“I can barely see you,” Delilah starts off our virtual date. “Your face is like three pixels.”

“Sorreh,” I reply with a hint of pretension. “Perhaps it’s because I’m using my Kindle?”

“You’re using your goddamn Kindle for our goddamn virtual date?” Delilah flirts with me in that faux-angry tone I know so well. We’ve been on this Zoom call for all of five minutes, but I feel like I’ve known her for an eternity, mostly because it took me three hours to hook up my Kindle to Zoom.

“Yeah, I’m what you’d call a bibliophile,” I hit her with my favorite pick-up line. I follow up with a little improv: “I like to read books. Books are... good.”

“I think I’m going to leave,” Delilah messages me in the Zoom chat. “You’re a nutjob.” She’s testing if I can read all those many words. A seasoned pro, I skim most of them, focusing only on key terms.

“Nutjob!?!” I type back. “Lets wait until 2nd date for that.” I dismiss Delilah’s romantic advances and resume talking about my Kindle’s functionality.

“You wanna see what this baby can do?” I hit the “Share Screen” button. “These are all my books,” I guide her through my virtual library. “Books with pages and words.” I leave the rest up to her imagination.

“That’s the settings menu,” Delilah observes. “Do you own a single E-book?”

I quickly toggle the language to Spanish. “This novel changes dialects every page,” I explain, using the fancy word for language. Phew! That was almost a close one. I give Delilah a wink, but it’s only me who winks back—all alone in the Zoom lobby.