ROMANTICS: A Pick-up Line by Aubrey Hirsch & Devan Goldstein

Pick-Up Lines

By Aubrey Hirsch & Devan Goldstein

The worst pick-up line Aubrey’s ever heard: “Is that your boyfriend or your brother?”

Answer: her boyfriend, Devan, but she’d like to have said, “Both.”

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How Aubrey tried to pick-up Devan: “Now that you don’t have a girlfriend, do you want to make out sometime?” (the second half a line she’d used before with a success rate a little under 8%).

Devan’s response: “That’s really interesting. We should talk about that sometime.”

Aubrey’s response to that: “Are you being serious?”

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Pick-up lines Devan’s used: None. To be a pick-up line, doesn’t it have to be delivered to a stranger? Less-than-sincere? Cheekily aware of its own purpose? Devan’s game is emotional attentiveness, furtive touching, and well-timed portmanteaus.

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Things Devan wishes Aubrey would pick up: Her clothes, the piles of paper she leaves everywhere, the pace when they’re walking uphill, his system for loading the dishwasher, an appreciation for The Beatles.

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How Brandon Flowers from The Killers tried to pick-up Aubrey after a show in Cleveland before he was famous: “Do you LiveJournal?”

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The only pick-up lines ever used on Devan: None, unless you count “I’m Teresa” and “Devan, this is April. April, Devan.” Maybe he hasn’t been in the right kinds of places, maybe he’s just not attractive to the right strangers, maybe he projects aloofness, but Devan has never been picked up, or even Poked on Facebook. He’s just been introduced. To friends of friends, to acquaintances, to co-workers, a handful of whom he’s taken to bed.

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Better than pick-up lines: Pick-up trucks, pick-up soccer, pick-up sticks.

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Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in journals like American Short Fiction, Third Coast, Hobart, and PANK, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA and distributes most of her best pick-up lines via Twitter.

Devan Goldstein’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Collagist, A List Apart, and elsewhere. He works as a web usability and strategy consultant.

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