It’s not that Tits & Co. didn’t still carry themselves with the bearings of rulers. They still had mad swag. But they’d lost their kingdom, and I wondered if they knew that. So they built new bars, they got the best jobs. Well, the corporate jobs: Brooks Brothers’ ties and Wall Street money. Jobs that sapped the cool right out of them, kicked them into a corner offi ce and out of the zeitgeist. They got away for the weekend with their boyfriends and girlfriends, they took pictures with their parents. Where’s that line between growing up and growing old?

I decided that it was time to be one of the chosen ones. Asher was probably the single smartest person I had ever encountered. He treated classes as a joke, played a game with himself where he saw how fast he could complete exams (that he hadn’t flipped open a page to study for). He finished the two-hour exam in twenty minutes. Topped the class. Decried the mediocrity of education with laughs. He dropped his triple majors (finance, economics and automotive engineering) out of boredom and opted for the fluff communications major instead. Decried his obvious self-destructive tendencies and laughed.

It didn’t matter. Companies began courting him at the beginning of sophomore year. Start-ups offered him six figures to spearhead their marketing division.

He turned them all down. He took a job as a digital artist for a struggling magazine, worked out of an exposed concrete-walled offi ce in the Campus Arts District. Made less money a month than his second-skin Citizens cost, but that was all okay—as he said, ‘It’s trendy to be poor.’

It was a ridiculous statement, made at a hungover lunch with him and Jane sitting on one side of a TGIF booth, Thomas and I opposite them.

Thomas laughed at Asher. Directly, straight at him.

Jane laughed a laugh that wasn’t amused enough to not hold a measure of assent.

I picked Jane’s laugh. And moved my shoulders and head in a combination of a shrug and nod.

Are you starting to change?