Renegade

April - I

April 4, 2018

Dear Miss Catherine,

We're going to transfer the Big Stick policy from advance registration to the final group project for my ethics class. It's one of those requirements everyone is forced to take to graduate, probably because if the school didn't mandate this class, the ethics department would go bankrupt—as if ethics isn't already bankrupt in the world—but I can assure you that taking ethics does not make any of us more ethical.

Unlike last semester's group project fiasco, we get to pick our group members this time around. I picked a kid called Trevor who comes to lecture (good sign) and takes notes during class (another good sign).

That was on Monday. Yesterday afternoon, he messaged me asking if it was cool if he brings a friend into the group because he was sick the day the teacher released the group project and didn't have a group yet. His friend's name is David.

Trevor added David into the group chat, and David wrote a single "hi" in lowercase letters because that's the least labor-intensive greeting you can say in English—only two letters, and no need to press the Shift key.

At our first meeting, David showed up ten minutes later than we'd scheduled. David is not a David. He's a Goliath. When he came in, I tilted my head to look up, because that guy was humongous and tall and broad, like a human version of the Greek Titans. He wasn't carrying a backpack—didn't bring anything except himself in a white T-shirt, light blue chino shorts, bulging veins and muscles, and mildly bloodshot eyes.

He gave Trevor a fist bump with one tanned, rocky fist. "Eyyyy, Trevor. Whassup?"

Trevor did the dude nod chin-up thing like the gangsters in the mob movies.

David turned and asked me whassup.

Nothing much.

He grunted and sat down with a thud in a chair at the unoccupied edge of the table between me and Trevor. He started drumming his tree-trunk-esque fingers against the desk and bouncing his heels against the floor, shaking the table. He was really jittery the whole time.

I asked him cautiously if he was a senior, and he laughed while Trevor snickered.

David said flatly, "No. Guess how old I am."

Maybe twenty-three?

Trevor burst out laughing and said that David's a freshman.

My eyes bugged out, and I repeated, "A freshman?" There was no way that guy was a freshman.

David sniggered and said that he's eighteen.

Eighteen? Goliath is younger than me.

I apologized and said that I thought he looked older.

David waved it off with a huge plank of a hand and said it's fine. He never gets ID'd at bars and clubs because they just wave him through.

Trevor mock-punched the side of David's ginormous triceps and said, "David works out, don'tcha?"

David did not move an inch because his triceps must be hewn out of granite, and he chuckled and said that he can squat three hundred and bench-press two-fifty.

Good Lord...

I wonder which theory of bulking season David ascribes to—the one about wolfing down white chicken meat or going on an all-Soylent juice cleanse. Actually, the thing I really wonder about is how a relatively small and willowy person like Trevor would end up friends with a huge hulk like David, and such good friends, too, that he'd bring his giant into the group.