She was the salutatorian of my high school class, but I wasn’t really friendly with her.  She seemed bossy and weird to me, and I couldn’t pretend to be interested in all the weird inside jokes among her clique.  My mother said she went to Notre Dame, but her parents had to take out a second mortgage on their house to fund her.  I don’t know if that’s true.  I do know that she joined the military, and got married, however, I read on the Internet that she is now divorced.  For the first time she seemed human to me.

He is my cousins’ cousin.  Does that make him my cousin?  I always thought he was super cool because he also moved from his hometown to Miami.  He moved in with his girlfriend right away, which I also liked.  I thought he was telling all the narrow-minded people who wanted him to fail to go fuck themselves, and I loved that.  I heard from my mother that he studied film, and I hope he becomes a big time director or producer or something just to show the extended family snobs from Massachusetts that their expectations for him were very wrong.

The office had difficulty replacing her after she dated her supervisor.  Positions were quickly shuffled, but her replacement quit within two weeks.  Everyone said how great Julie was.  I learned from her closest coworkers that the supervisor did most of her work and that according to one of them she, “sat there like a deer in the headlights”.  I have a tendency to believe that was jealousy speaking, but I was shocked to find out she is a mother with a school aged child.  When I imagine her and children, I imagine her having the look her coworker spoke of.

We bonded because we were awkward teenagers in the suburbs who felt misunderstood.  He and I sat in class talking about and listening to hip hop on our portable CD players because we finished our assignments long before the rest of the class and were left unattended by our teacher.  He told me that he couldn’t wait to get married because he thought it would be nice to have someone with whom he could share his problems.  He once suggested that we become roommates.  I knew it would never happen.  It broke my heart that he had a drug problem.

He made me believe that electronic music is cool.  I was his biggest fan, staying at the bar later than everyone else from our office.  We were escaping our identities as young professionals.  He was now a DJ, whereas I was pretending to feel comfortable in a bar with strangers.   I admire his passion for music.  Seeing him focus so intently on something that was so enjoyable made me happy for him.  It was a far cry from the social awkwardness at happy hour when he once told me I looked like I was on my way to a funeral.