Commutatio

A fair exchange is no robbery. If you know the dealer

There should have been something romantic about the heady swell of grasses at the top of Greenwich hill in late June, but the boredom was stifling. The boy sat opposite her, staring fixedly at his book in a manner he probably imagined was admirable. Why he’d brought her, apart from to observe such old-fashioned endurance, was beyond her. With no book of her own, she lay back and pulled the heads from the grasses and knotted them like a child. The silence ached, each minute itching with the swat of flies and unpleasant sunlight. She hated him, then, bored already of his play-acting of someone much older, wiser, more intellectual than he could ever be. They were the same age, give or take a few years, but the chasm between them gaped in ambition, interests, and intellect. He was handsome, yes, in a blonde, smooth, grey eyed way, but that was all. He was beauty and youth and when that rotted she would be left screaming into the long grasses with a quiet, boring man who could give her nothing but the hard cold preference for a book.

She wasn’t good. She wasn’t kind, she wasn’t nice, and there was little more to be said about that, now, at the grand old age of twenty-four. Her bones ached to live fast, to skip this strange purgatory of graduate jobs and ignorant friends. She didn’t want this. This waiting. This…