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The rest of the ride home was filled with more music than conversation. And that, too, was okay. Kurt's words seemed to express exactly how I was feeling as I rode alongside Len.

I think I'm dumb . . . Or maybe just happy.

the twenty-fourth

For a Sunday night, it was pretty dead. So I got off work early enough to call Len and ask him to meet me at Helga's. It had become a sort of routine, hanging out on the nights he had off from saving people's lives and the nights I had off doing the opposite via junk food. With Bridget and Pepe off in LA visiting her dad, I really don't have anyone else here to spend time with. So I'm grateful for his company, even if we've strayed little from our usual dialogue. I want to think that I've helped Len feel less alone in his pain. But I should have been tipped off to the contrary when he made a surprising request tonight.

“How about. Um. I meet you at. Um. AJ's?”

“AJ's?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Let's live a little.”

This was an unusual turn of events. First, because Len doesn't drink. And second, because AJ's is the darkest, dankest, least-inviting drinking establishment on the boardwalk. It repels bennies, and therefore is most appealing to locals and semilocals like me. AJ's only concession to any sort of décor is the hundreds of plastic potted plants hanging from the ceiling, all ashen with decades of cigarette-smoky dust. At AJ's, only two varieties of music are played: Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I'd told Len that I'd always wanted to get a drink there, for kicks, but never had anyone to go with me and I didn't want to go alone because that's the first sign of alcoholism. And while that will give me something to talk about with the street-corner winos with whom I'll be keeping company after I graduate, there's no need to get an early start on my addiction.

When I got there, Len already had a half-empty cup of beer in front of him. I decided not to make a big deal about this uncharacteristic libation. I ordered whatever they had on tap. I got Budweiser, served in plastic. Klassy.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

Usually that precedes something that I don't want to hear. But I was open-minded.

“Go on,” I said.

Len swallowed his beer, then looked straight ahead at his reflection in the Miller Lite mirror across the bar. “I don't want to be a doctor.”

“I don't want to be a shrink!”

We toasted each other, our plastic cups making more of a crunch than a clink.

“Why don't you want to be a doctor?” I asked.

“It turns out that I'm not very good with people,” he said with a shrug.

“Me either! What do you think you'll do after graduation?”

He shook his head slowly, somberly. “I have no idea.”

“Me either!”

“You sound very happy about your uncertain future,” he said, his eyebrows crumpling.

“Oh, I'm totally freaked out,” I said in a blithe tone that undermined the message. “But it's comforting to know that I'm not alone in my cluelessness. At least you've got an extra semester to figure it out. I'll be unemployed and homeless come January.”

“That's unfortunate,” he said.

“It is,” I said.

We swiveled back and forth on our bar stools for a few seconds.

“What happened to us?” Len asked, staring into his cup. “We were Most Likely to Succeed. Now we're both a mess.”

“Yes we are,” I said. There was a fingerprint smudge on the left lens of his glasses that in his younger, more-together days, he would have rubbed off immediately with a small, square piece of felt that he kept in his back pocket for such a purpose. But this Len just ignored it, or didn't notice it at all, which was also very unlike him.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Actually, we're messes. Plural. We're our own separate messes.”

“Hey, Len, you're not stuttering,” I pointed out. “Did you notice that?”

“Actually, yes, I did notice that. People stammer less when they're drunk. It's a counterintuitive but common phenomenon studied by linguists.”

“I bet it's because drinking