, feeding the wall in the crawlspace underneath the stairs what she could easily find and trap: bugs. But soon, that wasn’t enough. The wall demanded more. “I can’t give you any more” she would weep, her forehead pressed against the cool rough concrete of the wall in the crawlspace under the stairs, night after night, while her parents slept. “MORRRRRRRE” it would buzz, the alien voice pressing so violently on the inside her head that it threatened to split her skull open like a rotten cantaloupe. So she began trapping larger things; frogs, mice, anything else she could find outside in the dark woods behind her school. But soon that wasn’t enough, either. The wall’s hunger grew. She managed to trap a few pets; some cats, a small dog here or there — and fed them all to the wall.

That’s when her sister first appeared.

It all happened so casually one Thursday morning; when she came down to breakfast, her parents and some older girl with straight white hair she had never seen before were all sitting around the kitchen table, eating and laughing like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Oh! Look who’s finally awake!” her mother said, laughter on her voice. In one oddly graceful move, her mother filled a bowl with cereal and poured in just the right amount of milk. “Here you are, my little angel.” Her new older sister moved over so she could sit down. “Angela was just saying how excited she was to get you something for your birthday next week” her dad said, slowly leaning forward over his morning paper and smiling with too many teeth. Her new older sister, Angela, smirked and gave the girl a quick little wink when her parents weren’t looking. Her birthday wasn’t for another six months.

The more the girl fed The Wall In The Crawlspace Down Under The Stairs week after week, the happier her parents seemed to get — and the more Angela seemed to glow. There was almost a sheen about her; something shiny just underneath her skin that made you want to keep looking at her. Angela quickly became the most popular girl at school, among both the boys and the girls. The teachers would even stop the girl in the hallway to ask about her sister. Once, the girl forgot something in her locker and ran to get it during class. As she walked by Angela’s classroom, she saw Angela standing on a desk, the entire class surrounding her with their heads bowed, breathing in unison. Angela held her face up towards the ceiling, the florescent light spilling over her glowing skin, as if she was feeding. The teacher stood motionless with his forehead against the dry erase board, arms at his sides. He had pissed himself.

Angela was never mean to the girl, even at home — she was always offering to help her younger sister with her homework, or boys, or anything else. The girl always declined, but Angela persisted. Every night, Angela would come right to the girl’s bedroom door, but would never enter. She would always linger outside, in the hallway, a low buzz softly rising and falling in her chest, like a wet out of tune orchestra all playing at once. “Don’t you want help with your homework?” she would ask, her eyes wide and unblinking, her mouth in the perfect “O” shape of a frozen scream, the sound of Angela’s words appearing in the girl’s mind. “NO.” the girl would reply from the safety of her bed. “GO AWAY.” Then a sudden smile would split across Angela’s face, a smile with too many teeth, her shiny translucent skin stretched over the bony frame of a young girl, her straight white hair floating out in the darkness of the hallway. “DO NOT FORRRRRGET. WE ARE HUNNNNNGRY” she would reply, her black pupils pinpricks in those wide white unblinking eyes, her mouth a bottomless black oval. Then she would would turn and softly pad down the stairs on all fours, down to the basement.

The girl thought about running away; the weather was turning cold and animals for The Wall were getting harder and harder to find — and The Wall’s appetite seemed to be increasing. Breakfast was also getting out of control; one morning, her mother made 40 slices of toast, all buttered perfectly. Another morning, her father spent the entire breakfast laughing so hard at the morning news on the radio that he began coughing up blood. On the radio was nothing but static.

One day after school in the woods, the girl came across the bloody insides of some large animal — a big dog, maybe. Or a deer. It looked like some larger beast had vomited up the organs of a recent kill, and it was fresh. The girl took one look and knew this was her only chance. She took everything out of her backpack — books, binders, a practice test for science class — and stuffed in as much of the animal’s guts as she could. She left all of her school supplies in the woods. She wouldn’t need them ever again.

When she got home, the house was empty. The girl dragged the backpack into the kitchen and hauled it onto the counter. The blood was beginning to soak through the bottom. She looked at the clock; Angela and her parents would be home at any minute. The girl looked around under the sink, in the back, until she found the poison. She opened her backpack and stuffed it all inside, just as her parents car pulled into the driveway. She only had seconds before they would be inside. She zipped up the backpack and headed for the door to the basement. It would have to be enough.

Over the previous months, the basement had been transformed into a living mass of black rotting flesh. Her parents spent almost all of their time down there, tending to the writhing mass of pulsating coils and strips of grotesque quivering tissue that lined the walls and hung from the ceiling. There were occasional teeth that had sprouted from where the walls met the floor; the girl thought that all of the animals that she had fed The Wall In The Crawlspace Down Under The Stairs had been somehow digested and transformed into this perverse living nightmare that her parents’ basement had become; it was a living, breathing thing. Who knew how far down into the soil it had grown; how far into the rest of the neighborhood it had spread. At the very least, it was hurting the resale value of the house.

The girl hadn’t entered the basement in months — she usually just opened the basement door and threw the sacrifices down the stairs, either to be absorbed by the floor or eaten by the thing that everyone called her older sister — but the girl knew that this time would have to be different. She would have to go down to the source. She opened the basement door, a putrid warm breeze greeting her. The girl heard the keys jingle in the front door. They would be inside at any moment. The girl took a deep breath, clutched her backpack, and descended into the basement.

Stepping carefully between the clusters of quivering fleshpods and over the slimy black masses of writhing tentacles, the girl came to the small door to the crawlspace. The low buzzing was so loud that she could barely see straight. She opened her backpack, and could feel the buzzing grow hungrily. Her hands shook so bad she could barely get the bag open, but she managed. It was all she could do to pour the poisoned gelatinous guts of whatever poor lonely animal had died up there on the dirty ground in the dark backwoods behind the school onto the concrete wall in her basement. The buzzing grew thick with feeding. The girl felt something wet start to trickle from her ears and nose. She wiped her face and it came away bloody. She slowly backed out, keeping an eye on the spot where the poisoned guts had soaked into the wall. The thick buzzing started to falter and skip, like a bicycle chain trying to catch a gear.

“WHAAAAAT ARE YOU DOINNNNNNNG” The girl spun around to see Angela on all fours, her horrid mouth stretched into that eternal silent scream, the black pinpricks of her eyes catching some unseen light in the dark, pinning the girl to the wall. “Nothing!” the girl said, her head pounding, the buzz filling everything, blood beginning to trickle from her eyes like tears. A part of the girl noticed that Angela was naked except for the writhing black tentacles that were furiously sliding up her legs and over her stomach, as if preparing for something. “IT IS NOTTTTT RIIIIIIIIIGHT” the Angela thing buzzed in the girl’s mind. She hissed and took a step forward, her limbs seeming to slowly stretch and elongate. “What’s going on down there?” the girl’s mother called from upstairs. “You girls play nice, you hear?” The Angela thing took another step forward and smiled with too many teeth. “NOW WE SEEEEE YOU ON THE INSIDEEEEEEAAAAAIAIAIIIAIIAI100101001!” The Angela thing screamed and fell to the ground. The buzzing in the girl’s head began to skip, like a radio flipping between stations. The girl ran for the stairs and scrambled up, slipping on the slick flesh that laid like a thick living carpet over every surface.

The girl burst out into the kitchen, sprawling out on the floor. The buzzing stopped. Everything was quiet. The girl sat up and wiped the blood out of her eyes. She looked around. Her Dad was asleep in his easy chair, paper on his chest. Her Mom was watching TV. She turned, a frown on her face. “Everything okay, honey?” The girl looked past her mother to the TV — it wasn’t static, it was just some daytime soap opera. A show anyone would watch.

From then on, her parents were convinced that her sister had run away, and they wouldn’t hear any other explanation. The girl tried to convince them that she never had a sister; that Angela never existed, that she was all in their minds. But then, eventually, the girl stopped. Because that conversation always led to her telling them about The Wall. And that would invariably lead to a talk about the crawlspace in the basement. And that then led to something the girl didn’t want to think about — the one thing that scared the girl the most; her parents reply: “Honey, we don’t have a basement.”

And they were right.

The house had no basement. In their kitchen, the wall where the door to the basement had been was now just a plain wall — if there had ever been a door there to begin with. The girl walked around the house in disbelief; there was no sign that their house had ever had a basement. The girl was so adamant she was right that one Sunday, while her parents were out at the farmer’s market, she took a baseball bat to the wall. Behind it was nothing but insulation.

Since the girl poisoned The Wall, her parents argued daily about whether they should have done more to try to find her older sister. It became their obsession; all they could think about, all they could talk about. The girl stopped going to school, but no one really noticed. Instead, she read books about all sorts of fantastic places in the world. It was after reading about one of these places, Machu Picchu, and looking at pictures on some travel site, that she saw a photo that stopped her cold. It was Angela.

She was in the background of another tourist’s photo, and even though her hair had been dyed a light pink, and she was blurry, the girl could immediately tell it was the Angela thing from her basement. It smiled with too many teeth.

That night, the girl packed a bag and got on the next bus out of town. She knew what she had to do. The bus took her as far as LA, where she got a little sublet, month to month, in an apartment above a bar. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The girl started working at a Mexican restaurant, talking to customers to see what they knew, doubling up on brunch shifts to save up enough money for a plane ticket down to the jungles of South America — where she knew she would finally face her fate, one last time.

So anyway, you guys think I should ask this waitress out or what?