I look around the room. “Um, you mean about a guy pushing a rock up a hill?”

“Sure, you can talk about ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’… or what about the absurd? Do you agree that there could be an ‘absurd’ relationship between what humans want and what there actually is?”

“Um…”

She wheels the projector to the side of the room, and Abigail leans over. “Are we really supposed to be enlightened right now? It’s freaking Friday.”

Doug raises his hand, even though Evelyn said we didn’t have to. I guess we’re just fantastic robots after twelve years of this stuff. “What I think I meant is that it’s depressing to keep looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

Brendan sighs. “It’s only depressing if you want it to exist. The actual relationship is kind of hysterical. Like we’re all screwing off or trying to do something that matters, but nothing does and we all keep doing it anyway.”

Participation is 20 percent of our grade. Given the status of my essay, I take a go at it. “Maybe it’s only depressing if you think about it too much. On a day-to-day basis, when you’re living life and doing your thing, you don’t really have time for, um…”

“Existential quandaries?” Evelyn provides.

“Er, yeah, so I vote that thinking about it too much is the problem. Like, philosophy is the problem.”

The whole class laughs. Even Evelyn has a smile on her face.

“I like Cham’s solution,” Doug says.

“But I don’t think we can help thinking about it,” Brendan says, and we all turn around again. He is relentless. “It might be okay for a little while to do things like homework and college applications and plan prom, but at some point we have to wonder what it’s all for. It’s gotta be for something, right?”

A few people roll their eyes and I’m about to be one of them, but I detect something less than a smile behind his lips.

“Yes, this is why philosophy is important,” Evelyn says happily. “It’s not just an academic subject. It’s the consciousness we bring to our lives.”

After that, I think we’re all pretty tired of so much thinking. Evelyn hands out a book that’s actually another thing Camus wrote, a play called Caligula, and then she gives us the rest of the period to start reading it. I want to want to start reading it, but instead I flip through the pages in my agenda because there are sixty-five days ’til prom. There’s only two weeks left to get tickets, which means Gene’s going to have to ask me soon. Will it be public? Will I be naked, which has only happened 1.5 times altogether, but still?

Opportunities abound: Gene’s last track meet; Senior Night, which Abigail is dancing at; prom; graduation; Senior Volunteer Trip. It’s just a little hard to think about how despairing the human condition is, when a few weekends ago we danced until we threw up, and in a few more weekends we’ll be dancing until we throw up more. All the things we’ve been looking forward to since high school started are finally happening to us. My time capsule is filling up, and it’s freaking amazing. Of course life is worth living. Maybe it’s a sobfest if you’re an octogenarian philosopher who devoted his life to that curvy bit of punctuation known as the question mark, but when you’re seventeen, the world is just an oyster loving an oyster loving an oyster.