Page 126 of Two Marlboros

... poly-tetra-fluoro...

I closed the handouts and huffed. It was not possible to study with a conscience lording it over you.

I knew I had done the right thing in sending that text. Alan’s had been yet another hit below the belt, and it was only right that it should end that way. And no matter how much my mind kept telling me that it was bullshit -thank you, mind- I knew that I had followed the only possible choice.

I fanned myself with my hand to chase away the great heat, but it was impossible: some fool had left the classroom window open, just to cheer my study with mugginess and smog. There was a stench of landfill to drive one’s brain out, and the swearing that could be heard from the street did not help me concentrate.I was forced to reread the same paragraphs several times and often the same lines – I blamed the mess outside, not the one inside my head.

Mine had been a wise decision, the kind that any person with a little common sense would have made. But perhaps, in the end, I would have looked better if I had just disappeared. The moment I had gotten angry with him, I had made it clear to him that I was interested in that friendship, dead before it had even really begun; and was that or was that not a cheap shot?

Not to mention the fact that I had come across as a testy guy who had taken it out on him and was still mulling it over.

...Well, yes, indeed it was like that: I was brooding in the hope of finding a way to stop. The problem was that the more I thought about it, the more my pride hurt, because once again I couldn’t not give a damn about what had happened and his reaction, I couldn’t get it out of my head that maybe I had hurt him. I couldn’t stop worrying about what he might feel, and damn how much I hated myself!

I hated myself so much!

I reopened the handouts, ready to start over.

I uncorked the highlighter and pledged to underline only the sentences I actually read.

Polymeric materials have modest mechanical strength at -- temperatures greater than 250°. They are poorly soluble and have a density -- polytetrafluoroethylene, commonly called Teflon, has a density greater than 2 g/cm3.

Nonsense.

What was I reading?

I let go of the highlighter and ran my hands over my face, as if it might have helped me find the concentration I kept losing. I was three weeks away from that freaking test, which I basically didn’t care that much about now, but still aware that I was goingto fall behind. I looked dejectedly at the graphs on the breaking resistance of polymer materials - a wiggly line going up and down.

I sighed again. I looked up at the other guys in that room and wished I was one of them, any of them, one who didn’t have all that shit to think about.

Because it wasn’t just Alan; Harvey was there, too.

And there I was, alone, wondering where he was and what crappy business he had gotten himself into. And then there was Ryan. The most painful punch in my face of my entire existence. I thought back to the ungrateful friend I had been, because maybe calling myself just “friend” was too much.

Ryan had basically only been part of my life as long as we had been two innocent kids, when at most I would accompany him to watch girls play volleyball. At the end of the game, he would make himself known to them with an ice-cold lemonade and a couple of witty jokes placed here and there, but he was already on another world from me, who understood nothing about those matters. Occasionally we played catch, when my father - another load of crap I would have gladly put aside - would not take us to baseball games.

But what had there ever been more than that? What had held us together during those years? Maybe it was the memory of something that had been there and would never return. Maybe it was the memory of the carefree years that we thought we could have again just by being together; instead, we hadn’t realized that the clock had kept ticking over our heads, that we had been confronted with choices that had taken us on different tracks.

There, I could not go back.

I couldn’t do that with Ryan, nor with my father, much less with Alan.

It was a hard lesson to digest, every time. I had to learn to understand bullshit had a cost, and I always chose the ones with the highest price tag. I had found so many guys who were willing to forgive me anything, like doormats, that maybe I had gotten the hang of it.

And then guys like Alan would come along and they weren’t willing to keep up with my mood swings. They wouldn’t carry some of my weight. He didn’t, despite so many promises. It was always like that anyway: come the climax, they’d all run away, and they wouldn’t come back.

Someone occupied the chair next to mine. I cast a fleeting glance only to catch a glimpse of the now-famousShittySteve. The amoeba was back on me, but I had to admit that he didn’t look his usual manic self that morning. He settled down next to me, who by now was waving a white flag, since studying was impossible, let alone with him on top of everything causing me a sense of revulsion.

“Are you still mad at me, Nate?”

“Don’t call me that, I hate it.”

“You seem a little agitated, don’t you?”

I took a deep breath and exhale. I didn’t answer him.

“You’re still upset about that Alan thing, I bet. What a rude guy he was, telling me your relationship was just a farce.”

With shocking calmness, only a few days earlier he had revealed to me that it was Alan himself who had told him, on the night of the party.

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