When Nerds Collide
In the months after I befriended Mike, we spent a lot of time hanging out together. We’d ride bikes between each other’s houses, romp around the creek near my apartment complex, and play NES games for hours. Mike had this quirky sense of humor, and he remains to this day the best storyteller I’ve ever met. We became best friends that year, through Seminar and dodgeball and all the goofy hangouts along the way.
So it might seem surprising that I also became good friends with his mortal enemy, Ryan. He was — and I mean this in the best possible sense — a prototypical nerd. As a fellow Seminarian, Ryan was also incredibly intelligent, shining especially in the mathematical realm. He was funny, but in a much drier way, tossing out the occasional witticism that didn’t register for a few moments due to its unexpected and oblique nature.
I didn’t know this when I met him on that first day in Seminar, but I probably surmised as much, based on his glasses and matted hair and slightly stooped posture. His nasally voice didn’t help matters much, nor did the fact that he always smelled vaguely of old milk and stale cigarettes — his dad was quite a smoker.
“He’s a thief,” Mike told me bluntly when I brought up Ryan’s name on the way home from school. “Stole $50 from me.”
I hiked my backpack up and picked up the pace to keep up with Mike. “Really? Like, how?”
He just shook his head. “It’s complicated. Not worth explaining.”
And he never did — I got a few hints here and there over the years, but never the full story. Apparently, a video game went missing after Ryan was at Mike’s house, and when Mike later saw the game at Ryan’s, he claimed it wasn’t Mike’s. The next time Mike went to Ryan’s house, the game was gone. “He sold it,” Mike swore. “Got rid of the evidence and pocketed the profits.” He spat. “Thief.”
After that, the two would fling barbs at each other whenever they crossed paths. I found this out the first few times I tried to invite them both over play basketball (Ryan had zero athletic ability) and Scrabble (Mike hated board games). We’d play 1 v 1, and when Mike had the ball, he’d taunt, “C’mon, Ryan — aren’t you going to try to steal this from me too?” During Scrabble, Ryan would put down a word like L-I-A-R, then say, “Oh, whoops — sorry, Mike, I forgot we can’t use proper names.”
Eventually I learned that I had to split up my time between the two of them, and plan different activities accordingly. With Ryan, I could lean into my nerdier side hard. We often sat in his room on perfectly sunny days, reading Xanth novels for hours. We’d hole up in his rec room and play Trivial Pursuit or Life or Stratego. He was the only person I knew back then who had a PC, so we’d take turns struggling through the King’s Quest and Monkey Island series, with a break here or there for some Star Trek:TNG.
One day, while we watched the crew of The Enterprise battling the Borgs, Ryan’s older brother Judd swaggered into the room, twisting a hand towel. “Watch out, Rye Bread!” he shouted, snapping the towel at Ryan’s shoulder. It let out a sharp crack as it lashed his arm, and Ryan recoiled.
“Knock it off!” he whined, but Judd had already begun rewinding. He snapped the towel again, and it popped just inches from Ryan’s face. As a big brother myself, I knew where this was headed, and I didn’t want to end up in the crossfire. Sidling toward the back door, I realized too late my mistake: I gave Judd a moving target.
As I bolted outside, Judd’s footsteps slapped behind me, the towel lashing the air inches from my back. Dodging piles of dog poop throughout the yard, I swung around to the front of the house. When I reached the front door, Judd was right at my back, flicking the towel and laughing his head off.
I burst inside and raced up the steps, stumbling when he snapped my calf. Clambering on all fours, I kept fleeing upstairs, desperate for refuge Ryan’s room. Judd caught me right in the shoulder blade with another crack of the towel, spurring me onward. “Let me in!” I yelled.
Before Ryan could respond, I plowed into his door, forcing it open. I spun around to shut it and lock it, only to find it was already locked. Still, I leaned against it to hold it closed as Judd pounded on the outside. “Open up!” he demanded. “I have cookies!”
Meanwhile, Ryan emerged from behind his bed and approached me with befuddlement. Stopping halfway across his room, he knelt to pick up something off the floor. He brought it over it me, and we shared puzzled expressions.
It was twelve inches of jagged wood, smooth and white on one side and splintery on the other. He frowned toward the doorknob. I glanced down, and suddenly it hit me. Right by the handle there was a raw gap in the doorframe, about the same size as that fragment. I stepped back, letting the door swing open.
Judd stepped in, ready to strike, but stopped when he saw what we were staring at. “What did you do?” Judd asked, grinning wide-eyed at the gash in the wood. “You busted it!”
“You were tryin’ to kill me!” I objected. “I didn’t know the door was locked!”
Letting the towel go slack, Judd sauntered out of the room. “You are gonna be in so much trouble,” he said, laughing to himself as he sought out his parents.
“Here,” I said, taking the fragment from Ryan. I pressed it back into place, and it stayed. I gently closed the door. It latched.
Then the wood came loose and clunked to the floor. “Sorry?” I said weakly. Apparently it wasn’t so simple, mending broken things.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the tensions between Ryan and Mike simmered below the surface for years. Besides Seminar, we had most of the same classes all throughout middle school. We even ate lunch at the same time, and we all sat together. But it wasn’t just the three of us; I had made one other friend around the same time, and I invited him to join us.
He sat across from me with his blue lunchbox and un-Velcro’ed the top. “Hey guys!” he chirped, fastidiously unwrapping his crustless, whole-grain sandwich.
Ryan and Mike looked away, leaving me to respond. Ignoring the chill in the air, I return his smile. “Hey, Steve,” I replied.
To be continued…