A Modest Proposal

His face was looking straight into the maw of an enormous text book. There was a slice of pizza frozen halfway to his mouth, and his guitar case was sitting at his feet, waiting. His face was adorned with a fair amount of stubble. “You know,” he tells me without looking up “I once proposed to a girl just because she had a locker beside mine.” He looks up and into my eyes. “That’s not weird, is it?”
This is the sort of thing you expect when you spend too much time with Stuart. I didn’t answer him, so he just looked back down at his book and took a bite of his pizza.
“It’s not like I was in love with her or anything,” he said to me eventually. “I just needed to feel something different. High school, you know, it was dragging on me. I asked in response to some question she asked the hall in general. I don’t think she even heard me, because she didn’t answer. Of course,” he says, suddenly looking pensive, “I suppose it could have been that she did hear and didn’t answer because she was embarrassed. I mean, I was being pretty sarcastic when I said it, all monotone and whatnot. Maybe she was into me and I was being inadvertently mean.” He shruged, then after a slight pause, turned back to his book and took another bite of pizza. In silence, he finished, then sighed, and looked up again. “Thanks for the breakfast.”
It was two o’clock in the afternoon. He stood up, stooped to pick up his guitar, and then was gone.