September 25, 2008 at 6:12PM

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Our first assignment in English is an essay on The Metamorphosis.

I'm over at Alex's house because he wants to swap papers, give each other edits when we're both done. His mom baked oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies and laid them out for us on a tray next to a jug of milk and two tall glasses. I notice that Alex has cookie crumbs on his laptop keyboard. He's typing away furiously, trying to finish his paper so I can edit it for him. I wonder if his keyboard is still going to be functional with all those crumbs lodged inside.

I look at my own paper, re-reading the first paragraph for the third time. I liked the story a lot, so actually kind of enjoyed writing the paper. Not sure if Alex is going to make mine any better, but curious to see what he wrote.

Furiously typing with a look of uncontainable glee, Alex makes a final keystroke and looks up.

"Alright, finished!" he proclaims.

"Cool, let's swap."

Alex and I exchange laptops and start editing each other's work. The essay he's written is a mess. He uses a lot of words that I'm pretty sure he doesn't know the meaning of, and his grammar is off the wall, almost approaching another language. But some of the ideas are great. He talks a lot about alienation, how the character lost his humanity, how his darkest subconscious fears were being realized.

I think about my own paper, which is more straightforward—more about the character's troubled relationship with his parents, specifically his father who ultimately kills him by hurling an apple at his shell. What a way to go. Thanks A LOT, DAD...

It occurs to me that Alex has this totally unique way of looking at things; whatever he was thinking was going to be slightly different than what everyone else was thinking.

"This is cool, man," I say. "Nice work."

He looks up at me, sort of nervously, thrilled to hear the compliment.

"Thanks, man. That means a lot," he replies. "Yours is really cool, too."

"Thanks."

I clean up some spelling mistakes for him and rewrite a few sentences and hand it back. He's overjoyed with the result.

"Didn't think I could do this shit, but I guess you can always surprise yourself, huh?"

Can you always surprise yourself? I feel like I haven't done that in a very long time. Maybe it's more of an occasional thing. Or just doesn't happen at all for some people.

He gives me a few suggestions for ideas to expand on in my paper, which are helpful. I promised my parents I'd try to do a little better in school. Maybe this was a start.

After we finish our papers, Alex turns on this movie, The Shawshank Redemption. It's about a guy who's falsely imprisoned and spends years battling this warden, eventually tunnelling his way out of his cell. He has this friend in prison who helps him out, and they become really good pals. Alex laughs hysterically at the ending when the two guys are finally free, on some idyllic beach, racing towards each other for the big, climactic embrace. I think about whether Alex and I will be that close. I've never had a friend last more than a year or so.

I think I ate too many oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies. 

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