It's Like Deja Vu All Over Again

I didn’t know the kid that well and I didn’t have any classes with him so I never really talked to him that much. I knew his name. His name was Kevin. Sometimes I’d see him at parties on the weekends. He still had his baby bottle. He would fill it with beer and rum.

He dated my sister’s friend, Emily, for a little while. I had known Emily for a long time. She had been a friend of my sister’s since they were five or six. They were really good friends. She spent a lot of time at our house for sleepovers and stuff. Sometimes she would pee the bed, but I never made fun of her for it. I think most older brothers would have loved the opportunity to make fun of their sister’s friend for peeing the bed and I think she really appreciated that I never mentioned it even though I definitely knew about it because after the sixth or seventh time, my parents started paying me to clean everything up instead of having to do it themselves.

I asked Emily why Kevin only ever drank out of a baby bottle and she said that she didn’t know. They had only been dating for a very short time at that point and she didn’t want to bring it up and offend him or anything. I asked her to tell me if she ever found out. They broke up right after that and I kind of forgot about it because Kevin stopped going to school. I don’t know if he transferred or dropped out, but I never saw him at lunch or any parties after that.

I hadn’t thought about him in a long time, but Emily happened to mention him while she was over at our house recently and I immediately remembered the baby bottle thing.

“Did you ever find out why he drank out of that bottle?” I asked.

I’ve seen it twice now in theaters, and the rhythmic and narrative coherence of the whole thing PUMPS ME UP 

(especially in contrast to the fucking mess of the Transformers trailer that inevitably followed both times, and consisted solely of loud french horn honks and crashes interspersed occasionally with meaningless overwrought dialogue delivered with zero conviction)