When the young lady spoke, he felt disarmed, having poured days of labor into looking like someone you wouldn’t have time to talk to. With effort, he unstuck his tongue from the alarmingly dry roof of his mouth and reached for words. He was planning on playing the role of a [I]complete[/I] nobody, a disposable extra. He felt his eyeballs roll like pinwheels as his brain buffered and lagged before picking a stock character to impersonate.

“Yeah. I d’know why they call it that, but I’ve been at ‘em since before I could shave. My old man used to tell me that if you wanna get anywhere you gotta toughen up. Mind you, I was a scrawny thing. [I]Y’gotta eat nails for breakfast[/I], he tells me. Then that’s about when ma’ went, so that’s how we toughened up. By now I figure I drank enough of the damn things to be as tough as a whole hardware store. Patroned by a kindly demon in the bottle, we are,” he says, slurring his words a bit to lean into his inner lush.

Seeing the sparkle in her youthful eyes, he felt the muscle under his tongue crouch like it wanted to pounce, to scream [I]get away from me[/I] but that didn’t really seem like the right approach. Maybe it’d be in character to lash out but it’d also be a super effective way to get a [i]fuckton[/i] of attention and a swift escort off the grounds, maybe even a police escort if he was particularly unlucky, which he figured he was,  any time that it actually mattered.

“Gonna be honest with you: I haven’t read a book in fifteen years and I don’t know what that word means. I’m here to look at the pretty girls in pretty colors. [I]Nice[/I],” he paused to cough into his rolled fist, “[I]dress, by the way.[/I] But the closest I ever really been to an art show before was the bathroom stall down by the 7-11. To be totally honest with you, I think I should probably just go but maybe a few more nails will keep me here,” he said finishing his drink off before slipping it down the length of the bar like a hockey puck and triple-patting the table to call for another, being as intentionally obnoxious as possible before checking around to see if the professor had arrived. Seeing nothing, he turned his attention back to the girl.

“So how about you? Are you a part of the show or do you just really like museums?”