Person Who Sits Next To Me

"I once knew a girl named Kate Stromberg,

who's name had no rhyme except Bromberg.

A city in Poland,

I found while patrollin'

the web for words other than 'homburg'."*

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My first impression of Kate Stromberg was "Woah, she and Lauren Keach seem like really good friends." This was because they sat next to each other in freshman biology, and could occasionally be seen having a conversation. And I'm pretty sure they must've been lab partners for something. I don't know. I'm not her keeper!

But in retrospect, sitting next to someone in one class is probably not enough to form a friendship. You would need at least... four classes together. And have to be hallway buddies traveling to two of them. Even if one hallway buddy has to chase the other down because the second hallway buddy is completely inconsiderate of the fact that the first hallway buddy will get very lost trying to find his way from Tallent's class to physics without the assistance of the aforementioned second hallway buddy.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that this year, Kate Stromberg and I have been involuntarily together a lot. We've played incredibly lengthy games of tic-tac-toe, a game she is so good at and I so dumb that she actually won four times. We've studied for English vocab quizzes, meaning she studied for English vocab quizzes while I frantically shoved my head over her shoulder in order to see maybe one or two of the words. We've discussed UK basketball, where I learned that John Cousins is not the name of a basketball player. We've probably even got inside jokes. I don't remember them.

And through asking about math homework and physics labs and visual literacy projects, and goofing on and off on free days or when Ms. Tallent is talking, Kate and I have become pretty normal friends. It just kind of happened that way; we never really went through a stage where we hung out outside of school, or where we talked about our lives and problems. (Well, Kate's lives and problems. Kate probably knows far more than she ever wished to about mine, from me. Whining.) I feel weirdly comfortable around Kate, and I hope she feels weirdly comfortable around me, because she's certainly weirdly honest - she's the only person who's consistently disliked all the essays I've ever written, which I find hilarious. Really. She's so mean about it; it's sadistically kind of awesome.

But anyway. Kate and I are sort of friends, which is because and why we sit next to each other in English and rant about Roni every time we leave her room and play weirdly long games of tic-tac-toe. And that's why she'd obviously be lavender. Which is a color? Right?

*A type of felt hat.