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We had decided to meet up at the nearest Starbucks because we thought the TV in both our houses would only distract us. I caught sight of Carlo from down the block, tapping his pen on the tabletop and sipping his frap–his jaw clenching as he did. It’s silly I know, but I found it to be the most endearing thing. Today, we were going on our first study session for the quarterly exams, and I couldn’t be more excited.

“What great lessons are you ready to teach me today?” I said, breathless, but not from walking.

His eyes lit up. “The importance of not having someone wait for you for very long,” he teased, looking at his watch. “I can get impatient, and you might just regret it if I upped and left.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, quietly, wondering whether he was talking about something else other than my being 15 minutes late today. (Hoping that he was, actually.)

But by the time I settled on hot chocolate and had arranged my books around me, I was thinking otherwise. Since that fateful day he told me he’d chosen our friendship over his feelings, I had heard nothing else from him. From then on, things were back to normal and he had been, to me, the way he’d always been: comfortable, sometimes patronizing, sometimes annoying, mostly supportive, always playful, always friendly. I have gotten no feelers since that day. His burying his face in his book, completely oblivious to the fact that I’ve been staring at him for the last two minutes now was the truest testament to that.

We had gotten one hour of studying in before he looked up. “Break?” I asked, and he nodded. We finished the rest of my glazed doughnut as we watched the people around us and decided to play a game. We called it Couple Analysis, and we were going to make wild, completely unfounded assumptions based on what the couples looked like.

“I see a couple…” I started, eyeing the one across from us. He was playing with his skateboard under the table and had a chain looped around his pants; she was powdering her nose. “She agreed to go out with him because she thought she could change him. Now she’s realizing he’ll always be a kid. She is now ready to dump him for a college guy.”

Carlo looked at me, eyes wide. “Kay, I think they’re mother and son!” he whispered.

I let out a big laugh but was unfazed. So for the better part of 30 minutes, I played Couple Analyzer to whoever cared to walk in front of us. I rebutted all of Carlo’s analyses for nine couples out of 10 before I finally grew tired.

“I’m out. It’s back to the books for me,” I announced, as I took my bookmark away from the page I had sectioned off and started to read.

“I see a couple,” he said quietly, and I looked up. I didn’t see any one in sight… “He’s been keen on her for some time now. He wasn’t upfront about it because they were very close, and he didn’t want to ruin their friendship.” …Unless he was talking about the old couple who was just elaving. “So he started dropping major hints. She didn’t seem to notice until finally, he spelled it out for her–only to find out she liked someone else. So he felt monumentally stupid and stayed away from her for a while. But he ended up missing her terribly and crawling back, saying sorry…” Surely Carlo wasn’t talking about the pair beside them who looked like they were brother and sister.

“…insisting he didn’t mean to like her and making things out like his feelings for her didn’t run that deep anyway.” And I finally looked at him looking at me.

“She took it all in, I think” he said, staring into my eyes. “But I have to tell you, Katie,” he said, shaking his head as I waited to exhale, “that crazy guy was lying.”