How is an understanding reached? There is a point in every relationship or friendship where a certain understanding is either reached, or not reached. This determines the course of that entire relationship. How is such a thing predicted, such an understanding understood? Looking sidewise at his leg, next to hers, she found no answer, only dark corduroy lines, regimented and fading into wear and flat colour. She had felt so close to his thoughts that summer, but with the coming of autumn, it seemed to the girl that she had been let go. High school must have had the same nerve- numbing effect on every student, but she felt as though she were very alone. There was no class. There was nothing there for her to learn. There was no table, no instructor. There were only her hands, twisted in her lap like knotted fabric, beside him.

She found him a severely flawed person: he had once counted her among his two closest friends. Perhaps he still did. But if that were the case, she wondered how he could manage to say such things to her as he did, and in such an offhand manner, as though they did not tear her apart.

We're invisible to you now. You don't even look at us.

It made her so angry--not that he had said it, but that he had beaten her to it. She had felt that way about him, about the two of them, what had been her closest companions. She couldn't believe that he would take her indignation away from her by uttering words that were hers. Mild and calm, he had won. Won. Won everything: respect, of an irreplacable sort, and the unshakable love of the third of their triangle, a lovely girl, and the best friend of both.

You don't even look at us.

Of course, she should have known things would narrow their way down to this current perspective. When two corners of a triangle are of friendship, and one is of love, the hypotenuse of love's angle becomes superfluous, and the other two sides inevitably flatten, around the love, into a line. Once this has happened, it is impossible to tell where one begins and where the other ends. They are lines, to be sure, for all to see, but ask the public to seperate them, and problems will arise.

The girl felt physically ill, when she thought of that entrenchment in another that they lived with, and adored living with. The girl felt waves of actual nausea when she was given evidence of their symbiosis and mutual reliance. The weakness made her sick. It made her sick, and so lonely she could die, so lonely she could think of nothing she wanted more than to reach into her skin and pull out her bones, to turn her own body inside out to rid herself of her tension and revulsion.

When she thought of how differently she used to approach him, indeed and both of them, she knew that she would have laughed, had it not involved her. The change was so marked, and she could not tell if the change was in her, or in him. She could not speak to very many people anymore.