We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarassingly, A True Story

“Even with my crutches, I wasn’t an especially useful teammate in capture the flag—I couldn’t really hold the flag and move it at the same time. But at least on crutches I could run around to make it look like I was participating. The participation would be fake, but what did it matter when the alternative was wearing, you know, a fake leg? That’s what it means to be an amputee: You’re always putting on a show.” 

In a passage describing his attempt to participate in a game, Sundquist shows how isolated he feels from other kids of his age. He is alone in his management of his disability, in addition to his orchestration of a show of participation. The repetition of “fake” to describe his leg and his participation indicates his sense of imposter syndrome and inferiority to his peers without disabilities.

“When you’re faced with a significantly life-altering negative situation you can’t control, you grasp at the little things you can control. The little opportunities where you can make choices for yourself. I couldn’t choose to get my leg back, no, but I could choose to ask my youth pastor about the schedule without telling him my hip-disarticulated leg was the reason I was asking.” 

Sundquist explains that his attempts to control little aspects of his life are an after-effect of the overwhelming situation that was out of his control—the loss of his leg. However, he is alone in his mission to control everything, as his wish to not focus on his leg prevents him from explaining his reasoning to others. On a further level, Sundquist’s investigation into his dating failures is another attempt to control the uncontrollable.

“Sarah Stevens was still a significant blip on my romantic radar, and all these years I’d been curious to understand why she broke up with me so fast.” 

Sarah Stevens, the girl who agreed to be Sundquist’s girlfriend for 23 hours in eighth grade, when they were both awkward young teens, still holds emotional power over him when he is well into his twenties. The sting of her rejection permeates and he considers that the qualities that made him such an objectionable boyfriend at 13 are still relevant to his investigation.

“For my parents, what God wanted was more important than what I wanted. And God was more difficult to argue with, since he wasn’t sitting at the table with us. So I played the God card whenever I could.”

As the pragmatic son of extremely religious parents, Sundquist fights to get his needs met when they are opposed to what his parents think God would want. As God is an abstract entity who “wasn’t sitting at the table with us,” Sundquist uses the ambiguity of God’s position to challenge his parents’ rules. This act of independent thought reveals Sundquist’s essentially strong character and determination not to give up.

“She already knew that I had one leg—which I was a little weirded out to discover since most people at school didn’t know yet—and even with this knowledge, she still wanted to meet me. My disability did not reduce her opinion of me; in fact, based on the note, it seemed like it actually made her think more highly of me.” 

Sundquist is staggered to find that Liza Taylor Smith, the hottest girl in his school, wants to meet him despite knowing about his disability. Not only that, but that his disability has made him stand out to her in a good way. He struggles to balance this fact with his elaborate attempt to conceal his disability from most people at school. He does not know whether to be uncomfortable or flattered by the fact that Liza has singled him out for his difference.

“She seemed out of my league […] After I had gotten into the swing of things at public school, after I understood the social hierarchy and where I fit in it, I never considered dating her.”

Whereas at the beginning of his public school career Sundquist dwelt in blissful ignorance of the social hierarchy, and imagined he could date a pretty, popular girl like Liza Taylor Smith, he soon becomes accustomed to the unspoken rules of high school and internalizes them. Liza is in a different league to a non-football-player with a disability like him, and therefore impossibly out of reach.

“The word ‘interesting’ came out of her mouth so slowly and carefully it sounded like the screech of nails on a chalkboard. It was shudder-inducing: The best word in her vocabulary to describe me was… ‘interesting.’ ‘Interesting’ is the word you use to describe the color of month-old Chinese takeout noodles in your refrigerator.”

When Sundquist confronts Liza about their truncated romantic potential, and compliments her by saying that she was one of the prettiest girls in school, she attempts to deflect the compliment and steer the conversation away from a romance by saying that Sundquist was one of the most interesting boys. The torturously laborious way she pronounces the word highlights the awkwardness of the situation, and her unwillingness to be put on the spot. Meanwhile, Sundquist reads negative connotations into the word interesting, which he equates with weird. Arguably, Sundquist, who already stands out more than he would like to, does not consider that being distinctive is a compliment.

“Surface or not, take away my personality and appearance and I’m not sure what is left. I’m not sure what the ‘real me’ would be apart from them. But I know one thing: There aren’t a lot of girls who would date a guy with no personality. Or body. Surface or not, I’m of the opinion that these things do matter, at least to some degree, and therefore a rejection of them can’t be trivialized.” 

Here, Sundquist responds to the platitude that a rejection of a romantic partner for “surface reasons” is invalid, and that the rejected party should not feel injured by this. He argues that looks and personality make up so much of a self that it is difficult to see how anyone would not judge a person’s attractiveness based on these things. On a further level Sundquist implies that being rejected as a romantic partner because of his disability cannot be trivialized.

“You can throw all the numbers at it that you want, you can shout theories all day long, you can draw graphs and make flowcharts until you run out of paper, but in the end, rejection is just pure pain, and fighting emotion with logic is like bringing a calculator to a knife fight. You’re going to get stabbed in the heart, and there’s nothing your precious numbers can do to protect you.” 

While Sundquist has thought long and hard about the reasons why people are, or are not, attracted to one another, and has even tried to quantify aspects of romantic love with numbers and graphs and charts, he concludes that statistics hold no sway in the domain of emotion. He illustrates his point with the simile of the fussy, square calculator to describe logic, and the potent knife to describe emotion. Clearly, the calculator, even with all its functions, is no defense against the pain of romantic rejection.

“We should hang out sometime is so perfect because it’s nearly impossible to say no to. That’s how I first thought of it: I was looking for a way to ask out Francesca without any possibility of rejection.” 

Sundquist is so averse to rejection that he thinks he has engineered a way to avoid it with the line “we should hang out sometime.” This line, which is more an opinion than a request, becomes his go-to when he wants to approach girls, and presides over much of his unsuccessful dating career. While Sundquist thinks that he is safe from rejection, he has simultaneously reduced his own attractiveness by seeming unconfident.

“Hi, nine-one-one? I have a serious golfing injury to report… A young man fell down and when he stood up his foot was turned backward… I don’t know how it’s possible, either, but I’m telling you that’s how it looks from my angle… Yes, a female companion… No, based on her body language right now, I’d assume they’ll never be more than just friends…” 

Here, Sundquist imagines the thoughts of the other people at the golf course where he has fallen spectacularly in front of Francesca, and the foot on his prosthetic leg has turned the wrong way round. He initially adopts a humorous, mocking tone when he reports the surreal incident of a foot going into reverse position. However, his fantasy touches genuine hurt when he imagines that the people are thinking that this incident has wrecked Sundquist’s chances with Francesca. Underlying this, is the assumption that people with awkward prosthetic limbs who embarrass themselves in public do not deserve a love life.

“I felt like we had gone back in time ten years, returning to that golf course. I was falling in slow motion, down, down, down […] I looked up at her in shock […] for a moment frozen on the grass, unsure of what to say next. That’s how I felt again, a decade later, caught in the headlights. She had asked me a question, but I was too scared to try to answer, almost like I knew exactly what had happened to us but was afraid to admit it to myself.”

When Sundquist asks Francesca what happened between the two of them and she returns the question to him, he goes back in time to when he fell over on the golf course and felt stunned, unsure how to act next. This hints at his lack of confidence in emotional and romantic matters. However, the fact that he might have the answer, but not be able to read it, suggests that there is something that is blocking his intuitive knowledge about why something goes wrong in all of his romantic encounters.

“Like everyone in the history of the world who has had a crush on his or her best friend, I was too scared to tell her, because if I did I might lose her completely. And the sharp bite of losing her completely would be far worse than the one-sided romantic arrangement we had going.” 

Sundquist’s fear that he is not a sufficiently attractive romantic partner to his friend Evelyn makes him hesitate to risk their friendship with a romantic gesture. In the manner of many under-confident people, he tells himself that he would rather have something over nothing and plays it safe with her.

“I had this fantasy about Evelyn. But not the kind of fantasy you’d expect from a teenaged boy. My fantasy went like this: My girlfriend, Evelyn, would call me one afternoon, crying […] In between sobs, she’d gasp out little sentences. She didn’t know what to do. Her life was falling apart […] ‘Hold on, babe,’ I’d say, ‘I’m coming for you.’” 

Sundquist’s fantasy of rescuing Evelyn highlights not only his passion for her, but his need to be indispensable to someone. Rather than the sexual fantasy the reader might expect from a teenage boy, Sundquist’s vision indicates that his primary need is to be helpful to a person he admires. Arguably, as Sundquist plays the real-life role of Evelyn’s romantic advisor, he is not too far off his fantasy: He only wishes that she would acknowledge him as the unique man in her life.

“We parted without a word at the base of the stairs, and after that we never spoke again […] The feeling was mutual. Shame. Shame and embarrassment on my part; shame and guilt on hers. That moment in the stairwell may have set a record for the shortest romantic relationship of all time. And after our breakup, there was just too much baggage between us to be able to acknowledge each other anymore.” 

Sundquist here references the embarrassing incident when an attractive girl took his arm to walk down the stairs and he lost his balance. The girl did not realize that he was an amputee until they were already making their way down the stairs. The moment of realization is one of mutual mortification. The girl feels guilty for making an amputee walk her down the stairs, and Sundquist feels embarrassed about the condition which makes such a spontaneous encounter impossible. The silence, which he likens to that following an awkward breakup, also refers to the silence on disability, and the isolation endured by people with disabilities because those without disabilities can feel awkward around them.

“The leg itself, with its three stiff titanium and aluminum joints, was engineered for stability, not for getting down. I felt like I was trying to dance while tied in a seated position to a cement block.”

Here, Sundquist describes the unsuitability of his prosthetic leg for dancing. Its function is to keep him stable; however, it is awkward when he tries to enjoy the fun, non-utilitarian activity of dancing. The slangy expression “getting down” refers to being loose enough to dance but also has sexual implications. It implies that Sundquist’s insecurity about his kinetic abilities occupies the same space as his sexual insecurity.

“Our friendship? What a joke. We weren’t friends. She was just a hot girl I had a crush on. Would I have been friends with her if I didn’t have that crush? Probably not. Would she have been friends with me? Again, probably not.” 

Evelyn’s coldness towards Sundquist at the prom leads him to reconsider the friendship he apparently valued. He realizes the insincerity at the root of their connection. Neither wanted a platonic friendship. He wanted a relationship. And if not, he at least wanted the feeling of being around a hot girl. Evelyn wanted to be around a guy who had a crush on her for self-validation. This is an uncomfortable moment of self-awareness for Sundquist.

“But when a girl rejects your advance on the dance floor, it is something deeper, more instinctive, more visceral. She is at a fundamental gut level not attracted to you. In fact, she is in some way repelled by you, by your smell, by your presence, by the feeling of your body touching hers […] And this charge is amplified, I think, if you happen to be an amputee, because it throws a spark on the kindling of insecurity you were already harboring concerning the shape of your body.”

Sundquist takes Paulette’s rejection of his hands around her waist when he tries to dance with her as the most profound type of rejection. He sees that she is instinctively repulsed by him. Given his bodily insecurities, Sundquist instantly assumes that the shape of his body has provoked this reaction. He never considers that Paulette’s reasons for shoving away his hands may have had more to do with the abruptness of his advance and her own experiences and outlook.

“The thing I preferred not to admit was how much Stella reminded me of myself: the social awkwardness, the chance meetings that were not actually happening by chance […] The truth is, I only thought of Stella as a stalker because I wasn’t interested in dating her.” 

After a period of reflection, Sundquist admits that the label of “stalker” that he has attached to Stella, the girl who likes him and engineers allegedly “chance” meetings between them, is unfair. As an indirect but persistent suitor, Stella reminds him uncomfortably of himself. Both Stella and Sundquist are too insecure to tell their chosen objects that they like them, and instead resort to eccentric, stalkerish behavior because it is what they will allow themselves to do.

“It was, for me, this big, watershed moment in my life, a defining conversation in Lilly’s and my (admittedly one-sided) relationship. But for her, it did not even make enough of an impression that the memory was worth saving.”

Following the pattern of Sundquist’s one-sided relationships, in this instance he cares far more than his intended partner, Lilly. While he has been treasuring the memory of every interaction as important evidence for an investigation into his love life, Lilly deems the same interactions as disposable because she does not even remember them.

“They figure that I’m probably very shy, reserved, self-conscious. That I might be bitter about my situation. So, it’s like, if I act really confident and self-assured, it bowls people over. It’s shocking. They are amazed by my charisma or something, but it’s only because their expectations were so low in the first place.” 

Sundquist relates to Sasha that his character continually confounds the expectations of people who hold prejudices that those with disabilities are pitiable and automatically bitter about their situation. He relates how the pleasant surprise of his charisma stems from people’s prejudice that people with disabilities are worn down by their self-consciousness. Sundquist’s ability to confide in Sasha indicates his level of comfort with her, and his assumption that they are on the same page.

“I wanted to find an explanation, any explanation at all, other than the obvious one. I had always been the guy who had overcome his amputation […] I had never used my disability as an excuse for anything. That just wasn’t the kind of person I was. So I had not wanted to blame it for my lack of success with girls either.” 

After Sundquist watches a movie where a boy loses his limb, he feels a lingering sense of grief and insecurity around his own amputation. Having not used his amputation as an excuse for anything, he conducts the investigation just to be sure that his amputation is not the cause of his rejection by women. However, secretly, he harbors the suspicion that it is; that success in dating may be the one thing he cannot achieve because of his disability.

“It was not the shape of my body, as it turned out, but my insecurities about that shape that had kept me single.” 

Sundquist reaches the conclusion that it is his own projections of inferiority onto his body rather than those of other people that have kept him single. By being insecure, Sundquist created drama and a sense of pity about his shape, where there did not need to be any. This is a turning point in his self-awareness regarding his romantic relationships.