"My hair feels chewy," I said, staring into one of my curls.

I was fifteen, and not paying any attention to Mr. Davenport, alongside everyone else in the classroom. I think he was talking about Margaret Thatcher and bees and maybe something about coats. Since I'd transferred into this fifth period circus two months ago, I'd slowly made my way from always looking at the front of the classroom, to only talking to Danny, behind me.

"'Chewy'? Have you chewed your hair recently?" Danny asked. The delight in his tone, accompanied by his silent laugh made me feel important and funny- mission accomplished.

Danny was funny. He drew robots and abstract cartoon characters doing dark things on his notebooks, and he remembered everything. He was wiry and always had the faintest of bags under his eyes, but they almost went with his pale skin, shaggy hair, and high-top Converse that created his lost, depressive teen boy-ensemble.

He wasn't conventionally attractive, and the fluorescent lighting of our public school only aided in all of us feeling hideously awkward. But Danny was weird, and I knew that I liked that.

I dated him for six weeks after I told him about my chewy hair. (Six weeks in dumbass Freshmen time is roughly a year and a half.) We would get coffee, or sushi, and make out in the park near his house. Whenever we'd kiss, I'd always feel so big and lumbering; I was all breasts, stomach, and hips, slathered up against his bony body. I felt like Jabba the Hut trying to fondle the Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

It was a rainy, dreary Tuesday when he broke up with me. He pulled me aside in the hallway one day, saying he wanted to talk to me. I wore this ugly green shirt that I suddenly became aware wasn't fully covering my stomach. He said he thought things should "probably slow down." I felt like a pile of green Jell-O. The worst part was, I wasn't even that into him. Our kisses were out of sync and our dates were "meh," which made it even more insulting that he was ending things with me.

"Let's just try to stay friends. I think that would be best," he reassured me.

Then something weird happened- we actually stayed friends. We partied all the way through high school, went away to distant colleges, and returned back to our city, ready to figure out ourselves, our careers, adulthood, and pick up where we left off.

Now we are 25, sitting at the shady-ass bar a block away from his house, and he's got something very important that he needs to tell me, that couldn't wait until I was NOT in bed with my man-candy.

"I think my dad's cheating on my mom."

I stare at him for a second, then say to the bartender with myriad piercings walking by, "Can we get two more IPAs?"