Nothing romantic, of course. Christ, no. I still tended to think she was loud, obnoxious, and stupid, and she thought I was an annoying little chickenshit. But we were intertwined in each other. It was almost as if we had been melted, molded together, and then separated and hardened into two entirely different beings.

“How are you today?” Wynezra asked me at lunch.

“Bleeding,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Do you need some chocolate?”

She wasn’t even being sarcastic. I could see in her eyes that she totally meant it. And that made me want to cry, so I thought of things that made me happy, that made me laugh, like cat videos, and cheesecake, and Chris Farley, but that only seemed to make it worse, and then I remembered that Chris Farley was dead, and I completely lost it.

Wynezra pulled her wallet out of her back pocket, removed a dollar, and ventured off to the vending machines. A minute later, she came back and set an Almond Joy in front of me.

I stared at it like a log of dog shit sealed in a candy wrapper, which it basically was.

“Almond Joy?” I said. “Of all the amazing candy bars in the whole wide world, you get me a fucking Almond Joy?”

“Almond Joys are great,” said Wynezra.

“I hate coconut,” I said. “I hate almonds! They taste like actual balls.”

“They have antioxidants.”

“Then antioxidants taste like balls!”

“Try it. Call it a social experiment.”

“A social experiment?” I said. I was so mad, I could barely even decipher what she meant. So, out of pure rage, I ripped open the Almond Joy and took a big bite. I hoped it was so disgusting that it made me sick, and I puked all over Wynezra’s shirt, which had a picture of a velociraptor and said VELOCIRAPTOR = DISTANCERAPTOR/TIMERAPTOR, and it was my favorite shirt! That’s how mad I was.

I chewed.

I chewed some more.

I swallowed.

“This actually isn’t terrible,” I said, and I took another bite.

“I tried an Almond Joy the other day,” said Wynezra. “I hated it.”

“Whad? Sherioushly?”

“You wanna hear something even crazier?”

I swallowed, took another bite, and nodded. This candy bar was fucking delicious.

“I don’t like pork rinds anymore,” said Wynezra.

I choked on the candy bar in my mouth, gagged, and then spewed it across the table. Wynezra leaned left, just barely dodging the largest, saliva-lubed chunk.

“Are you serious?” I said, totally moved on from my near-death experience.

Wynezra nodded, gravely serious. “Would I joke about pork rinds?”

She most definitely would not.

“I’m willing to bet,” said Wynezra, “that you like pork rinds now.”

There was a long silence as she allowed me to process this startling hypothesis. In order to cope with the implications, I inserted the last of the candy bar in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed.