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extreme that he momentarily cannot function
]
    COREY: the soup’s okay but there’s too many tomatoes
    WES: corey, that’s spaghetti sauce
    COREY: no it’s a soup
    WES: you got it from the pasta bar
    COREY: i think it’s the soup and pasta bar
    WES: well
    WES: hmm
    ASH: you guys want to get second dinner?
    [
a silence in which it is clear that corey and wes had not even considered the possibility of second dinner
]
    COREY: oh hell yes
    WES: like pizza?
    ASH: i was thinking sushi
    Second dinner was at a sushi place that Ash drove us to and then paid for, and it taught us a number of things about Ash. For one, she had a car. The car was a huge, black, new-smelling SUV that felt more like a rental than anyone’s day-to-day car. It certainly didn’t feel like the one my parents had. There weren’t inexplicable hair and crumbs ground into the seats, or ancient mud-encrusted stacks of papers and binders sloshing around everyone’s feet. There were no stray objects of any kind, and every surface felt cool and pebbly, like the skin of a lizard, but from space.
    Another thing we learned was that Ash had an entire strategy for ordering sushi:
    1. buy the sushi chefs a beer
    2. tell them the magic word
    The magic word is
omakase
. It is Japanese for “Just make whatever.” And if you utter this word after buying the sushi chefs a beer, these sushi chefs are going to make you some epic stuff. I would not be able to tell you what any of it was, except that the production values of this sushi were top-notch. A lot of it didn’t even look like food. It was fish art. There was a little fish volcano. There was a seaweed pond with little fish stepping stones and ripples coming out from each one. And then they gave us each a sea urchin.
    Sea urchin is called
uni
, and it looks like a human tongue, except orange and with bigger, more diseased-looking taste buds. Ash slurped hers up immediately. I put mine in my mouth without thinking about it too hard and managed to enjoy it. It tasted kind of like the sea, kind of like a burger. But Corey just stared at his with unconcealable horror.
    The sushi chefs thought this was hilarious.
    â€œHa ha ha!” the main one yelled. “You should eat it!!”
    Clearly, Corey and I had stepped into someone else’s life. It did not resemble our lives anymore. It was someone with an infinitely more baller lifestyle. But Ash was kind of guarded about how it had come to be.
    WES: so how come you know so much about sushi?
    ASH: i don’t know that much. i’ve had it a few times
    COREY: what’s up with your crazy nice car
    ASH: it’s my mom’s
    COREY: how come you have it though
    ASH: i dunno, she wasn’t using it
    COREY: tell your mom she’s crazy because that car is baller
    WES: so ash where are you from and everything
    ASH: new york what about you guys
    WES: uh, pittsburgh
    COREY: and your parents they’re also from new york?
    ASH,
shrugging
: they’re from a couple places what about yours
    It didn’t take us long to figure out that she was kind of uncomfortable talking about herself and was going to deflect every question back onto us. So pretty soon we were just rapidly volunteering things about ourselves.
    COREY: my dad’s jewish and my mom is irish catholic
    WES: our high school is called benson and it’s like medium size with a couple thousand kids
    COREY: my older sister becca made us get two different cats
    WES: it’s an inner-city public school, so budget-wise kind of hurting
    COREY: one of the cats is named fish-fish and he literally has feline AIDS
    WES: the gym department is so strapped for cash that one of their units is called “the block run” and in it the gym teacher just forces everyone to run around the block
    COREY: wes is adopted
    WES:
    ASH:
    COREY: he doesn’t like to talk about it but it is kind of obvious from his name and then how he looks
    WES: there are other possible