The day before the con law exam was beautiful again. 75 degrees and a breeze that changed directions often. People scurried through it on their way to and from the library. Ellipses and I sat on a bench on the edge of the courtyard and threw pebbles at the ones we knew. Some of the good postured girls smiled at us and waved hello. Griffothy looked up (the equivalent of someone of normal height looking down) and pretended not to feel the pebbles or hear us when we shouted his name. Nicko strode over and lied on the ground in front of us.
“Thank God, normal people!”
Someone had recently broken his heart and he wanted to talk. It was almost dinnertime so the three of us headed to a sushi place on Bleecker. We chose it because fish was brain food.
“It’s my library girlfriend,” Nicko said when we sat down. “She’s gay.”
“This is why you don’t talk to library girlfriends,” I said.
“So what,” Ellipses asked. I asked the waitress for a round of dollar sake.
“So she told me that after I fucked her all night. That’s like a year in finals time. I’m emotionally invested now.” I asked him who she was. “Tall, thin, eyebrow ring…”
“You hooked up with Emily,” I told him. “She has buzzed hair and wears a men’s leather jacket. How did you not know she was gay?”
“Hello maybe I don’t believe in stereotyping people?”
The dollar sake arrived and we ordered. For the third time that spring I caught myself thinking that sake tasted like low fat hemlock, then reasoned that dollar sake was probably not representative of the genre.
Nicko told us more about Emily. She took her boots off and sat on her feet in the library; her homepage was the BBC; she refused to kiss Nicko because of his beard. We ordered another round of dollar sake. I pointed out how the last person Ellipses had hooked up with was a gay guy and four of the past five girls I’d hooked up with were straight.
“You guys,” I said. “There’s something about us. We must be hot in some freakish way that transcends gender.”
“Yeah,” Nicko nodded and his eyes were wide. “Dude it sounds like a good thing but really it’s like a curse.”
“Or,” Ellipses said, “we seek these people out because we don’t actually want the responsibility of a relationship. In fact, we can’t even deal with the responsibility of rejecting someone. So we have to hook up with people who are guaranteed to reject us.”
“Are you listening to me? She did not. Tell me. She was-”
“Relationships aren’t that much responsibility,” I said. “On sitcoms in the 90s they used to make a big deal about forgetting your girlfriend’s birthday, but now with facebook notifications what’s the problem?”
“Yeah, can’t be more responsibility than law school,” Nicko said. The plates arrived. “Thank God brain food!”
“Law school responsibility is kind of optional,” I pointed out.
“See,” Ellipses said. “Maybe we blow off law school because we’re afraid of getting a job where we’ll have responsibility! That’s why we’re here drinking cheap Japanese booze while the competition is sticky tabbing their outlines for tomorrow. And we’re going to be miserable when grades come out, the same way we’re miserable when people reject us. But actually it’s our own fault because we refuse to grow up. In fact we’re miserable because we know we deserve exactly–”
“AAAAAH” Nicko said and covered his ears. “Evil evil evil evil!” I covered my ears too and we said “evil evil evilvieivlevilevil vievilevilevielvielvilvielv!”
Turned out Ellipses had scored adderall that morning.
