Looking back, it was no big deal.  Not really.  In hind sight, it was just one of those stupid, awkward moments that dating is all about.  But at the time, there was only one reaction, and it was the wrong one.

Had things gone better, it might even have been funny.  She might have laughed about it with her housewife girlfriends over a glass of wine some years later.  But the world does not revolve around the way things might have gone.  All that matters is the way things went.

To that point, it had been a wonderful evening.  After months of sitting on the sidelines, it felt good to be dating again.  This wonderful boy who worked in the kitchen, this unassuming young man who was so gentle with her when he’d happened upon one of her crying jags, was every bit the gentleman she’d hoped he would be.  They had a fantastic dinner at Lucky Parmesan, that new restaurant that opened a week ago.  They walked along the pier in the hot summer night and talked about where they wanted to go - he was some kind of computer programmer, for phones and such.  He bought her an ice cream and even let her use his jacket to sit on instead of scratching her backside against the cold, rough cement of the pier as they sat eating.

And she knew she should have been a bit more resistant, but after an evening of being treated like a princess, she began to feel all warm and fuzzy sitting in the shotgun of his beatup old sedan.  Sure, it had the familiar boy-smell of fast food and body funk.  But familiar things aren’t so bad, and this guy was really nice.

So when he hesitantly suggested that they go back to his apartment, she said, “sure” without a care in the world.  He lived in the nice section of town, too; she couldn’t imagine how he could afford it working at the dive they did.  It wasn’t the nicest building on the street by any measure, but it was nice just to be in the part of town where the flowers on the trees smelled sweet and inviting.  He led her up the stairs to his top-floor apartment, where the light in the hallway was out.

It was probably just nerves that prevented him from noticing the blue radiant light coming from under his door, so dark was the hallway.  He’d been chattering away nervously the whole way there.  Had he noticed, one would think he would never have opened the door.  At least, he certainly would have made some excuse to go in before her.  But he didn’t.

And when he opened the door, the site inside made the warm butterflies buzzing through her body shoot directly to her stomach and grow mean.  She stopped dead in the door frame, staring aghast.  It wasn’t the cloths on the floor; it wasn’t the dingy kitchen she could see beyond the bath of blue monitor light.  It was the monitors themselves.  Eight of them by her count, held together in a single frame above a sea of blinking lights, each and every single one of them filled to the brim with. . . . . porn.

Porn.  And not the regular stuff, either: the really nasty amateur stuff.  Eight monitors of the stuff, all playing different nasty porn simultaneously.  Who in their right mind requires that much porn in a single sitting?  What kind of sicko looks at this stuff, overabundant in bodily fluids and dermetological mishaps?

If there was an answer to these questions, clearly, it was not going to come from this formerly nice boy.  The expression on his face was at once thunder-struck and shamed.  His mouth moved, but no words came out.  His complexion alternated from white to green to red even in the pale of the monitor glow.  For a second, he even tried to smile, as though it was no big deal.  But the expression on her face must have told him something different.

She backed out of the hallway and back down the stairs.  By the time she’d hit the second step, she was running.  She must have said something to the boy, but no length of time would have ever been enough to recount.  He was saying something to her, too, but she was so flabberghasted and disgusted, she just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

She was at a full sprint by the time she reached the lobby and smashed her full force against the doors to the sweet-smelling outside.  He was following, but not as fast.  She bounded down the stone stairs in a single gazelle-like leap, bolting across the street heedlessly.

Looking back, it was no big deal.  Not really.  Had things gone better, it might even have been funny.  But in that moment which seemed to last an hour, as she felt her hips move suddenly to the right, her heeled shoes fly off her feet, her shins scrape against something plastic under the car, she knew that wasn’t the way the world worked.  When her body flew across the street and her head was dashed against the McCaddam surface, she knew that what could have been did not make what was any different.  It was her last thought even as she felt the sharp pain in her neck and the sudden disappearance of her body.

After a moments hesitation, the driver of the white sedan swore and threw the car into reverse.  In a squeal of tires and a haze of blue tire smoke, the car dashed away from the scene: the dead girl on the street and the aghast young boy who could barely process what was happening.