She sits on the black vinyl chair next to him, a fake Barcelona, with an easy, inscrutable grace—thanks to the karate training, he reasons—and looks at him. Make that stares. Not a word out of her, just the death stare. Like that one tractor beam thingy in Star Wars. Locked on him and ready to do some damage. One hand twitching. Probably deciding which punch to throw first. Maybe rip his heart out and show it to him before he dies—that old Bruce Lee classic. He sits back on his cushioned love seat a bit, hopefully just out of her range, and decides to pitch right in. And then it happens. The crying starts up. He’s got to give her some credit here, because this is pretty smooth, this tactic. He hadn’t even come up with a game plan for this one. Nope. He’d run the shouting-match–fisticuffs–chase-across-campus scenario through his head a dozen times, but this middlebrow, mascara-running, silent plea for sympathy hadn’t even seemed like a remote possibility.

“Look, I could say a bunch of stuff, really, all kinds of pretty standard guy crap that you’d see right through and none of it would make this any easier, so I might as well just say it. OK?” He checks to see how that worked, whether it appears to have any lasting effect. She remains quiet, though, like some Jazz Age painting—it’s her bobbed hairdo that brings this to mind—simply looking back at him. Silent.

“I really like what we had, you know, all those dinners and movies at your place. You’re great, you totally are, and I loved being in class with you. I learned a ton, honestly. You’re awesome with Shakespeare … Taming of the Shrew really came alive for me. But … I just don’t dig this anymore, all right? I mean, not so much.” Nothing from her. A couple more tears, but they’re starting to mean less and less now that he’s waist-deep in them.