Anthony’s eyes snapped open as he was jolted into consciousness, as if struck with a staggering bolt of morning confusion. Calling it a rude awakening would be putting it mildly. As his mind slowly tried to navigate the fog of his rousing, a familiar flash of memory sliced through his brain of how he’d awakened in a similar fashion after parties in high school. He was instantly transported to the days of being woken by someone drawing on his face with a marker or kicking him in the nuts, his hungover brain almost too muddled to care and his lanky body contorted into a pile of human spaghetti, likely unmoved from whenever he’d collapsed there hours prior after a very long night of raucous, angst-filled revelry. Yet nonetheless, he’d always wake right up after something like that hit. These days, the young bachelor could better hold his liquor and usually found slightly more dignified places to crash than the messy floors of house party bedrooms… like booze-soaked dorm carpets.

In short, Anthony, or Ant as most his friends were wont to call him, was a bit of a loser. More specifically, he preferred the term “burnout.” He’d always been considered a “gifted” kid since back in the early days of grade school, but the urge to apply himself dissipated over the years before leaving him distilled into a lazy existence of focusing his brain power on getting out of doing anything of any real practical value. In fact, he’d argue that it was something of an art form. As a result, he’d been able to almost effortlessly skate through high school with only minor difficulty but wasn’t exactly shooting for the stars, either. Then once he discovered just how much weed suited this particular skill set he’d cultivated, it was game over. Nonetheless, his parents still harassed him hard enough to get him to go to college. He had thus far maintained enough of a GPA to not be thrown out on his ear, and he showed up most of the time. This morning already felt like it was not going to be one of those days. To put it poetically, Ant felt like microwaved shit.

“Jeeeeesus H. Christ,” he breathed with a yawn, stretching out his arms and inadvertently knocking his phone off the bedside table in the process. It hit the carpeted floor with a definite thump. He reached down, examining it with a grimace. A hairline crack now ran diagonally through the center of the screen, sharply contrasting the well-lit screen in his dim dorm room. Perfect. A wonderful start to the day.
“This is why we buy phone cases with screen protectors instead of all these textbooks I’ll never fucking read,” Ant scolded to himself, rolling out of a bed at last. So what had jarred him awake like that, anyway? It had sounded like a buzz from his notifications, the one it made when set to vibrate and rattled the table a bit. As his fuzzy sleep-sodden vision began to come into focus, he found the digital culprit: a notification hung on the top of his screen from an app he didn’t recognize.

“What the fuck is this…?” he wondered aloud, words still tinged with slurring from poor decisions the night prior. The more he studied the app and its logo the more he started to have a recollection, albeit fuzzy, of what it was. Feeling somewhat lonely the night before and more than half in the bag, he’d signed up and created a profile on one of those hookup apps everyone was using. By the looks of it, a Tinder knock-off, in essence. He’d used apps like those in the past for a few short stints but they never really seemed to go anywhere. This was one Ant wasn’t used to seeing among the inescapable array of ad spam that followed his online activity, but they were all pretty much the same at the end of the day anyway.

The brightly-colored notification pulsed hypnotically, as if beckoning him to open it and read. The allure of mystery would not be dismissed. He thumbed over to the notification and pressed it, the app unfolding before his eyes. It was actually a pretty cool little animation, he had to admit. Evidently, in his drunken stupor, he’d actually managed to form a semi-coherent bio and matched with someone.
“Now who are you, Selena F?” he inquired to the empty air. Maybe his slacker ass had accidentally stumbled into a fortuitous circumstance after all. This girl was actually pretty cute and, against all odds, seemed to actually want to meet up despite his fumbling, typo-ridden attempts at courtship. This Selena was asking to meet up, tonight, no less. He’d really clinched something like this last night in that state? Wouldn’t be the first time he had luck like this fall into his lap, but it wasn’t common either.