Blockbuster Boy

One should never know too precisely whom one has married.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

It was January 2007. I, and the two best friends a girl could ask for (more about them later), stumbled into Blockbuster one evening, prepared to rent a season of Sex and the City and spend the night devouring our weight in cookie dough. That afternoon, I'd had yet another frustrating conversation with yet another insignificant boyfriend. As we meandered through the store, I complained, "I just can't find the right guy. I need a guy that's friendly and personable, that's down-to-earth. He needs to be good-looking, but not act like he knows he's good-looking (we all know the type)." At that moment, I looked up and saw a guy standing behind the cash register in a sexy blue Blockbuster polo shirt. "Like," I said, "that guy."  

Now, I'm not a believer in love at first sight. And I'm not saying that I believe this was love at first sight. To be honest, I was half-joking at the time. The thing is, everyone knew Blockbuster Boy. He'd been working at Blockbuster, like, forever, and he was always outgoing and helpful. For instance, when Kelly and I had a hankering to hijack her brother's video game system, Blockbuster Boy had helped us pick out a game that was "kinda like a racing game, but not really hard and not, like, bloody or anything..." (we're not really gamers). Or when I came up to the counter with Dirty Dancing and confessed to never having seen it before, he acted appropriately shocked. It just wasn't until this night that I began to think of him as anything but Blockbuster Boy.

It soon became my mission in life to go on a date with Blockbuster Boy. Now, don't think I'm a stalker or anything, but... well, it might have been borderline. Truthfully, I really enjoyed spending the next semester finding out little tidbits about him. One day over a long weekend when we were all, again, at home, Kelly said to me, "You know that's Kevin's brother, right?" She was referring to a guy we'd graduated high school with--a guy who had quite the reputation of a being a loud, obnoxious, somewhat-troublesome fellow. Not a bad guy, exactly, but not exactly a teacher's pet, either. "Nah," I said, "He can't be." My Blockbuster Boy was nothing like Kevin. "Sure, it is," Kelly insisted. "Look at him. They stand the same." Glancing over to the aisle where Boy was meticulously restocking DVDs, I could no longer deny it. There was no doubt; the two brothers did stand the same.


By the end of the spring semester, even my friends at Truman knew about Blockbuster Boy. When asked what I was doing over the summer, I would (somewhat) jokingly say, "Dating Blockbuster Boy." Every weekend trip home, I would find an excuse to make it into Blockbuster at least once. If he wasn't working, I'd turn around and walk back out, but as my mom jokes, "We never had a problem getting Katie to return movies."


Fortunately, I wasn't forced to be a creeper for too long. One night at the beginning of summer--May 18, 2007, to be exact--Blockbuster Boy asked for my number. Two days later he called me, and we set up a movie date for that week... more about that later. I will tell you I didn't mention the whole stalking thing that night.