I could not sell anyone from the group chat on axe throwing, and Amy had spent the last two weeks holed up in a loft with some finance guy, alternating between texting this is IT!!!! and ignoring me for days. Instead, I took Nathan, a bearded, muscular man I’d met several years ago at a house party, who had recently responded to one of my Instagram Stories at three a.m. with lol.
Nathan was the kind of man who would have been considered vaguely alternative ten or even five years ago, but whose signifiers now combined to make clear that he was a former suburbanite who had moved to the city, gone vegan, and taken a job in music PR.
“People think it’s all grain bowls and acai,” he said, taking a wide stance and eyeing the axe in his tattooed hand. His flannel shirt and ripped jeans seemed fused to his body, like someone had vacuum-packed Kurt Cobain to store over winter. “But I’m living proof that you can eat like crap and still live a plant-based life. Ask me which Doritos are vegan,” he said, winding up. “It’s not all of them, but it’s more than you’d think.”
The fact that he got a bull’s-eye instantly, and several more thereafter, I found oddly depressing. Dating has a way of making incompatibility feel like personal failure; there was nothing technically wrong with Nathan, except that I did not like him or want to spend any more time with him, which, in the context of us having paid forty-five dollars for an hour of axe throwing and one draft beer each, was a problem. When he told me I seemed like I had a “great shape under there,” I offered to go to the bar.
The venue did not only host axe throwing. Adults above the drinking age could come here to enjoy any number of loosely camp-themed activities: tug-of-war, shuffleboard, and that classic camp pastime, enormous video arcade games. I skirted around a large, rowdy group as they jostled each other over indoor lawn bowling, their opponents insisting, yes, Scott had put his foot over the line, he had—he had!—they’d all seen it.
What were they all doing here? What were they hoping to feel, these adults engaged in games from their real or imagined pasts? Distracting themselves, I guessed. This was the conclusion my ongoing hobby experiment seemed to be working toward. Skiing weekends, bowling, after-work volleyball leagues, knowing about professional sports . . . all activities seemed to be transparent efforts in void-avoidance, when actually nothing drove home the meaninglessness of life more than watching thousands of people desperately cheer as one millionaire tried to get a ball across another millionaire’s line. The only activity that has ever really interested me is sitting around with my friends in flattering lighting, eating food and talking about who wanted to kiss us, and what we were wearing when they did.
I thought about this as I watched a group of twentysomething girls cheering while one of their friends whacked a pinball machine. They were having a level of fun I’d never seen outside of a commercial for a chain restaurant. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe avoidance was the way forward. I considered joining them to cheer on their friend, who wasn’t even doing that well at pinball, not that you would know from the onslaught of support she was receiving from her rowdy companions. She had just landed in a fifty-point pocket when the dart pierced my leg.
What happened was this: a woman shrieked, and when I looked for the source of the sound, three people were staring at me with their hands clapped over their mouths.
I looked down at my thigh. The skirt I was wearing （leather, a big swing） and the tights （double layered for extra smoothing and support） had helped, but there was nonetheless a small lawn dart impaled in my upper leg.
“Ohhhhh my god,” one of the women yelled. “Oh my god, are you okay?!”
I didn’t know how to answer. The dart did not appear deeply embedded, but what if it was plugging a vein? What if, when I pulled it out, I spurted blood all over everything, like in movies where someone gets nicked in the, what was it, jugular? Wasn’t there a major artery in the leg somewhere? The key was probably not to panic, to keep my heart rate low, but that didn’t feel like something that was up to me. What was the breathing thing—four, eight, five?
“Do you mind if I have a look at that?”
The voice belonged to a curly-haired man wearing a concerned expression and a shawl collar cardigan. “Are you a doctor?” I asked.
“Better,” the drunk woman said, grabbing me by the arms and giving me what she must have felt was a reassuring shake. “He’s my boss.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Maybe!” she said.
“You absolutely are not,” the man said, gently pushing her away. “Go get some water, okay?”
Over her shoulder the woman yelled, “6Bites ER! CODE RED!”
Formerly called Taste of T.O., 6Bites was one of a number of new media ventures that dove in headfirst when a child actor turned rapper suggested we start calling our city “the 6ix.” It ran restaurant reviews and interviews with local chefs and the occasional exposé about “toxic kitchen culture,” but mostly it seemed to make its living via videos of disembodied hands cooking completely inedible recipes and listicles about where to get a Bloody Mary with a burger in it.
“I’m sorry about her and everything else about this,” said the man, kneeling to examine my leg. “A disaster, start to finish.”
An ambient awareness that he was quite handsome solidified into stress about whether all the tights and leather had given me swamp crotch.
“We gave the new hires a bar tab,” he said. “This is the worst it’s been, but believe me when I say you are not the first casualty of this dart game. Maybe I could . . .” He reached tentatively for the dart.
“Shouldn’t we get an employee or something?” I asked.
“They’re all, like, nineteen and stoned,” he said. “I think I’m your best shot. Plus, it looks like it’s not—I mean, that’s barely in there. Just let me . . .”
His fingertips made contact with the body of the dart. I flinched and looked away, unable to bear it. My face was still scrunched, body tensed, eyes averted, when I heard it clink to the floor. I examined my skirt: it hadn’t even pierced the lining.
“I’m Simon,” he said, smiling as he got up off the floor. He had the calmly confident demeanor typical of the attractive, but there was an openness to him that suggested something else: an insistently supportive home environment maybe, or a religious upbringing. He looked like someone who thought heaven was real.
Simon offered to buy me a drink to make up for the injury. I pointed out that there had not, in the end, been any injury at all. He said, “Still,” and started walking toward the bar.
I didn’t know how to process the straightforwardness of his flirtation. It was my understanding that romantic （or at least casually sexual） intent was communicated with a series of tongue-in-cheek digs about the other person’s clothing, habits, or character, maybe some social media interaction conducted at a conspicuous hour. This earnest “can I buy you a drink?” approach was new and disconcerting. Still, he was very good-looking, and I had ignored weirder feelings than novelty in the name of a few minutes’ conversation with someone hot.
Simon got to the bar, made easy small talk with the person behind it, and ordered a drink I’d never heard of, with bourbon and Campari and some third ingredient I didn’t catch. It was bright red and tasted sweet and bitter, with a cherry in it. He thanked and tipped the bartender. I watched them absorb his easy smile. Then he turned to me.