-Just Friends-

In a wedding where the guests are restricted to spouses or soon-to-be’s, the bride’s brother brought a friend. Not a girlfriend, as both hastily correct parents and grandparents. Just friends, longtime friends who met in their first year of college, a young man and woman familiar but never intimate. Since the bride’s brother and friend are designated as overflow, same as me, the three of us roomed together and formed a temporary cliché, and I was surprised to find that our threesome easily exceeded the wedding in chatty fun.

Physically, he’s become much more imposing than I remember. But he still carries a smile and a sincere laugh, so it’s surprising when he lifts his sleeve to display bruises he picked up in a bar fight. It was very one-sided, he explains, just like this one - here he gestures at a scab along his hairline.

They correct another guest in unison. “Just friends.”

“Do you ever claim to be more than friends to get rid of a guy you’re not interested in? I ask her.
“All the time. He doesn’t mind.”
“And vice versa?”
Not an issue, she says, he is never interested in girls like her.
I’m watching very carefully to see if she twitches over this, but it’s inconclusive until she regards her closest male companion, stuck in space and peering into the screen of his camera.

“He likes girls with thin waists.” She tells me, and puts her thumb and forefinger together with a silver-dollar sized circle of air in between.