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Smarter than the average
I went to school with a guy. Let’s call him Steve. We should. After all, that is his real name.
Steve was smarter than your average teenage boy. He was the smartest guy in my class and probably the smartest in our entire year. Yet he wore his intelligence lightly; nonchalantly; like an Italian man wears a scarf. He knew he was smart; he just never felt the need to crow about it.
But we all knew. All of us — his classmates — thought (KNEW) that Steve was destined for great things. He was the only person I knew that seemed to be fashioned from university material. And, after a successful stint at university, he would land a great job where he would use his massive brain to make lots of money before marrying a trophy wife. We didn’t have such a thing at my school. But if we’d had a vote for “the most likely to succeed”, Steve would have been an automatic winner. No-one else came close.
When I walked out of my school gates for the final time, I had dozens of friends with whom I had spent the past five years. We shared a common bond, so of course we would all be lifelong friends.
Within a year, that dozen had dwindled to just one or two. We all got caught up in college, work, girlfriends, boyfriends and — you know — life. One of those to fall by the wayside on my personal friendship superhighway was Steve.
