“No problem, no problem,” said the scientist. “So, okay. Do you know what a quasar is? We know that quasars are a paradox because they emit great amounts of energy despite being close enough to a black hole to be swallowed up by it. Right? Okay. So …”
All of a sudden another thought jumped into my mind, and I couldn’t tell if I was just being paranoid or what—but it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it was possible that all my friends went to the same party the night before without telling me, and that’s why they all woke up so late and then all texted me at the same time.
“Uh-huh, wow, whoa, that’s crazy,” I said, while I thought about whether I should give them the benefit of the doubt and still make plans to meet up with them later, or whether I should hold off on making plans until I could find a way to prove definitively whether or not they had all fucked me over, in which case I would still meet up with them but only to tell them to go fuck themselves. I really hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though, because I had gotten pretty excited to see the looks on their faces when I told them about dark matter and about how nobody in the world knew what it was except the scientist and us.
Also, to be honest, it would be bad timing for me to lose all my friends today of all days because it was Sunday, and Sunday nights always made me a little lonely for some reason. It always seemed to be windier on Sunday nights, too—maybe the scientist knew something about why that was. In any case, the point was that on Sundays especially, I really would prefer not to be alone, even though I knew deep down that it was probably better to be alone than to be with fake friends.
“Uh-huh, wow, whoa, that’s crazy,” I kept saying to the scientist on a loop as I tried to figure out if there was anything at all in the middle—for example, which friends might have convinced the other friends to leave me out and which friends might have just gone along with the peer pressure, and so which ones I might possibly be able to forgive, even if I had to tell the others to go fuck themselves for all time.
Just when I was finally close to a pretty good theory, I noticed that the scientist wasn’t saying anything anymore. He was just standing there, staring at me with that same smile from before, only not so smug anymore, like now it was really tender and scared, even though the weird part is that if I had to draw the smile, I would have drawn the exact same smile as the smug one—but I could somehow tell it was different even though it looked the same. And also, I noticed both his eyes had clogged up. “You’re the only other person in the world who knows,” he said. Then one tear fell down from one eye and then the other. “I can’t believe I’m not alone with this anymore.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that nope, he was still alone, so I nodded and walked up to him and shook his hand—a really big handshake, like in a “congratulations” type of way, and when that didn’t feel like enough, I gave him a hug right around his fat, nice neck. Then that felt like maybe borderline too much—the handshake and the hug combined—so I gave him one of those solid “and that’s that” nods and left.
I did end up seeing my so-called friends that night. Get this: they told me they had gone to a party without me, but they said they knew it was going to be bad and that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, which is why they didn’t invite me. It was a little bit shady, but I was tired of thinking about this so I just decided to let it go. I told them about the planetarium tour and about how no one knows what dark matter is, not even the scientist, which they thought was interesting, and then I did an impression of the scientist giving the tour, which they thought was hysterical. I felt a little bad because in my impression I gave the scientist a lisp, which he didn’t have in real life, but that was the part that made my friends laugh the hardest, so, who knows. One of my friends said, “You know, he actually sounds kind of sweet,” which made me feel better because that was how I felt about him in my head while I was doing the impression! Even though I was making him sound like a dork, I still thought of him as kind of sweet. And also, he had lied about no one knowing what dark matter is, when he really did know, so he wasn’t exactly an angel himself. And I knew he would never find out about my impression, so it wouldn’t hurt him. And if he ever does find out about it, through some invention he makes or something, I hope he’ll just forgive me, the same way I forgave my friends.