Girlfriends (Patrick Sanchez) by Patrick Sanchez Read Free Book Online Page B

Cheryl’s idea of a good time.
    A few weeks earlier, she went to Mister Days with a couple of the girls from work, when a young college guy approached her and tried to make conversation. Cheryl didn’t have any interest in the kid, but it didn’t hurt to be polite. After a few minutes they actually started to hit it off. He was a psychology major at American University, where Cheryl had graduated from, and they even had some of the same professors. The conversation went along smoothly until he inquired as to when she graduated. When she told him, his mouth dropped just a tad before he tried to recover by telling her how good she looked for twenty-nine. The young white boy then said he had heard that black people aged better than white people and she was surely proof of it. Annoyed and feeling about a hundred and ten, Cheryl joked that she used a lot of sunblock and tried to always get enough fiber. The young man politely laughed at her little joke and said it was nice to meet her before letting her know he was going to roam around a bit and maybe “they’d catch up later.” He then extended his hand, offering a good-bye handshake. Feeling a tad humiliated, Cheryl shook his hand and forced a smile.
    It all seemed so ridiculous. In the scheme of things, she was still very young. She wasn’t even thirty yet, but she could remember back when she was twenty-one and thirty was just plain old. She also remembered being twenty-one and telling her friends to shoot her if she was still doing the bar scene when she was thirty. She had one more year to avoid a bullet.
    Cheryl read an article or two in the City Paper and made her way toward the back. Eventually, she hit the classified section and flipped a few more pages until she reached the personal ads. She looked at the Matches section every couple of weeks and sometimes even circled a few ads she thought were interesting, but she was never able to make that final leap and actually place a call.
    As she combed the ads, she laughed at herself. She hated how youth-obsessed people were and how a twenty-one-year-old at Mister Days thought she was an old hag. But this didn’t stop her from immediately bypassing any ads from guys who were over thirty-five. She skipped over the divorced ones, the ones with kids, the ones who said they were hairy, and the ones who said they were stocky, which everyone knew was a marketer’s term for big as a house.
    Of course, she also passed on the ads that were specifically looking for white women. These ads annoyed her. It was like she wasn’t good enough for certain men because of her skin color, but a part of her also felt sorry for men who limited themselves to one race. There were so many people out there, and it was just foolish not to give someone a chance because they were African American or Asian or Latino or whatever. Over the years Cheryl had dated men of different races—a few black men, a Latino guy, and a man of Native American descent. But mostly Cheryl seemed to date white guys. In fact, most of the people in her life tended to be white. White people were just what she was used to. She grew up outside Portland, Maine, and was the only black girl in her grade school and one of two in her high school. In Maine she could go weeks without seeing a black person other than her parents.
    Now that she had been in D.C. for a few years, she had a few black friends, but when she first moved to D.C. to go to college, it was almost a culture shock. She had never seen so many ethnic minorities in her life, and not just African Americans. D.C. was the epitome of diversity. During the brief walk from her dorm room to the Armand’s Pizza on Wisconsin Avenue she might see other black people, Caucasians, some Latinos, an Asian or two, and sometimes women in full Muslim attire. It took some getting used to, but Cheryl eventually embraced the diversity of her new city. This was one of the reasons she stayed in D.C. after she graduated from college.