At the movie theater that had become a college for kids said to be special they took a math class with a man who was frustrated with the amount of paper being balled up and tossed in the air around the room. The teacher said to the kids in the room don’t any of you care about math. No one spoke but the boy who said in his typical way that he did not like to do math but liked the idea of math and wished that more of math class was about the appreciation of math instead of how math got done. For the girl, that was the moment when she gave up on him because what could the boy do but talk in circles and it would be in her interest to not think about him anymore. Her name was Alex and she was into not being around the girls and she wore a sweater and the ends of it wrapped around her fingers. She didn’t understand why the boy thought death was something to talk about and why he could never take any action. She had been through this before where she’d spoken to a guy who had a girlfriend and she was not going to do this again. From the boy’s perspective, he did love the girlfriend and at night they would talk on the phone and cry and break up, but in the morning, in the shower, the hard water in his eyes, he would think, what have I done? In the end, he went to a real college that was not a movie theater for kids who were said to be special. The boy couldn’t say for sure what happened to the girlfriend. He was a born leader, but felt ashamed for all the things he never did.
