I Suck at Girls by Justin Halpern

showing him a few Euros to make my point.
    “No. Money I own.”
    “Then what’s the problem?” Ryan asked.
    Abelena approached with her bag.
    “Joe and I are going to go to San Sebastián together. It was very nice meeting you guys,” she said. Then she walked back to her friends, exchanged a few sentences in Spanish with them, and hugged them good-bye.
    “Wow,” Ryan said.
    “Yes,” Joe said.
    “Well, it was really great meeting you, Joe,” I said.
    “Yes. I want fun time for Justin. Fun time for Ryan,” he replied.
    “Thanks, man.”
    “I own sad,” he added.
    “We own it, too, man,” I said.
    I gave Joe my e-mail address. Then Ryan and I watched as he and Abelena walked out of the ferry station together.
    After bumming around on the beach all day, Ryan, Eloisa, Anetta, and I boarded a dilapidated ship whose rusted exterior and cracked floorboards made it look like it should have been setting sail for Ellis Island in the summer of 1925. As we pulled away from the harbor, Ryan and I stood out on the bow.
    “This is it, dude. We’re going to the party capital of the world. We have girls with us. Stuff is going to get crazy, and we have to get crazy with it. No excuses,” Ryan said.
    “Totally,” I agreed.
    We didn’t have enough money for a room on board, so the four of us slept in lounge chairs on the observation deck. Thirteen hours later, the sun smacked us across the face, waking us up just as we were approaching the island. Ibiza looked to be a series of hills, covered in small white Mediterranean homes, plunging down to a sandy beach lined with grand resorts and the turquoise ocean below. When we disembarked from the boat, we realized we had no idea where to go. All the other tourists grabbed taxis and drove off toward the resorts, but we couldn’t afford those rates, and we weren’t about to waste money on a cab. The streets were deserted and it was horror-movie quiet. We shrugged our shoulders, chose a direction almost at random, and started walking down a narrow street when suddenly a voice from behind us said, “You guys lost?”
    Standing behind us was a bronzed American man in his late twenties, wearing baggy white pants, a pair of bright red shoes covered in sparkles, an electric-blue short-sleeve T-shirt that seemed to be made of Lycra, and a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses with fluorescent yellow lenses. He reminded me of an animal you’d see in a nature special about how the most dangerous species in the Amazon use their colorful markings as a warning to other animals.
    “I can show you around. I need to walk off this E. I’m rolling balls so fucking hard right now,” he said, running his hands through his spiked hair, then popping his pinkie in his mouth and tugging on his cheek like a fish that’d been hooked.
    With no real idea where we were going, we took him up on his offer, and headed off in the exact opposite direction from the one we’d chosen. As we walked, he explained that he lived on the island and worked as a promoter for a few different clubs.
    “It’s my job to make sure the party is super-hot. If it’s not hot enough, I make it hotter,” he said as we walked down the boardwalk.
    “So what’s the hottest party to go to in Ibiza?” Ryan asked.
    “You can’t handle that party. If you touched that party, it would burn you.”
    “Okay. Well, what about the second hottest party?” I asked.
    “Still too hot for you,” he said.
    “Just tell us a party that’s appropriately hot for us,” Ryan snapped.
    He looked us up and down. “Club Pacha,” he said.
    He led us to a hostel that sat at the end of a small alley, above an auto shop, and was on his way.
    As soon as we got into our tiny single room, Eloisa and Anetta went into the bathroom together and threw on skirts and bikini tops. Then the four of us headed down to the beach. We spent the day lounging on the sand in front of a hotel and swigging from a small bottle of vodka we’d brought with us from