Selena Anderson (’13) in JOYLAND

ROMEO NO. 3

Robert don’t need no help pulling girls, now. But when the Dream Date came to Burrell for its Hometown Hunks series, I just had to jump at my chance. See, I’m the type of brother that’s always taking chances. Be it quitting school to become an entrepreneur—because I’m going to have my own business one day—or be it quitting my job at the Dyimond Burger because I found it stifling to my social life. Once I let that be known, Vernecia who stay at the Dyimond Burger and will probably drop dead behind the cash register, way she carries on, she replied, “What social life?” Hardy-har-har-har. What’s funny is the number of milkshakes that girl pours per hour. I watch her taking orders with her head cocked to the side like, You been talking to me this whole time? And mopping through the hook at closing because they short on account of me and she’s steady telling me how she just can’t see it: me, that is, doing much more than the Dyimond Burger. Vernecia was at Baylor for three semesters before her mama passed and she thinks she the only one around here that can do something.

Fact is, the girl’s a naysayer. My own daddy is a naysayer too. But I have what they call an entrepreneurial spirit. And once I become a ladies’ man and an entrepreneur, they’ll have to complain to somebody else. I was in the midst of telling Vernecia that when outside the front windows, the Dream Date rig pulled up South Main. That’d be the stretch of road between the restaurant and the high school, the same road that for two hundred years has only been there to guide you from one side of cow country to the other side of some more cow country. But picture my calling the way I seen it: the words Dream Date in Coca-Cola letters and “Got what it takes to be a Romeo?” in glittering gold underneath. Robert said, Sure thing. I could be a Romeo. I’m telling you, brother, it didn’t take me more than one second to figure out what to do.

Read the rest of the story at JOYLAND.