21st
As time goes by.
Last night, while we were at some bar around Tania’s apartment, we met up with this guy I briefly had a thing with back in high school. Back then, he was a straight-laced guy, all about school and soccer and his music, an altar boy, a wannabe doctor. An overall good kid; I was more perverted than he was. We stopped talking to each other after he told me, in a raging fit, that I was invading his life because I was talking to his little sister and his friends, whom he introduced me to. I figured he was irrational, on top of being self-centered, and told him to fuck off. We rarely talked after that, and he remained the self-centered asshole I fell in like with my junior year of high school.
So, unsurprisingly, I was curious to see him last night. Most of the people who go to the school here live around it, so I was certain we would see him at some point. He comes in, sort of greasy and dirty looking, with an ugly shirt, jeans, and some strange shoes. He’s still as short as he was in high school. He says hi and kisses me, and he’s holding a cigarette with his right hand.
“Since when do you smoke?,” I ask him. He used to be against any sort of smoking, and would drink very little.
“Two years and still going,” he says.
Clearly, the guy has changed, but not entirely. He’s a “cool guy” now; apparently he’s doing coke every once in a while, and everybody knows that coke is what the cool kids do. He’s in the band that he started while we were having our little thing, and they’ve blown up a bit and I hear they sound way better. But he still doesn’t get any girls, which clearly means he probably still has his head up his ass.
But, while he’s “cool” and “laid-back” now, he’s still pretentious as fuck. He tried to impress me saying he’s studying to become a teacher and wants to go on and get a PhD or whatever it is teachers get. While being a teacher is a respectable choice, and one that I hope to make someday, I know for a fact that his faculty is one of the least demanding in terms of requirements to get in. So if he was trying to impress me with his brains, he failed miserably.
And he also speaks with some sort of accent he picked up somewhere. It’s like a weird hybrid of Argentinean and Spanish accents, but sort of weird because he sounds like he’s taking a shit. He speaks in a very correct way, which to us Puerto Ricans yells “pretentious asshat” like no other thing. And when he’s not speaking this weirdly-accented Spanish, he’s speaking English for no reason. Like full on conversations in English.
I’ve just realized I get with guys when they are at their prime. Every single guy I’ve had a thing with, or hooked up with, or whatever. They look their best, and act their best, and generally have their shit together when I get them. After that, they get a huge beer belly, like my first hookup at MIT, or they get into a douchebag frat, like my second hookup at MIT, or they start fucking desperate Wellesley chicks because they can’t get ass, like my summer whateverthefuckthatwas. Or, like this guy, they start doing coke, slacking off in school and switch from pre-med to teaching, and become greasy and get a weird accent.
Maybe this is an indication that the next guy I hook up with I should never speak to again. I mean, I wouldn’t want to tarnish their image in my mind, right?
