The year was 1991. I was 19 years old.
I was in summer session in college, and it was BORING. I didn't know a single person that was around, so basically I just went back to my apartment every day and watched rented movies and called party lines. All of my college friends, and even my friendly acquaintances, were home for the summer. I was yearning for some excitement. I also hadn't touched a girl since breaking up with my last girlfriend six months earlier, so I was yearning for that, too.
I had a favorite pizza place where I usually picked up the pizza and ate it at home, but I kinda felt like I just wanted to get out that day, so I was eating pizza by myself in the restaurant.
I had only been eating for about 10 minutes when I heard a female voice behind me.
"Hi!"
I turned around and saw a really hot girl, kind of your stereotypical blond sorority type, standing behind me and looking at me. She was with a friend who was also hot, but not quite as attractive.
At first I thought that maybe these two hot chicks found themselves really attracted to me and were trying to find an excuse to talk to me.
Then I came to my senses and realized that this wasn't likely. Girls like that had to have a million guys after them, and while I did run into some girls at school who were attracted to me, I knew I wasn't good looking enough to cause girls of that caliber to just approach me out of the blue while I was eating alone.
I responded back, "Hi..... Do I know you?"
The hotter one quickly responded, "You're Mike, right? From chemistry class?"
Right then, I realized I had found my summer excitement. This chick seemed to think I was some guy from her chemistry class, and she apparently liked 'Mike' enough to approach him and interrupt him while eating alone. Did she have a crush on Mike? Was she always looking for a reason to get to know him, and finally found it in the pizza parlor? Maybe she and Mike even hooked up at some point in the past! In any case, if being 'Mike' was going to allow me to get some action with a girl who looked like that, who was I to question it?
"Yeah, I'm Mike! Oh, I remember now! Your name is.... ummm.... crap, I forget!"
"Julie," she said. "I'm surprised you don't remember." (Her name isn't really Julie, I don't remember what it was, but that's the name I'll give her for this story.)
"It's just kinda late, sorry about that," I covered.
"Well, can we sit down with you?", she asked.
"Sure, have a seat!"
Julie and her friend sat down with me. She went on about how she thought I "looked a lot like Mike" but hadn't been 100% sure I was really him, and was a little hesitant to approach me.
"No, I'm glad you did," I told her, and was looking for some signs that she was actually into Mike more than just for friendship.
Julie then asked if she and her friend could have slices of my pizza. I started to get worried. What if the joke was on me? What if this "Mike" thing was a ruse, simply so she and her friend could get some of my pizza for free? I came to my senses and figured that this was highly unlikely. I mean, how much are a few slices of pizza worth? Would two high-maintenance-looking chicks like this really go through such trouble just to score a few free slices of pizza? No, she had to really believe I was Mike.
We ate the pizza, and then she spotted some other friends of hers across the restaurant. She invited me to join the group of them at the other table. Of course, I said yes, and came along. I had to maintain this "Mike" ruse, and was hoping that none of the friends (some of whom were male, some of whom were female) knew the real Mike, as it would be highly awkward to explain the whole thing.
The friends, again, all seemed like fraternity/sorority types. None seemed particularly intelligent. The conversations that took place were vapid and shallow. I tried to keep fairly quiet, to avoid getting into discussion topics that would give me away as a phony. I was still holding out hope that Julie would invite me back to her place after all of this, and have her way with "Mike" as she had always wanted. Everyone seemed to take me at face value, and no one suspected that I was full of shit. After all, why should they have? I was just a classmate of hers, right?
Eventually everyone decided to go over to the rented house of a few of the people at the table. Julie didn't live there, but she was invited, as was the whole group. Julie asked me if I wanted to come along, and I told her that I did. I knew that nothing was likely to happen between me and her when we were over there as a group, but I figured that maybe it would lead to something more later. I also felt this was a good sign, as she could have easily used everyone's plans to leave as a legitimate excuse to ditch "Mike" at the pizza place, if she hadn't been into him/me.
We got to the house, and nothing interesting happened. We all kinda sat around and talked. Again, I didn't come off as interesting, but I also didn't say anything weird or awkward, nor did I give myself away as a liar, nor did I make any unwanted advances toward Julie.
About 90 minutes into it, the people who lived at the house said they wanted to go to sleep, and the rest of us had to leave. Julie told me that she was going home, and that it was "cool hanging out with you tonight", or something to that effect. I took this as an opportunity to ask for her phone number. She gave it to me. I heard her friend and one of the other guys mention that they wanted to go back and drink beer at the pizza place, and the two of them left to do that. Julie went home. I went home.
I sat home for about an hour, and something was bothering me. I just had a feeling she gave me a fake phone number. I had no real reason to believe this, but something about the way she said it to me made me believe that it wasn't real. It was now quite late and Julie was probably sleeping, and I debated whether I should call the number to see who answered. I was afraid that I would ruin it for "Mike" if I called and woke her up just an hour after leaving her company, coming off as desperate or weird. I decided that I would call , but would fake a Mexican accent and ask for "Jose" if she actually answered the phone. I was hoping just to get an answering machine with her voice on it.
I dialed the number, still wondering if I was doing the right thing. This is what I got:
MP3 file: http://pokerfraudalert.com/radio/nc.mp3
"Your call cannot be completed as dialed", just as I feared.
"Oh well," I thought. "I wasn't telling the truth myself, so I guess I can't be too mad about her giving me a fake number."
I was a bit disappointed that I wasn't going to be getting any, and that I wasn't going to get to continue being Mike, but perhaps it was for the better. It was a weeknight, and perhaps she was going to see the real Mike the next day, anyway. I felt that the jig was probably up soon, and this might have actually saved me a lot of hassle.
But then curiosity got the better of me.
Why did she give me a fake phone number?
She liked "Mike" enough to interrupt him eating, sit with him, and invite him over to her friends' house, so why give him a fake number at that point?
Was the whole thing just a joke on me? Did she and her friend concoct some plan to mess with the head of some lonely-looking guy eating alone? Was there actually no "Mike" in real life?
Could this have possibly just been about scoring a few free slices of pizza, and then she just never found a natural time to get rid of me?
Or did she really believe I was Mike, and did I screw something up during the evening to lower her opinion of him/me?
Or did she come to realize at some point that I was full of shit?
I had to get answers. It was just too weird to let go. Part of me was also still holding out hope that I just heard or remembered a digit incorrectly.
But how could I get any closure? I didn't have a real number, I only had her first name, and I wasn't that likely to run into her again.
Then I remembered her friend going back with that other guy to the pizza place. BINGO!
I rushed down to the pizza joint, and indeed, her friend and one of the guys were still there, drinking beer.
Now it was time for me to run a convincing bullshit story. I just hoped that they didn't know she had given me a fake phone number, and I especially hoped that they weren't told at some point that I wasn't really Mike.
"Ummm... hi!", I said, as I approached them. "Hey, Julie gave me her number earlier to call her about some chemistry notes when I got home, but when I tried, the number didn't work. I must have written it down wrong. Can you give it to me again?"
Her friend paused for a second, and then said, "Uh, sure... it's 685-0731."
The number I was given was 685-0794. So they were close, but not close enough to have heard or remembered wrong. Julie definitely morphed her real number into a fake one for purposes of giving me one that didn't work, yet having it appear to be real. I was reasonably certain that this was the real number, because the friend never heard the fake one being given out, and it would have been too much of a coincidence for them to have been so similar.
(These weren't the actual numbers, but I put them to demonstrate how they were close yet not-so-close.)
I thanked the friend, and went home.
For the next 2 days, I wondered what to do about this. Again, I didn't really have the right to be angry, because I was lying, too. I was trying to get a hot chick to sleep with me, thinking she was sleeping with someone she already knew from class. Did I really have a right to be sore when it didn't work out?
I wanted to call the number and confront her. I wanted to ask what the fuck really happened. I even considered calling up and coming clean that I wasn't Mike, and asking for her side of everything.
I decided that all of this would come off as too creepy, so I didn't do it. Besides, I didn't think it was likely she would tell me the truth, anyway.
I never made that call, other than to do what I originally planned -- call just to hear if the number was real, and pretend to have a wrong number if I got her. I reached her machine, heard her name "Julie" on it, and hung up.
21 years later, I still have no idea what the fuck this was all about.
Why did she do all of this? What was her endgame? Did Mike really exist? Was she just trying to leech some pizza from me?
I'll let the peanut gallery decide.
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Originally Posted by gauchojake
