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MEMOIR
Sequels and Becoming Different People
Avatar and life’s stages
The year is 2009 and my best friend and I are filing into his mother’s silver Honda Odyssey. It’s a van well-suited to her three kids and all of their various sports and extracurricular activities. We’re going to see Avatar in 3D.
There’s an opened case of water bottles teetering around with plasticky jolts beneath the gentle hum of Christmas music. We’re old enough to know most of the words of these songs but young enough that they’re not quite cemented into our brains. Silly bands line wrists, the stock market is in even worse shambles than today, and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” has yet to even celebrate its sixteenth birthday.
John and I both love a girl for the first time. But it’s the same girl; her name is Jenny. We play an insidious tug-of-war match over her affections that lasts for the better part of a year. Right now, I’m winning. Aided by the QWERTY keyboard of my Alias 2 cellphone, I’m engaged in a feverish texting match with her as she lies sprawled out on the floor of her boyband-covered middle school bedroom.
John peers over at me nervously. He knows that I’m texting her but hardly wants to confront me about it in front of his mom. Me, I’m smiling like a fool at the first “You’re cute’s,” “I…
